"all that nasty thing"

[coderman]

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/02/barrett-brown-the-rule-of-law-enforcement/

The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison
The Rule of Law Enforcement
Barrett Brown

Feb. 2 2016, 3:02 p.m.

AFTER HAVING SPENT the prior six months in a fruitless cycle of
retaliation and counter-retaliation and counter-counter-retaliation
with the administration of the Federal Correctional Institution at
Fort Worth, where I managed to do about half of my time in the hole
before finally getting kicked out altogether, I was delighted to
arrive here at FCI Three Rivers, a medium security prison subject to
occasional outbreaks of gang warfare that also happens to be quite a
lot of fun. And though one’s first few days at a new prison are always
given over largely to errands and social obligations, I did manage to
get in some much-needed reading time when someone lent me a copy of
Five Families, a history of the American mafia by the veteran New York
Times crime reporter Selwyn Raab. I’ve never had much interest in
organized crime of the non-governmental sort, but ever since 2009 when
I read through the bulk of Thomas Friedman’s past columns in the
course of researching a book on the subject of incompetence, I’ve been
fascinated by the extent to which a fellow can be a bit of a dummy,
with questionable writing abilities and a penchant for making
demonstrably erroneous attacks on others, and still find regular
employment with the nation’s most prestigious newspaper (though in
fairness to the Times, they did eventually get rid of William
Kristol).

I’m afraid I gave up on reading Five Families straight through after
about the halfway mark, by which point it had become clear that Raab,
contrary to all decency, was going to continue using the phrase
“law-enforcement” thusly, with the unwarranted hyphen, something that
would have been more tolerable did the term not necessarily appear
every few pages due to the nature of the subject matter, often in the
company of such other improprieties as “civil-rights,”
“public-relations,” “stolen-car rings,” or “loan-shark,” and to such
an extent that one could be forgiven for suspecting that Raab himself,
for all his tough talk on crime, is in fact some sort of illicit
hyphen smuggler.

Luckily, this is the sort of book from which one can extract the most
telling instances of Gray Lady-caliber foolishness just by skimming
around. At some point Raab seems to decide that the writers of The
Sopranos must be punished for humanizing the mafia in the course of
writing a drama about human beings who are in the mafia. And so, more
in sadness than in anger, but more in confusion than either, he set
out to debunk the show’s fictional plotline by way of his own
fictional journalistic expertise: “Genuine capos and wiseguys would
never emulate Tony’s behavior. … No top-tier mobster would last long
if he behaved like Tony Soprano, who defies basic Mafioso caution by
exposing himself as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by rivals.
He drives without a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a sidewalk
café.” This comes just a few chapters after we’re told the following
about a real-life top-tier mobster: “Shunning bodyguards and
bullet-proof limousines, the sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his
Mafia associates in restaurants and travelled about Manhattan in taxis
like any ordinary businessman.”

To his credit, Raab did manage to refrain from rendering this last bit
as “ordinary-businessman,” which is just extraordinary, so we’ll give
him another try: “Sex and psychiatry are prominent in The Sopranos’
story line. Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a
radioactive mistake for a boss or capo, who can never display symptoms
of weakness or mental instability.” Naturally Raab has already
forgotten having written the following about mafia boss Frank
Costello: “Striving for inner peace while hovering between criminal
affiliates and respected society, Costello tried psychoanalysis.”

