Writing a new code of ethics behind bars

America’s prisons have acquired the grim moniker “The New Jim Crow,” the title of Michelle Alexander’s landmark study of mass incarceration. But in California’s sprawling prison system, disciplinary tactics often look more like the old Jim Crow. To subdue conflict between rival groups, security officers have regularly separated inmates by race and imposed segregated lockdowns to restrain their movement. A new legal settlement mandates an end to the practice — at least officially.

Prison authorities previously contended that intergroup conflicts are segregated, so they discipline accordingly. They invoke the vintage panic-inducing specter of race riots and gang violence to justify pre-emptive restraint. Such race-based security operates more subtly than Jim Crow. The incarcerated get hit with segregated confinement as well as the punitive stripping of privileges, such as the ability to read mail from family. The practice has become ingrained in prison routine, with an estimated 160 lockdowns a year, lasting up to six weeks.

But last month, California appeared committed to stopping this practice in a settlement in a federal lawsuit, in which rights advocates charged that the lockdowns violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by imposing punitive restrictions on inmates on the basis of race rather than on real security threats. Under the settlement, the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) may still impose the restraints but not explicitly on the basis of race or ethnicity. It’s a modest if long overdue concession in a long-standing battle for civil rights behind bars.

But does the end of race-based lockdowns mean California’s prisons are becoming integrated? Will corrections officers recognize that separate is inherently unequal, even for the imprisoned?

Not quite. Yes, inmates may experience somewhat less explicit racial segregation in lockdowns. Yet more pernicious forms of segregation will likely continue in day-to-day prison life. The authorities retain broad leeway to continue using lockdowns at their discretion to prevent riots and gang-related violence. And while the settlement might diminish the most blatantly race-based crackdowns, it won’t undo the systemic linkage of race, violence and punishment.

Whether prison administrators lock down a whole cellblock or simply shunt troublemakers into solitary confinement, pre-emptive violence and collective punishment — tactics premised on suppression and isolation — are not sustainable safety measures. The same regressive ideas helped bolster Jim Crow as a way to manage race relations. This rationale has now been applied to prison populations while authorities avoid confronting the social complexities that drive intergroup conflict.

Progressive legal experts point out that so-called prison rioting and gang conflict tie into a culture of inequity that pervades every level of the criminal process. Pre-emptive disciplinary clampdowns should thus be strictly limited by constitutional protections against discrimination and maltreatment.

From a social justice standpoint, in failing to acknowledge the personal sovereignty of the imprisoned, this disciplinary system provides little incentive for anyone — administrators or inmates — to act out of any sense of individual humanity.

The solution to these problems starts with simultaneously moving away from brutal control tactics and toward humane treatment and integration. To that end, corrections officials have in recent years sought to incrementally reform housing policies to facilitate desegregation and to defuse interpersonal tensions, in part by focusing conflict intervention efforts on specific individuals rather than whole racial groups.

But prisons can’t be made into humane institutions just by changing how they’re managed internally. The real de-escalation of the mass imprisonment trend must take place in the criminal justice system as a whole by fixing the crime and sentencing policies that breed racial bias and aggravate underlying social inequalities.

Racial divides are built into every aspect of California’s carceral landscape: About 3 in 4 incarcerated adult males are men of color, the vast majority Latinos and blacks, while these groups collectively make up just over half the state’s adult male population. In prisons, the incarcerated are systematically isolated, often psychologically broken, under conditions so unbearable that about 30,000 inmates went on hunger strike last year in protest. On the outside, their communities are impoverished, destabilized and aggressively policed. Absent a total restructuring of the system, including changing who gets locked up in the first place, racism will remain a cornerstone of the country’s criminal justice regime.

To dismantle these inequities, civil rights campaigners are joining lawmakers and criminal justice authorities in calling for an overhaul of the way communities deal with crime. Reformers have pushed statewide initiatives to end the overuse of solitary confinement and change sentencing policies for lower-level crimes, including California voters’ recent approval of the sentencing-reform ballot initiative Proposition 47. But Gov. Jerry Brown’s promises to reduce mass incarceration in California notwithstanding, the prisons are still packed, with an incarcerated population of some 135,000 individuals and growing.

Yet within that massive imprisoned population, a surprising culture shift — and even a nascent peace movement — is emerging in defiance of the racialized status quo. During protests against solitary confinement in 2012, activists in the prisons achieved what punitive segregation could not: an opening for racial reconciliation. Through coordinated civil disobedience and mass organizing, black, Latino and white inmate activists developed a formal pact known as the Agreement to End Hostilities, which declared, “All racial group hostilities need to be at an end ... Do not allow personal, individual issues to escalate into racial group issues!”

Negotiated by representatives from the inmate community, the pact galvanized mass campaigns that continued through the 2013 hunger strikes and marked its second anniversary last month. Their unified demand for dignity won’t end all conflict in prisons, but the agreement attests to the idea that racial divisions are a product of — not a justification for — institutional violence.

And in forging a united front, the imprisoned are working toward a new code of ethics behind bars. As Mohamed Shekh, communications director of the advocacy group Critical Resistance, told me, whatever the courts say, the activists who formed the peace pact want their movement to remain resolved “not to let CDCR use their constructed classifications to turn the imprisoned population against each other” and instead “know who is really causing them hostility.”

Now it’s up to the state to learn from those who know how to really end inequity in prison: not by locking people down but by dismantling fear and opening minds.