gathering along the wall. Most faces were staring up into mine, though no teeth were being shown. No happiness lived here.
I didn’t know any face down in the crowd and none, I guess, knew me. No one said anything to me, nor did I say a word to them. They began to file out to what I guessed to be the chow hall. Charlie row was next. “Let the gates be the bell” was fresh in my mind. My neighbor to the right had said that last night. So it was best, I thought, to tie into him immediately.
“Charlie row watch your gates, gates opening,” the soldier-cop called down the tier.
With some effort the cage door began to slide open. When there was enough room to squeeze out I made it through and was on the tier in what I reasonably thought to be Blood ’hood. But when my neighbor in cage nine came out it was a familiar face: Bennose from 107 Hoover. Ben recognized me and broke into a wide grin. But still I was tense. Next I saw Levi from 107 Hoover, then Popa and Perry—who I didn’t know, but had seen on the news— from Harlem Crip. Taco from Grape was there, too. It had all been a test to register my commitment level when in dire straits. I passed with flying colors.
They had already known that I was coming, perhaps long before I did. The grapevine could be very efficient at times, and at other times it failed miserably. I found out quickly that above and beyond unit E-F and G-H in Central juvenile hall, this was where they housed the “worst of the worst.” I fell in step and was right at home. Both Able row and Charlie row were Crips. There were Chicanos housed there, as well. No Americans could survive on Able or Charlie row, nor could any Blood. Later I fixed it where Sixties were excluded, too. Bloods, Americans— there were very few—and victims lived on Baker and Denver rows, or P.C., Protective Custody.
The “slob game,” as it came to be known—played on me to test my courage—was also used to uncover and weed out real Bloods. Because every American put into the tank was severely beaten or in some cases raped, the entire populace of American soldier-cops despised the juveniles of Able and Charlie rows with a vengeance. Often we’d get beat for the most trivial things. And, of course, there was inter-rivalry.
When I got there, Cyco Mike from Main Street Crips was supposedly in charge. He was a tyrant, taking food and other things from people, especially those on Able row, without so much as a word in return. He was a big, dark-complexioned cat with long hair. He, like the rest of us, had a murder charge. From day one he sensed my potential to threaten his tyrannical rule. It wasn’t leadership he was providing. He had gotten his position not by popular support but by brute strength. On his team he had Green Eyes from Venice Sho-line Crips, Eric from Nine- Deuce Hoover, his homies Killer Rob and Cisco from Main Street, and Handbone, who was also from Venice Sho- line. They were all on Able row. The other Crips on Able row were simply cannon fodder. The rumble between Cyco Mike and me was inevitable. All the while I kept lifting weights and training for that day.
“When two totalitarian powers make war on each other, the anger and hatred that arise can be appeased only by the death of one or the other. More than this, such killing is profoundly satisfying. Anger and hatred are ’fulfilled’ in destruction insofar as such emotions know satiety. The more lives the soldier succeeds in accounting for, the prouder he is likely to feel. To his people he is a genuine hero and to himself, as well. For him, war is in no sense a game or a dirty mess. It is a mission, a holy cause, his chance to prove himself and gain a supreme purpose in living. His hatred of the enemy makes this soldier feel supremely real, and in combat his hatred finds its only appropriate appeasement.”
J. Glenn Gray
The juvenile tank has got to be the most blatant exercise the state has ever devised for corrupting, institutionalizing, and creating recidivism in youths. At the behest of a judge or on the recommendation of the probation officer or district attorney, these youths can be whisked from a structured program monitored by a civilian staff—who attempt to counsel the captured youths by developing a healthy, human rapport with them and their parents—and dropped into a prisonlike setting with not so much as an inkling of counseling or adult support or the benefit of any meaningful, structured program to aid them in correcting whatever problems they may have. Removing them from a program designed for immature, unsophisticated youths and hurling them into a highly competitive, one hundred percent criminal population and setting—where the only adults are the very same police deputies responsible for their initial capture—is clearly a way to breed a criminal generation.