Even had the author not been so sporting as to provide us with
comically perfect counterexamples by which to disprove his various
inane objections, one could have also pointed out that Tony Soprano’s
decision to see a psychiatrist does in fact prove to be a “mistake”
insomuch as that it directly leads to a rupture in his organization
culminating in a botched assassination attempt in the very first
season, so this objection wouldn’t have made any sense even had it
gotten past that crucial
directly-contradicted-by-your-own-fucking-book hurdle that seems to be
giving Raab so much trouble. Now take a moment to reflect on the fact
that this is the guy the New York Times assigned to report on one of
the nation’s most complex and insidious criminal conspiracies — this
plodding hyphen addict who cannot seem to follow a television show or
even his own manuscript. One supposes that there is some alternate
universe in which this might be considered a problem and where Ross
Douthat manages a furniture store and everyone knows his place.
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BUT THERE’S MORE to prison life than just sitting around despising the
New York Times. A week after arrival at Three Rivers, we new inmates
were summoned to an “Admissions and Orientation” seminar in which the
various department heads each speak for a few minutes about
institutional policy. I’d attended one of these back at Fort Worth;
usually the highlight is a short video clip of Bureau of Prisons
Director Charles Samuels, who gives a little talk. No one knows what
the talk is about, as whoever’s nephew was put in charge of producing
the video has talked Samuels into pausing every couple of sentences to
shift position and look into the other camera, just like the
newscasters, something that the fellow can manage only with the most
hilarious awkwardness, and so it proves impossible to follow what he’s
actually saying — which is a shame, as it’s almost certainly something
very non-formulaic and true.

Today, however, the chief attraction was to be our warden, Norbal
Vazquez, a longtime BOP functionary from Puerto Rico who is proverbial
for his deranged monologues as well as for being regarded with great
contempt by staff and inmates alike. Here are some actual quotes from
his exquisitely demented half-hour orientation talk, during which he
waddled back and forth, wagging his finger in admonishment when
appropriate and sometimes when not:

    On his own qualifications for the job: “I am here because I earned it!”

    On the assistant wardens upon whom lesser wardens depend: “I do
not need them!”

    On his inspiring biography: “I was a case manager before, and I
was an OUTSTANDING one!” [wags finger]

    On the status of we benighted inmates, sitting in darkness: “You
are all my children!”

    On who controls the prison: “Probably in some of your minds, is
inmates! But you are wrong!”

    On, er, violators: “I have no mercy for violators!”

    On medical care: “You have a bullet in your leg and you want the
bureau to heal you! Ha! Ha ha!”

    On the insufficiency of our meals: “Don’t come complain to me
about your meals. Because there are children with nothing!”

    On gang warfare: “If you show force, I am going to show force!”

    On homemade alcohol: “If you are drinking all that nasty thing,
shame on you! When your liver fails, I don’t care!”

    On inmates who are placed in the SHU and transferred to violent
maximum security prisons because they’ve been caught with harmless
contraband like synthetic marijuana: “They cry like babies! I have no
mercy!”

The only disappointing thing about the presentation was that he didn’t
end by exhibiting his medals and declaring himself President for Life;
indeed, I almost cried when someone told me he was retiring a few
weeks hence. And “all that nasty thing” is my new favorite
hooch-related meme, edging out “PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT” from a few
columns back.

All in all, it was an informative speech in spite of itself, even
aside from the fellow’s suspicious insistence on his own competence
and self-reliance and entirely meritocratic ascension to the top spot.
There was quite a bit of talk, for instance, about how the gangs
aren’t in control of the prison, something that obviously wouldn’t
need so much triumphant emphasis were such a state of affairs not at
least a possibility.
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IN FACT, THE GANGS really don’t have control over the prison. But then
neither does the administration, if by “control” we mean the ability
to make uncontested decisions over what happens within a given space,
in which case control is always a matter of degree. The federal and
state governments of the United States, for instance, exercise some
degree of overlapping control over their territory, but not to such an
extent that the various law-enforcement agencies — er, law enforcement
agencies — arrest any but a small minority of residents who violate
the law. This is just as well, since the law requires that the tens of
millions of Americans who use drugs or gamble or involve themselves in
prostitution be imprisoned — and that’s not even counting federal law,
which, as convincingly estimated by civil liberties attorney Harvey
Silvergate in his book Three Felonies a Day, the average American
unwittingly violates every day. And thus it is that the U.S. can
continue to exist above the level of an unprecedented gulag state only
to the extent that its laws are not actually enforced — an
extraordinary and fundamental fact of American life that one might
hope in vain to see rise to the level of an election issue, but which
is at least worth keeping in mind when it comes to the debate over
whether or not we should keep granting the state ever more powerful
methods of surveillance until it becomes the All-Seeing God Against
Whose Laws We All Have Sinned. (Personally I’d vote “no,” but then I’m
a felon and can’t vote anyway.)

