lockdown
gangland (2/6)

This gritty new series plunges head-first into the world of America’s most dangerous prisons, providing an unprecedented immersion into life behind bars and getting up close and personal with some of the world’s most hardened criminals. This first programme examines the gang warfare rife inside California’s Pelican Bay State Prison.

Located 350 miles from San Francisco, Pelican Bay State Prison was built in 1989 to control the most violent and hard-to-handle of the prison system’s gang members by isolating them from the outside world in one facility. Unfortunately, it has earned itself a reputation as a ‘headquarters’ for gang members –and its notoriety has turned being sent there into something of a privilege for inmates. “This is where all the killers come,” says Joseph ‘Shotgun’ Harmon, who is serving 17 years for assault with a deadly weapon. “If you’ve made it to Pelican Bay, you’ve made it.”

Not only do inmates continue to hone their criminal skills in Pelican Bay, as one guard puts it, but gang leaders have turned it into a command centre from which they continue to control criminal activity on the outside. From behind bars, they are able to run illegal drug trades in California; control thousands of gang members on the street; and even order killings.

Pelican Bay is divided into two facilities. The gang leaders are separated from the rest of the prisoners and put in solitary confinement in the notorious Security Housing Unit (SHU), where they spend 22 and a half hours a day in small cells. In the so-called ‘Mainline’ section, 2,000 ‘footsoldiers’ are housed in a number of blocks, each containing 120 cells. The prisoner population is comprised of four ethnic groups, who call themselves the Blacks, the Whites (including groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood and Nazi Low Riders), the Southern Mexicans and the Northern Mexicans. And for the officers guarding them all, every day in the yard brings with it the risk of being attacked. “We’re on the losing end of that battle,” explains prison officer Sergeant Navarro.

However, the authorities at Pelican Bay have a new way of controlling the gang leaders. Clint MacMillan, trained as a Navy SEAL, is part of the Internal Gang Investigations (IGI) unit – an elite team of 16 specialists who are leading Pelican Bay’s counter-assault. Their strategy is to destroy the gang leaders’ communication network in order to get important members to leave their gangs and, sometimes, turn informant.

Having convinced inmates like Joseph Harmon to turn, MacMillan and the IGI have their sights set on another key gang member who is believed to be communicating orders through coded letters. With the help of the FBI cryptology unit, MacMillan is able to decode these and confronts the inmate with the evidence. But will this gang member, who knows that even speaking to the IGI is enough to get him killed by his enemies, give MacMillan the information he needs?

Even if he does, not everyone is convinced that the war against gangs will be won. “You’re always gonna have gangs,” explains a former member of Latino prison gang Nuestra Familia. “Gangs are like cockroaches – they’re gonna be around till the end of the world.” Clint MacMillan and his team are determined to go some way to ending the cycle of violence –but with more gang members arriving at Pelican Bay twice a week, is this a war that they can ever hope to win?