Part Two of “Revolutionary Freedom Fighters”.
Over decades, Mexican Americans increasingly entered the California Department of Corrections workforce. In many academy classes, graduation rates reached 75 to 85%. Today, many California prisons lack meaningful racial diversity among staff. Power consolidates among cultural and racial lines.
Any institution that allows one cultural perspective to dominate prison policy, discipline and prison politics will produce bias, whether intentional or unconscious. I experienced this firsthand during a recent annual classification hearing. A Mexican counselor and a Mexican captain reviewed my file. When the captain read that I had previously been convicted of killing and mutilating the dead body of another inmate, he smiled, recognizing what he perceived as a gangster convict. But when he saw the photograph and realized that the victim was a Mexican, his demeanor shifted instantly. He yelled out, “He killed a Mexican!” The hearing was abruptly terminated, and in that moment, I was no longer an inmate. I was an enemy.
This is the new face of racism. It does not require racial slurs or public lynchings. It operates through monopolized job assignments, preferential treatment, selective disciplinary notes and informal alliances between staff and certain prisoner populations. Within this environment, a dangerous prison principle has taken hold! Working with the police or informing on Black prisoners is not considered snitching if it is framed as racial warfare against an enemy. This belief of southern Mexican gangs and white Nazi gangs and corrupt staff has destroyed lives and fractured solidarity.
It is well documented that many California prisons have been infiltrated by criminally oriented staff who exploit state power, resources and taxpayer money for their own personal gain. Violence becomes a marketing tool. Prison administrations rely on prisoner ignorance and interracial conflicts to justify their existence. Meanwhile, the real threat, the systemic manipulation of race and power, goes unaddressed.
Inside prisons, behaviors such as snitching, sexual predatory behavior and exploitation are supposedly intolerable, yet those same behaviors persist openly in gangs and street organizations outside on the streets. Why is the standard different? Who benefits from that contradiction? Often, the answer is simple, a correctional officer is behind the scenes labeling someone ‘no good’ and circulating fabricated paperwork or planting misinformation to provide or provoke violence. I have personally been approached over the years by prisoners acting as intermediaries for the guards, accusing me of snitching because I filed grievances.
The contradiction is absurd. A correctional officer is a paid professional informant, yet a prisoner exercising constitutionally protected speech is branded a traitor. To read, to write, to file grievances and to challenge abuse is not weakness. It is an inheritance paid for by the blood of our ancestors. Prisons are not merely buildings. They are systems of psychological domination. While some people find clarity through confinement, many more are lost to confusion, manipulation, drug use and state manufactured conflict.
Those who profit from mass incarceration are participants in a modern day slave economy. Anyone who interferes with a prisoner’s ability to regain freedom, whether directly or indirectly, serves the interest of that system. I call on all revolutionaries, political prisoners, original gangsters, boss back players to rise and shine, organize and unite, be the head, and not the tail – by any means necessary. You can’t have the fame without the sacrifice. The streets are watching! Blood In blood out.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