As is the case with the country at large, the rules within each
federal prison are such that a large portion of everyday activity
actually violates those rules — and in both cases, 99 percent of the
violations go unpunished, while anyone who proves inconvenient to the
powers that be can be singled out for retaliation. Technically it’s
against the rules to give anything to another inmate, for instance, or
to sell or trade or lend for that matter, but of course this is done
all day without a second thought, often in plain view of the guards,
not a single one of whom would consider objecting. There are other
rules that are almost universally disregarded but can be invoked at
whim; there is also a catch-all violation, “Anything Unauthorized,” on
hand as a last resort. But rabble-rousers can usually be dispensed
with via more specific regulations such as those barring the signing
of petitions or holding of demonstrations. (I myself was thrown in the
hole for months due to my supposed leadership role in one such
demonstration against an abusive guard who’d just threatened an
elderly man.)

Part of the justification behind those two regulations in particular
is that there exists a means by which inmates can have their
grievances addressed: the administrative remedy process. Naturally the
BOP routinely conspires to prevent inmates from completing that
process; the surreal lengths to which it’s gone to keep me from
pursuing my own retaliation complaint, a process I’ve documented in
this column over the course of the last nine months, are actually
quite commonly deployed against inmates deemed to have a good chance
of winning in court. Presumably this is why the Freedom of Information
Act request that The Intercept filed with the BOP some months ago to
obtain records of the administrative remedy process at FCI Fort Worth
was denied with no explanation, even though the documents in question
are specifically designated as being FOIA accessible. Any
comprehensive examination of those records would reveal a systematic
and highly effective effort by BOP officials to prevent inmates from
bringing instances of major policy violations and even outright
criminal activity by the bureau to the attention of the courts. The
American people do not control their own prisons.

The reality is that control is shared by way of a sort of makeshift
federalism that varies in particulars from prison to prison but in
which real power is always divided among the various gangs, the staff,
and local and regional administrators in an arrangement that’s best
described as a cross between the old Swiss canton system and China
during the Warring States period, which I’ll be the first to
acknowledge is not especially helpful. Suffice to say that it will
take me the remainder of my sentence to provide a real sense of this
remarkable state-within-a-state and its inimitable politics — the
politics of the literally disenfranchised, who live their lives in the
very guts of government without being able to rely on its protections,
and so are forced to provide their own. Really, it’s a
state-within-a-state-within-a-state.

