Isegoria

Thirteen female prison guards handed over control of a Baltimore jail to gang leaders:

Four corrections officers became pregnant by one inmate. Two of them got tattoos of the inmate’s first name, Tavon — one on her neck, the other on a wrist.

The guards allegedly helped leaders of the Black Guerilla Family run their criminal enterprise in jail by smuggling cellphones, prescription pills and other contraband in their underwear, shoes and hair. One gang leader allegedly used proceeds to buy luxury cars, including a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW, which he allowed some of the officers to drive.

Steve Sailer makes a number of observations:

Have you ever noticed that white prison gangs are always described as “white supremacist,” but black prison gangs and Mexican prison gangs are never described as “black supremacist” and “Mexican supremacist?”

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In another account, Jane Miller of WBAL-TV in Baltimore reports that none of the 13 female guards named in the indictment has been fired.

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I knew a guy once who had a job as head of a maintenance department at one of the huge prisons outside of Chicago. He said that lots of the guards were paid off by prison gangs to smuggle stuff in. He suggested that small rural towns that imagine that having a prison built there would be a great employment opportunity for their young men and women should think twice about what being a prison guard and being around prisoners all day does to a normal person’s morals. He told me this while we were sitting in his lovely and quite lavish house. Hey, wait a minute …

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Speaking of the Black Guerilla Family, I strongly suspect that the primateprison gang scenes in 2011′s clever Rise of the Planet of the Apes were inspired in part by this phrase “Black Guerilla Family.” It’s not the kind of thing the screenwriters can admit in public, but the more I read up on the once-famous history of the Black Guerilla Family, the more it sounds like one of the inspirations for the movie (along with the brilliant “Patient Zero” ending).

Rise, like many of the original Planet of the Apes movies, is in part a Black Power allegory. The Black Guerilla Family was the most intellectual of the prison gangs, founded in Northern California by George Jackson in 1966 as a Marxist revolutionary movement.

Jackson went on to be the prison boyfriend of Professor Angela Davis — they first met on visiting days, but exchanged passionate love letters. (Chicks dig guys on Death Row.) After the Jackson Brothers killed some guards in various escapes with guns she had bought, Professor Davis was put on trial for first degree murder. She was famously acquitted.

The whole story of George Jackson is just insane, but I don’t recall anybody else noticing any connections between Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the Black Guerilla Family. David Horowitz knew most of these folks so I wonder what he would think of Rise.

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Imagine that you are a Chechen Mafia vor sitting around in the rubble of your Grozny strip club, and a Yakov Smirnoff-type underling rushes in to announce, “TV say black vor in American prison had five babies with four lady guardettes! In Obama America, girls guard you!”

Being a rational mafioso, you would have to conclude that you owe it to your crime family descendants to get out of the Chechnya-Dagestan-Russia rackets rat race and come to America, so rich and so stupid, today.

We vastly overestimate our ability to spot “red flag” behaviors and get dangerous individuals into treatment. Take Amy Bishop, the neurobiologist who shot up a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville:

Amy Bishop shot her own brother, after all. She punched a woman at a pancake restaurant. She stood accused of mailing a bomb to one of her supervisors at Harvard. Red flags don’t get much brighter than that. Yet, nobody stepped in.

Why not? Collective denial — and the fact that she was a woman:

In her article, MacFarquhar relates gruesome tales of so-called Black Widows (women who murder their husbands or lovers) and Angels of Death (women who kill those placed in their professional care). These women often skirt suspicion and kill prolifically because it doesn’t occur to the cops until much, much too late that a female could be capable of such a thing. In retrospect, the crimes seem gallingly obvious: Genene Jones, an Angel of Death who worked as a pediatric nurse in Texas, is believed to have murdered as many as forty-six children before authorities caught up with her, in 1983. But as the murders are actually being committed, investigators prove far too ready to attribute the mounting body count to accidents, medical error, or a male perpetrator.

The state hospital where the Assistant Village Idiot works has had contradictory attitudes over time to the idea of “blowing off steam” versus more strenuously containing behavior:

In the 1980’s there were heavy punching bags on the units which patients could use. We found over time that some patients got even more worked up using them, and had to be pulled back, screaming, threatening, and hands now bleeding. There seemed no balance on the other side of anyone actually benefiting. We have a gym, and for those who can already contain themselves, it seems helpful to jog on the machines, play basketball, or lift weights. But we don’t actually have measures to show that these things do help. They just seem like normalised behaviors, so we encourage them. Others rapidly get overstimulated with even minor activity.

Or, they can get overstimulated and get assaultive when members of the opposite sex heave into view. By the way, it was always considered so ignorant and old-fashioned to declare how sexualised dancing is since the 60’s, but it becomes startlingly clear in an environment where people are locked up in a small space and impulsive behaviors can get out of control quickly. “Maria was dancing provocatively, so of course all the males had to come down to the day area” is said at morning report. But Maria’s dancing is sometimes a pretty mild version of what you’d see at any wedding, so at one level it’s not provocative. Except it is, and everyone can tell instantly.

Playing the TV or music too loud can be overstimulating. I don’t know that particular styles are worse. Some styles are more likely to be played loudly, but we’ve got folks who will crank up anything and get worked up.

Young males hanging around and woofing together is overstimulating, and we put a lid on that quickly. For females with a trauma history even hearing about other trauma is overstimulating. Personality disorders activate when they see someone else getting attention, as it threatens to them that they will be cast out of the family into the darkness.

We have been less encouraging of sexual behavior or the use of pornography, though even here there has been controversy. Psychology especially used to teach that these were normal expressions which we shouldn’t stand in the way of, however much church ladies objected. Then women with feminist leanings objected on other grounds, of exploitation and advantage-taking, muddying the waters further. Gay rights advocates became adamant that sexual expression was part of their humanity, and that started to bleed into mental health because most practitioners were liberals who wanted to keep up. So the issue of whether to give out condoms became a complicated medical, moral, clinical, legal risk-set of issues that is still unresolved. If people really press for it, their right to have pornography is upheld, but we make it so difficult that only the determined find it worth pursuing. I don’t think we notice anything other than whether someone is getting — you guessed it — overstimulated.

We don’t show horror movies or very violent or sexual ones, but we don’t have any data to support that. We just figure it’s probably a bad idea, and why take the risk? There are video games as well, some of which are a bit violent, but never the highest category of that. Some of the line staff play those games or watch those movies, but they are considered declasse. Not that we egalitarians would ever say that.

We let people cross-dress, even flamboyantly if they choose, because we are very modern and it’s their right. We only mention in whispers that this seems to occur more often when the patient is sicker, because then people might think that we think that… oh dear. Couldn’t people just get better and go home where we didn’t have to see them and do whatever they like? Because when they’re right here in front of us, and our professional judgment that they are much sicker on other grounds, but our politics tells us that we can’t say that, not even in front of our own staff, it creates a conflict we don’t like.

Oh, and by the way, the cross-dressers get overstimulated as well.