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Nelious Horsley, a former leader of Tacoma’s East Side Piru street gang and currently a prisoner at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, Wa., now helps teach a violence-prevention class to fellow inmates, part of a larger state department of corrections strategy to reduce the number of fights and aggravated assaults, according to an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
About 20 percent of the state’s 16,000 inmates are gang members, but they’re responsible for 46 percent of prison violence, said Dan Pacholke, acting prisons director. Over the past two years, violence at the state’s five largest prisons has dropped as much as 20 percent. Much of the decline is attributed to intense one-on-one interviews with inmates when they are first sent to prison, an estimated 500 each week from county jails. During the screenings, many are proud to admit their gang affiliations and show off their tattoos, and that information is logged into a growing database.
But the prison system has a policy of “mandatory separation” to keep rival gang members apart, Pacholke said.
Officials are more worried about gang violence than the gangs themselves. Gang members behaving themselves don’t hurt his officers or inmates. There’s also “a great deal of sorting” to separate hard-core gang members from the wannabes, who are often younger prisoners who haven’t yet shown the same propensity for violence, he added.
Meanwhile, Horsley has had enough of gang life. He said it took him 24 years to decide he was done with it, and by the time he completes his prison time on gun and drug offenses—June 2011 at the earliest—he’ll have spent more than half his life in custody.
To read the article, click here.
To find out more about prison violence and what can be done to prevent it, visit Justice Fellowship’s Prison Violence issue page. |