Complicating matters further is the great extent to which prisons can
differ, with the most pronounced of these divisions being that between
the state and federal systems. Broadly, we federals tend to look down
upon our regional cousins as “not quite our sort, old boy,” although
I’m probably the only one who puts it in exactly those terms. The
state prisons tend to house the small-time dealers, whereas the feds
are more often home to the guys who supplied them. The state is
halfway filled with such actual criminals as thieves, rapists, and
murderers, whereas the feds are made up largely of illegal immigrants
and drug entrepreneurs — people who have neither hurt anyone nor
deprived them of their property, but instead made the mistake of
taking all of this “free market” talk seriously. The character of the
federal prisons, then, will usually differ from those of the states.
But then they’ll also differ among themselves, sometimes quite a bit,
and not just along other readily obvious divisions such as those
between minimum, low, medium, and maximum security designations,
either. A few years ago the medium at Beaumont, Texas, to which I just
narrowly avoided being sent myself, was considerably more violent than
many of the maximums (also known as pens or, more technically, USPs).
Back at the FCI Fort Worth, there was a marked degree of difference in
how certain things were done even between the several 300-man units
into which inmates were divided. And since the local administrators
can disregard national policy more or less at will, as has been
documented in this column repeatedly for two years, de facto policy
will naturally vary from institution to institution as well. The
result of all of this is that each prison is its own unique snowflake,
fluttering about on gusts of cultural drift and BOP lawlessness.
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THE VITAL STATISTICS of my stomping grounds here at Three Rivers,
then, are as follows. The prison is home to a bit more than 1,000
inmates, of whom about 60 percent are Mexican nationals, another 20
percent are U.S. Hispanics, 10 percent are black, 5 percent are Latin
American, and 5 percent are white (the ofay percentage of 15 percent I
cited last time appears to have been out of date). About half of the
Mexicans “run with” (institutional slang for “are affiliated with”)
the Paisas, a relatively amorphous prison gang that draws its ranks
almost exclusively from Mexican nationals; a smaller percentage of
U.S. Hispanics run with Tango Blast, a more organized gang with a much
cooler name; while blacks and whites for purposes of prison riots and
dining arrangements both act mostly as race-based units.

As usual, there are all manner of qualifiers and exceptions plus a
smattering of smaller groupings: The Muslims will usually constitute
their own little umma, there are a couple of whites who run with
Tango, and so on. The most amusing of these aberrations involved the
fellow with whom I shared a cell before he transferred to a low a few
weeks back. Aaron LeBaron was born into an ultra-fundamentalist Mormon
cult led by his father, who had moved the wives and kids to Mexico
after some members of his congregation started to question whether or
not all of the voices he was hearing were actually from God. Aaron
eventually inherited the family theocracy as well as the family hit
list and the family international stolen car ring. In the end he was
captured and sentenced to 45 years. Today Aaron is an agnostic and
longtime Skeptic Magazine subscriber who was very excited to learn
that I’d written for that magazine as well as for Skeptical Inquirer.
(Come to think of it, he was the only person I’ve ever met who found
either one the least bit impressive, and I’ve been working them into
introductory conversations for years.) At any rate, having been raised
in Mexico and speaking perfect Spanish, this gangly, bespectacled,
white, Mormon-looking fellow had been accepted as one of the Paisas,
with whom he sat every day to eat and watch television. Scientists
cannot measure the extent to which I’m going to dominate every dinner
party conversation for the rest of my life.

For a medium, Three Rivers isn’t particularly violent. The last major
gang war, between the Tangos and the Paisas, was nearly a year ago;
afterward the compound went on lockdown for about two weeks, itself a
fairly typical gang intelligence investigation/cool-down period. In
the three months since I’ve arrived, I’ve only had to “take a knee”
once (inmates here are supposed to put at least one knee to the ground
when officers run by screaming “Get the fuck down!” or some variation
thereof as they proceed to the location of a conflict). And we’ve only
been locked down in the aftermath of a fight on one occasion, for just
a few hours.

This is just as well, as I’m thereby able to concentrate on the
trickle of information coming in from the wicked world beyond the
fence. Lately I’ve been getting garbled reports of hoverboards, as
well as some sort of new fascist movement that could conceivably take
control of the White House this year, though I find it difficult to
believe that the boards actually float like the ones from the movie.

Meanwhile, I’m halfway through the newish first volume of Niall
Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger, which we shall examine in
some detail next time. For now I will simply leave off with the
following actual sentences from Ferguson’s introduction: “In this
context, it is a strange irony of the Kissinger literature that so
many of the critiques of Kissinger’s mode of operation have a subtle
undertone of anti-Semitism. … This prompts the question: might the
ferocity of the criticism that Kissinger has attracted perhaps have
something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is
Jewish? This is not to imply that his critics are anti-Semites.” Well,
the hyphens are all in their proper places, anyway.

Quote of the Day

“When the mob gains the day it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is
then called the nation.”

— Napoleon