Inmates and integration
A court mandate to California's prisons means rewriting some unwritten rules.
To be honest, it didn't look like racial segregation. I was standing among long rows of metal bunk beds in a room where 36 men of different races -- black, white, Latino -- live together more or less peaceably. But the setting was a dormitory for minimum-security inmates at the Sierra Conservation Center, a prison in Tuolumne County near Yosemite, and in such places, unwritten rules apply.
One of the rules is that each bunk must be shared by two men of the same race. The bunks are close together. A white inmate could probably shake hands with a black inmate in a neighboring bunk without either man having to get out of bed. But that's a horizontal matter. Vertically, prison politics require that each bunk be occupied by two men of one race. Beside someone of another race, yes. Above or beneath, no. I didn't ask about diagonal.
Well-meaning Americans have long debated how best to encourage racial integration. Should government be aggressive in bringing it about quickly? Or should we rely on social evolution to achieve it more slowly and organically? In the case of California's prisons, however, the informed answer to these questions has generally been ... neither. Segregation, prison officials have suggested, is just fine with us if it prevents violence.
That's because California is cursed with race-based prison gangs, entities that originated in the state's corrections system during the 1960s and 1970s. (They include the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family and La Nuestra Familia, to name a few.) Because racial violence is central to prison-gang mores, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, has long followed unwritten rules of segregation in the interest of keeping the peace. In Level I and Level II units, which are minimum-to-medium security (Level IV is the highest level of security), inmates and staff alike honor the one-race-to-a-bunk-bed rule. When a bed in a "black" bunk opens up, for instance, only a black person is assigned to it, even if a white inmate is available to fill the spot.
In Level III and Level IV units, where prisoners generally live two to a cell, whites room with whites, Latinos with Latinos, blacks with blacks, and so forth. Corrections officers avoid assigning men of different races to a two-person cell, and inmates avoid requesting roommates of a different race.
