With career prison gangsters calling the shots, drug smuggling is surging at many California county jails. As the state system works to deal with facilities that are overcapacity and court orders to decrease its inmate population, it’s come up with a prison realignment plan that incorporates “flash incarceration” tactics, utilizing county jails to hold prison parolees who get sent back for minor technicalities. But the shot callers and prison-gang leaders, doing life in Pelican Bay and the feds, have figured out a way to exploit these changes.
Once inside, it’s open season given the inadequate security measures and resources at small facilities.
“These local county lockups are lax—you can get away with a lot of stuff,” Trouble says. “[The authorities] are not hip to all the moves and methods that are used to bring drugs in. They don’t have the training or experience in dealing with the hardcore prison mentality, and the shot callers recognized this and started using it to their advantage.”
The sheriff’s departments that run the county jails have struggled to keep pace with the flow of drugs in the three years since the overhaul of the state corrections system started sending lower-level felons to county lockups to reduce overcrowding. “What they are doing now,” Trouble tells VICE, “is sending dudes to the county jail for five or ten years. Unless you commit a certain type of crime, you don’t even go into the prison system—you stay in the local lockup. It’s right at home, so it’s sweet for the homeboys who have access to all their people because they are so close. Instead of having to drive several hours to a CDC prison, their visitors can come see them regularly and make overtures to the deputies there.”
These tactics were intended to give authorities a way to avoid sending parolees back to state prisons, but instead is being used by some offenders to move drugs into county jails, which are poorly equipped to deal with penitentiary smuggling techniques. “These folks have brought with them prison politics, prison contraband, prison culture. It’s very different than what the deputy sheriffs were previously used to dealing with,” Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson recently told the Associated Press. “Nobody was ready for this freight train.”
“The California system is flooded with drugs.” Trouble tells me. “A gram of heroin goes for like $400 to $600. They break a gram into quarters and sell them for like $100 to $150. Everybody locked up is trying to make money. The guards are on the take, especially at these county jails. They get paid to look the other way. A lot of these guards don’t even have their GEDs. They are from the same areas as the gang members getting locked up. Plus, they don’t got access to the same intel prison investigators in the state have access to.”