Posted on 05/29/2008 5:38:55 AM PDT by forkinsocket
San Quentin State Prison inmate Lexy Good is white, hangs out with whites on the prison exercise yard and must be careful not to associate with blacks and Latinos. No cards, no basketball outside the color lines.
Those are the unwritten inmate rules of prison life. People stick to their own race.
Good, who's doing a short stretch for receiving stolen property, likes it that way.
"We segregate amongst ourselves because I'd rather hang out with white people, and blacks would rather hang out with people of their own race," said Good, 33, of Walnut Creek. "Look at suburbia. Look at Oakland. Look at Beverly Hills. People in society self-segregate."
Soon that may change in the prisons.
San Quentin and 30 or so other state penal facilities are gearing up to carry out a federal court mediation agreement for integrating double cells and ending the use of race as the sole determining factor in making cell assignments.
Men in California's prisons have long been segregated in cells to quell racial tensions.
But Good, along with California's other 155,700 male inmates, may soon be forced to live in a 4-by-9-foot cell with an inmate of a different race.
A 1995 lawsuit filed by a black California inmate, Garrison Johnson, said that the California Department of Corrections' practice of segregating prisoners by race violated his rights. A 2005 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court led to federal court mediation and the agreement that double cells would be desegregated.
While most inmates and correctional officials agree that it is a noble idea, many fear the worst.
"They should be thinking about what kind of war they are going to start," said a San Quentin inmate who identified himself only as S. Styles, 36, of Vallejo.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I see a huge increase in attacks on corrections officers so that inmates can be removed from Gen. Pop.
This will be a blood bath.
Ah, yes-—political correctness rides again. And soon the poor bureaucrats will be wondering why violence is skyrocketing through the roof. I wonder what the prison guards think of this???
Conservatives also believe everyone is invariably good, but we know that if given the chance they will game the system, so don’t give them that opportunity."
I would beg to differ...Liberals do not differentiate between good and evil (except for conservatives who are evil). They simply believe that they know what is best for all people, and utopia can be achieved with the proper amount of force administered by an omniscient, omnipotent government.
Conservatives believe that most people are generally good. Convicted criminals have demonstrated they are the exceptions and should be segregated from society as a whole, and from each other as necessitated by reality.
“How did the Republicans let her be confirmed?”
Republican politicians come in three types: Naive spinless twits who don’t understand the hardball politics that Dems play (see McConnell being all shocked that Reid lied about the whole judicial appointment thing), cynical scum who are complicit with the Dems in their acquisition of more and more power for the gov’t (themselves), and actual conservatives who have a clue and try to fight but are so outnumbered by the other two types that they have no chance...
She got 98 votes!
This sounds like one of George Carlin’s old comedy skits. :-)
This sounds like a really dumb idea, but then again, should we really be bending over backwards to arrange our prisons based on fear that the criminals are going to start riots if we don’t do things the way they like? I think the criminals should shut up and sleep wherever they’re told to. Practically speaking though I think this is going to cause more trouble for the correction officers. I think it should be up to them to decide the best way to keep the prisoners controlled.
I read somewhere that in many California prisons, the Aryan Brotherhood often collaborates with MS-13 and other Latino gangs against the black gangs. I don’t know what the actual racial breakdown in the California prisons is, but I’m pretty sure that Latinos make up the largest group and there may possibly be more whites than blacks. So, if you put the whites and Latinos together, they will far outnumber the blacks.
CRAPP is my middle name! Err... make that my last name!
I try to join organizations that don’t charge dues even though I may heartily support their goals. :^)
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