PRISONER EXPRESS

The corporation closed its private prison at Hinton, Oklahoma to re-negotiate a more lucrative contract with the state. The threat is that they will re-populate its inmate ranch with a more expensive head of captive. (California is offering $15/head more to warehouse their captives). As a result, a bunch of Hinton inmates were stuffed into this prison. A large proportion of these kids have shiny, new Nazi-sign tattoos on their necks. I saw three of them clustered near the gate of the mini-prison while I was arguing with the kop to get to my class. They looked like terrified baby monkeys, clutching each other, looking for their mother, as if they were afraid to take a step away from each other, they stood so closely. Outwardly, on their faces though, they were able to nervously snickers to each other and make careful comment upon the happenings they observed around them. Hinton is the prison where, two years ago, their Nazi leader got snuffed in a closed circuit TV brawl. The state prison picked three Negroes to punish for it.

These kids and their fellows just arrived here last week, and most of them went to the mini prison 300 yards up the hill. In just one week they've distressed the kops here twice that we can detect. (The kops have this 960-captive prison divided into 6 mini prisons of 160 captives each, and at any time can easily throw up additional fences and razor wire to chop it up into 12 mini prisons of 80 captives each, or 24 mini prisons of 40 captives each). Every time an inmate slaps or pokes another with, say, a sharpened toothbrush; the kops herd all the captives to their toilet-sized cages and lock them up for a few hours.

These newly minted young Nazi-punks are tailor-made to create trouble where none existed before. Their birth occurs along the lines of this scenario: They get into their parents liquor, get stupid, "borrow" their granny's car for a "gang joyride" with their school-dropout chumps, the kops chase them into a crash with much property damage. Granny, whose car is totaled, decides to quit protecting her destructive, thieving little darling and testifies against him instead. So do all the people whose cars were crunched, fences driven over or homes smashed into. Junior goes to jail, where he and his little pals meet a bigger, older, more experienced and cunning brand of ID-iot than themselves. These older ID-iots have nothing bigger on their semi-literate minds than to terrify the crash-kids with tales of sexual exploitation that they will surely find when they get to prison. Their fevered little brains believe in this two-class society that they've been told of, consisting of bullies and sex-slaves. They are desperate to puff themselves up verbally and physically until they can qualify for acceptance into one of the mutual self-protective societies. Next things you know, they're getting permanent body graffiti scrawled into their skin to indicate gang ownership of the allegiance. The Hitler-hugger gangs likes to have big, circular blobs with stylized lightening bolts inside. This started with the Aryan nation kids 40 years ago: they'd put two very small, uncircled lines just below their shirt collars that looked somewhat like the twin lightening bolts of a division of the Nazi SS. As time went by, and the kids realized that any ID-iot could start his own branch of Hitler-hugger gang, the tattoos got bigger and more clownish, and rose up their necks to look like huge, purple bruises. The Negroes saw this and formed their own gangs. Scroungy-looking tattoos didn't show up on them very well, so they opted to use as their gang symbols something more discrete and less permanent, such as red or blue handkerchiefs hanging out of their back pockets, a specific brand of rubber shoe or a jacket with some sports logo on it. The Hispanics use various tattoos, often with a Central American Indian motif. The American Indians caught gang-fever last, and use the tattoo of a feather somewhere on their bodies.

These kids are called crash dummies because of the way they are manipulated by their leaders. The kids are eager to earn protection from their gang leaders, and gang leaders are eager to have younger ID-iots stupid enough to do their dirty deeds. The kops, news-artists and tabloid TV call the next step an "initiation ritual," but that is nothing but their sales pitch to the ignorant public. The fact is that these crash dummies are sent on missions. Gang leader selects a weak, monied individual from the herd of captives who are strong enough to stand alone. On these persons he sics his minions, instructing them to steal the loot by whatever means and give it to gang leader. Gang leader dodges any repercussions. If the flunkies get caught by the guards, or their sneak attack fails to too much resistance, gang leader is safe, hiding in the shadows. His eager recruits want gang protection more than they want to dodge the kops punishments. The flunkies won't snitch to the kops on who sent them. Thus a system of rehabilitation and negative reinforcement has broken down into a system of encouraging crime and violence.