60 Minutes: Prison Inmates Are Crafty



(image via Brentwoodmagazine)

The Corsair has always had this sick fascination with the uncanny craftiness of prison inmates. A show like "Oz" never jumps the shark. That's why that whole James St. James-Michael Alig "Phone Call From a Felon" dialogue was so culturally significant, IMHO anyway. Gurdjieff tells a story of being in an Far Eastern prison where some of the inmates were so crafty, that they could throw an origami note through a tiny airhole many yards upwards, to their waiting relations on the other side. In that Subterranean cosmos of society's refuse -- prison -- there is still commerce and invention, just ... nothing we would ever want to get involved in.

Who -- for example -- was the alchemist who pioneered jailhouse alcoholic "sterno" out of the odd fermented commissary fruit cup? (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment) Was it "Mother Necessity"? And what about the construction of "The Shiv"? First one makes it, then one hides it from constant checks, then, finally, one contrives to slip it in between the enemy ribs. How do cons achieve such a level of "craft"? Were they always such filthy schemers? Are some men simply born that way?

But We Digress. Leslie Stahl, who always has the trendiest hair in investigative reporting (Sorry, David Gregory via wonkette), brings us this story, at considerable personal risk, on 60 Minutes on Sunday:

"The prison involved is no less than Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California; specifically, its isolation unit called the 'SHU,' or Security Housing Unit, where inmates are housed in nearly solitary confinement, locked in their cells for 22 and a half hours a day, searched regularly for weapons and their personal effects X-rayed for contraband. Yet members of the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia, and other prison gangs are able to run thriving criminal enterprises out on the streets from inside the prison, 60 Minutes has confirmed from state and federal investigators. What kinds of crimes are orchestrated from the SHU?"

"'Anywhere from murder to money laundering, bank robberies, armored-car robberies, home invasions, drug deals, prostitution,' according to Epi Cortina, a former member of the Nuestra Familia who lived on the SHU for nine years. And how easy were inmates able to get messages out on to the street? 'Real easy,' according to Cortina and other former gang members interviewed by Stahl."

Good idea to put the sweet-smelling and feminine Leslie Stahl in with these Maximum Security gang bangers. Then again, something tells me the worried looking correspondent Bob Simon would be just as " Das Ewig-Weibliche" to this gang of mugs. With just a dash of the Stahl charm, and the promise of "Fama" via television, these men become suggestible to her agenda. Outsmarted. Thus, they reveal things ... on 60 Minutes ... only the most watched show on Sunday, the most attentive socially conscious audience ... and these things ... are directly incriminating and against the convict's self interest. But the instinct to fame makes them powerless to resist, or even anticipate the prison reform, the making it so much harder, that their boasting will, no doubt, precipitate. And that, in a way, is the bigger story.

"Inmates on the SHU are able to break their isolation and scheme with one another through a myriad of clever methods, including talking through storm drains and ventilation pipes, as well as through something called 'fishing,' in which inmates fashion a fishing line from the threads of their underwear, bed sheets and socks and tie tiny notes onto the end. The inmates then slide the notes under the prison doors, hook their lines and reel in each other's secret messages."

Jesus. Imagine the tenacity, the motor skills, the sheer reptile cunning involved:

"Once they communicate with each other, the most effective way they get their messages to their foot soldiers on the outside is through the U.S. mail. Sending letters is one of their rights guaranteed by law. Inmates write letters using codes that have been so hard to decipher, they have been sent to the FBI's cryptologists in Washington. Inmates also embed secret codes in their intricate prison artwork that is then mailed out to their 'homeboys' on the street."

"'And so what happens,' says Lt. Steve Perez, a senior official at Pelican Bay, 'is that when this [artwork] goes out, if you're not paying attention to what's happening, if you're not looking for the indicators of how they communicate, a beautiful piece of artwork becomes a message to have someone killed.' Adds Perez, 'These are the most creative, the most ingenious men, deeply committed to achieving their criminal goals.'"

Are you going to be watching it? The Corsair will be watching it.