Probation officers and deputy district attorneys ultimately decide who will be tried as an adult. This decision is based on what the P.O. and D.A. call “maturity of the circumstances surrounding the crime.” This, of course, is euphemistic and, when examined from my side of the bars, means “If you’re New Afrikan or Chicano and have a murder charge, regardless of the circumstances, you are mature enough to be treated as an adult.”
It went without saying that most any American youth captured for murder would never be tried as an adult. His crime was surely not “mature enough” to warrant such harsh treatment, even if the hard evidence surrounding the case clearly illustrated that. For example: a shotgun shell had been secured to a rat trap by a U-nail and deliberately left in Mrs. Goldberg’s mailbox. When she opened the box to retrieve her morning mail a wire was tripped, letting loose the swing arm of the trap, which in turn hit the primer of the low-base, high-charge .12 gauge shell, killing Mrs. Goldberg instantly. Or, while dropping hits of acid at a social gathering, a group of friends uncovered an intruder from another planet who had somehow broken their circle and was surreptitiously plotting to execute the town fathers or, more important, the connection. So, based on a Ouija board identification of the intruder, he is sacrificed and eaten. Sophisticated? Mature? Premeditated? Of course not. “This,” the P.O. and D.A. will explain to the judge, “was a simple case of a good child destructively influenced by the violence of television.” Or, deeper still, “a victim of the drug plague, simply needing a psychiatric evaluation. But,” the D.A. would continue, “to try this young person—our very future—as an adult would be tantamount to treason!”
But the juvenile tank is filled to capacity with New Afrikan and Chicano youth, who more often than not have been charged in an alleged crime against one of their own. A New Afrikan youth in jail, charged for murdering another New Afrikan in most any form—sophisticated or not, and usually it’s not—will be tried as an adult and given the stiffest sentence possible, which, without fail, will be life.
I found myself behind bars for the first time at age sixteen. Not a door, not a window, but bars. Since then I have had an indelible scar on my mind stamped “criminal.” All my years of watching TV told me that righteous criminals went to jail behind bars. Wasn’t Al Capone put behind bars? The Onion Field killers, Charles Manson, and Sirhan Sirhan? So by environment alone I came to look upon myself as a stone-cold criminal and nothing else. Not then overstanding the political machinations involved with me being housed in such a place, I simply assumed that my reputation had preceded me and a more secure setting was needed to hold me.
Without a doubt, I was engaged in criminality. But my activity gravitated around a survival instinct: kill or be killed. Conditions dictated that I evolve or perish. I was engaged in a war with an equal opponent. I did not start this cycle, nor did I conspire to create conditions so that this type of self-murder would take place. My participation came as second nature. To be in a gang in South Central when I joined—and it is still the case today—is the equivalent of growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and going to college: everyone does it. Those who don’t aren’t part of the fraternity. And as with everything from a union to a tennis club, it’s better to be in than out.
So it goes that the American youths tried as adults—an insignificant number, not enough for a percentage— stayed in juvenile hall. The few that trickled into our wardom had simply been thrown away by the system. Because of our youth and political immaturity we would vent our anger, frustration, and hatred of the system—whatever that was—on them. It was totally beyond our overstanding that they were just like us: castaways condemned to an existence outside of the system. Potential allies were torn to shreds like bloody meat in a shark tank. Not one walked out, and few live today unscarred.
We stayed locked in our paltry little cages most of the day. For an hour a day we’d all be let out into the dayroom—a huge room, unobserved save for a small portion that was manned by a lookout. We watched them attempt to watch us. The demarcation was set: us and them—that is, the soldier-cops. Unlike the staff in the hall, who posed little or no threat, the deputies were outright racist dogs who always wanted a confrontation with us. We thought that as we were juveniles, they could not beat us. How naive the young mind can be. Levi was the first to be beaten. I can’t recall the circumstances surrounding the altercation, but it was awfully messy. They beat him bad. Blood was everywhere. The more they beat him the more frantic they became, every one of them Americans, with the exception of one Negro. It blew my mind to hear the American deputies calling Levi “dirty nigger” and “nappy-headed motherfucker” while the Negro deputy held him for his cohorts. Even Levi looked to the Negro for some sort of explanation to this contradiction. None was given. That was heavy to me. Little did I know that the load would get heavier.
