The White Supremacist Group That May Be Targeting Law Enforcement For Revenge

From Think Progress courtesy of a facebook friend:

In October, a major effort by federal, state and local law enforcement landed 34 alleged Aryan Brotherhood members, including four top bosses, in prison. Members were accused of issuing kill orders on rival gangs, attempted murder, kidnapping, assault, drug dealing, weapons trafficking, arson and counterfeiting. 

Texas law enforcement was warned in December that ABT leaders were “issuing orders to inflict ‘mass casualties or death’ to law enforcement officials who were involved in cases where Aryan Brotherhood of Texas are facing life sentences or the death penalty.” According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the group was also “conducting surveillance on law enforcement officers.”

Soon after the warning was issued, Kaufman County assistant district attorney Mark Hasse was shot and killed in the parking lot of the Kaufman County courthouse in broad daylight. After the shooting, District Attorney Mike McLelland reportedly carried a gun everywhere, while a constant security watch guarded his house for a month. McLelland was killed on Saturday by an unknown assassin with an assault rifle. 

More here.

So, of course, the overall news media take on this, and so far this includes the scant amount of left-wing coverage I've seen on the story, is that there's an evil racist prison gang out there doing terrible and evil stuff.  And, needless to say, that appears to be entirely accurate.  But it's just not the whole story.

There very likely wouldn't be any racist prison gangs if prison wardens didn't encourage racial animosity behind bars.  It's pretty well documented at this point that wardens across the nation, in order to deal with overcrowded and understaffed situations, have adopted a sort of divide and conquer strategy for the purpose of maintaining order overall: if the blacks are fighting the whites, there's necessarily less time and energy left to fight guards.  

That's terrible in itself.  Prison officials stoke racist attitudes among prisoners because they think that's the best policy under the circumstances.  But why are the prisons overcrowded and understaffed?  The quickest answer is that a very sizable percentage of the prison population ought not be there in the first place.  The fruitless and pointless War on Drugs has sent millions into prisons over the decades, many of whom are simply users or petty dealers, criminals only by virtue of the fact that the substances they buy and sell are forbidden, for reasons that are increasingly unclear.  As the Johnny Depp character in the movie Blow so deftly illustrated, once these people are in prison, they become acquainted with people who really are criminals, and, with nothing to lose because mandatory minimum sentences put such "criminals" inside for extraordinarily long periods of time, drug convicts become real criminals themselves.

But that's not all.  Prisons are awful places.  Health care is shoddy, at best.  Rape and other kinds of violence run rampant.  Society jokes about the rape and doesn't appear to care about the violence.  And, in the odd instances when people do remark about the violence, it's usually along the lines of  "that's what they get."  Compounding the problem is the fact that, even though a lot of these prisoners have severe mental health issues, and very few skills that would allow them to make a legitimate living on the outside, there is virtually no attempt to rehabilitate them.  So they just sit there and rot, while trying to avoid rape, or beatings, or murder.

In short, the way we run our prisons guarantees that prisons are factories for the creation of more and worse criminals.  It is no wonder at all that our penal system breeds gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood.  It's exactly the same thing that happens if you chain up a dog and beat him for a few years.  He turns mean.  In this sense, society shares responsibility for these gang murders.  There's a lot we could do to lessen the probability of events like this.  Instead, we seem to be content with how things are now.

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