Novel Prison Program Tries to Cut Inmates’ Gang Ties

NEWTOWN, Conn. —  Inside a prison gym, an inmate dangles from a rope wrapped around his waist and looped over a metal rafter. Whether he falls 5 feet to the hardwood floor or is let down gently depends on his sworn enemy.

The man anchoring the swaying inmate is a rival gang member. Can he be trusted? Out on the streets, the man holding the rope might have killed the other guy.

The exercise is part of a model gang-busting program that the state Correction Department says has led hundreds of inmates to renounce their gang ties and brought a measure of tranquillity to Connecticut prisons.

About 20% of inmates in the nation’s prisons are gang members, so other states are watching closely.

The goal of the Connecticut program is to build trust, even friendships, among men who otherwise might stab each other with a spoon over something as petty as a stare or a passed note. By the end, a man’s blood oath to his gang gives way to a written pledge of allegiance to the Correction Department.

Ralph Abed, 36, a former Latin King gang member serving time for a series of robberies and burglaries, said, “I’m not a killer or a tough guy, but my temper is the problem. I think before I react now.”

Prison officials hope that gang ties will remain severed after the convicts return to the streets. But they say there’s no way to know for sure whether that’s happening.

The program treats gang affiliation like an addiction, with a 12-step program designed to break the inmates of their habit over five months.

“A lot of these guys are forced into gang involvement to begin with and then they have no way out, so it is an addiction in some sense,” said Jonathan V. Hall, program supervisor.

Inmates who fail to participate and renounce gang ties after one year are indefinitely separated from the rest of the prison population.

Held at the maximum-security Garner Correctional Institution, the program starts out by placing fellow members of the same gang in 23-hour-a-day lock-down inside 8-by-10-foot two-bunk cells. Violations keep them from gaining more freedoms.

In the two-month second step, inmates from different gangs are forced to share the same two-bunk cells. They study and work with members of rival gangs.

“There have been situations where it came to blows, but not because of their gang affiliations. It’s because we put two people together from different upbringings, different cultures, different personalities,” Warden Remi Acosta Jr. said. “You’re always going to have conflict in that situation.”

From there, inmates go on to attend classes in anger management, conflict resolution and other subjects, and participate in Outward Bound activities like the rope exercise. As they progress, inmates gain privileges, including the right to eat in small groups in a dining hall.

“I don’t know that I’ve seen true friendships develop because that takes time, but I’ve seen them communicate openly. I have seen them smile at each other,” Acosta said.

That’s a big improvement over four years ago, when a five-hour riot at Garner involving the 20-Love gang left three guards and 14 inmates injured, and caused nearly $1 million in damage.

Since the program began in 1994, there have been no organized gang-related disturbances at any of the state’s 23 correctional facilities, and assaults on staff members and inmates have become rare, Hall said.

Most states deal with violent gang members by shuffling them around prisons, massing them in one prison without busting up the gangs or locking down troublemakers.

None of those efforts has worked, said George Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center in Chicago. “Moving them around, you might be spreading the problem more than containing it,” he said.

Connecticut’s program breaks new ground by “making an honest attempt to get them out of gangs,” said Dale Welling, executive director of the National Major Gang Task Force in Houston.

Prison officials said about 1,000 inmates have entered the program, with 384, or nearly 40%, graduating and only nine of those ending up back in lock-down. The other inmates failed to finish either because they were paroled or washed out.

Inmates who fail because of bad behavior get shipped to the state’s highest security prison, the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers. There, they can expect to spend at least six months locked in their cells 23 hours a day, their only outlet an hour of recreation.

Completing the program does not shorten sentences; it only allows inmates to return to the general population at other prisons and share in the privileges there.

For six months, the prison staff tracks the graduates to ensure they do not drift back into their gangs. If they do, they’re returned to lock-down.

Some prisoners try to pretend they have given up gang life, but prison officials usually catch on, Abed said.

“You can just fake the funk,” he said, “but sooner or later, you ain’t going to make it.”