As ongoing FmH readers know, I try and follow the doings of the proto-fascist far right closely. A friend just let me know I had missed a piece in The New Yorker last month by David Grann called “The Brand”, which profiles the behind-bars doings of the Aryan Brotherhood. [You have seen what is apparently a minor league rendition of the Aryan Brotherhood’s prison activities if you have ever watched the HBO series Oz.] Here is, however, a New Yorker Online interview with Grann which gives the gist.
Prosecutors call the Aryan Brotherhood the most murderous criminal organization in the US. It has a system of selecting only the most cunning and vicious members to become “made” men, much like the Mafia. And most of its criminal activities remain unknown because they happen behind bars and most of their victims are themselves convicts without much of a constituency outside the prisons. The Brand controls an underground economy whose dimensions are remarkable in extent; Grann quotes an inmate’s estimate that 40% of the convicts at Leavenworth are shooting heroin, for instance. The money flow is hard to trace, for one thing because payments are made by money orders to designees on the outside. Communication about criminal activities uses sophisticated codes, invisible ink and rhyming schemes that strike me as similar to Cockney rhyming slang. Gang leaders are quite intelligent and well-read although self-educated, with philosophical tastes running to Sun Tzu and Nietzsche. There are many stories of prisoners’ abilities to charm women on the outside into remarkably loyal if somewhat exploitative relationships with them.
Grann reflects on how difficult something like The Brand is to stop, fluorishing as it does in maximum security where participants have nothing to lose and are already accustomed to the use of drastic means to achieve their ends. Grann seems to think these are clever people with a native intelligence that impresses him as much as it is frightening to contemplate. It is interesting to speculate on whether this parallel value system is something they develop once incarcerated or bring into prison with them from society; Grann observes that some convicted of less violent crimes such as drug dealing or bank robbery are transformed into the type of conscienceless killers in The Brand by prison socialization. He describes, seemingly sympathetically, the conviction of some in the penal system that their fearful power can only be broken by draconian measures including much more massive deprivations of their rights behind bars and the use of the death penalty against their leaders.
I really do think that the crucial question is the one above about the extent to which the mentality of The Brand is imported into the prison from the streets as opposed to being bred by the social structure behind bars. It certainly takes some critical mass and a self-sustaining process within the confines of a concentrated setting. Another matter of obvious concern is the relationship between the ostensible ideology of race hatred, that may first attract people to ultraright-wing groups such as what I understood the Aryan Brotherhood to be, and the unabashed thuggism of The Brand. One certainly has to wonder if the nation that already locks up a higher proportion of its adult male population than any other First World country is breeding this lawlessness, and whether there would be blowback from tightening the screws further. Why should we worry about these developments, happening as they do behind the impermeable barriers of maximum security? Will we be chastened only if the fiction that we can segregate the lawlessness effectively behind bars is given the lie by The Brand extending its reach to outside criminal activity with similar impunity?
