How Racist Prison Culture Infects Mainstream Politics  

Photo by Robert Thivierge via Flickr

Symbols not only help us understand the world that surrounds us; they also speak volumes about the body politic of the society in which we live.

I live in a small cowboy town in the Texas Hill Country.  It was once a community in which the “cowboy way”—a code of honesty, loyalty, and courage—shaped the body politic of the community.

Today the community’s body politic is an emerging white nationalism, rooted in a white supremacy belief system that makes traditional political conservatism seem Burlington, Vermont liberal.

This new body politic can be measured by the new symbols now seen on T-shirts, vehicles, flags, and in business establishments.

These are but a few of the symbols that now define this “cowboy” community: a “Fuck Joe Biden” T-shirt and flag; “I am a Navy retiree” above a Confederate flag on the tailgate of a Ford F-150; and a “Better Russian Than Democrat” on the bumper of a $60,000 Land Rover SUV.

These symbols, and others of the same ilk, can be found in thousands of small towns, and in white enclaves in larger urban areas across this country.

In his 1866 book “Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoevsky observed that  “the degree of civilization in society can be judged entering its prisons.”

By and large, American prisons today are bastions of violent gang affiliations, racism, and cultural differences. Gangs like the Latin Kings, Bloods, Crips, Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, and Gangster Disciples control the tenor and nature of the prison culture.

These gangs—estimated to be roughly 200,000 of the nation’s 1.5 million prison population—offer protection and social belonging to those inmates who accept and carry out the racist ideology of the gang.

American society today mirrors gang-infested prison environments.

There’s the MAGA gang, the Leftist gang, the White Nationalist gang, and the Evangelical gang. Each of these social gangs—driven by their own racist political and religious ideologies—represent roughly half of the nation’s population.

Many prisons have gang separation policies—like extreme restrictive housing units—necessary to maintain control, order, and stability in the inmate community.

But there are no social management tools to control the racist driven political and cultural ideologies currently shredding the collective peace and moral values of American society.

The political gang mentality now has roughly 43 percent of Americans believing that civil war is either likely or inevitable.

How did we get here?

Villains and Heroes

One reason is that the definition of crime has changed.

For example, political conservatives offered effusive praise for Kyle Rittenhouse—a white supremacist who at 17 years of age killed two people and wounded a third during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020.

But they blamed  President Joe Biden for the death of an 18-year-old MAGA supporter killed after being deliberately struck by an SUV driven by 41-year-old Shannon Brandt in McHenry, North Dakotas in September 2022 following a heated political discussion.

Both the Rittenhouse and Brandt killings were criminal acts. They were not political acts justified by extremist ideologies. These kinds of killings offer a glimmer into the dark shadows of looming civil war.

We are now living in a time when insurrection is considered patriotism—the seeds to violent civil conflict.

The prison world would become the same kind of battleground between clashing gang ideologies if was not for the power of the gun. The keeper maintains control of the kept through the power of forced order.

But there is no power of the gun to stop civil war in a free society.

And unlike gang warfare that occasionally occurs in prison, civil war in free society does not erupt over a turf-related dispute. Social-civil war starts with hatred—hatred rooted in race, culture, religion, and morality.

It is this kind of unfettered ideology, not the rule of reason, that shapes the body politic in any society

America was formed because of this kind of hatred—hatred of King George’s taxes and duties, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the King’s 1775 speech before Parliament calling for enhanced land and naval forces to deal with the unrest in the American colonies.

Thus, the seeds of hatred reside deeply in the bone marrow of the American soul—just as it does in the soul of the nation’s prison systems.

How did the father wearing the “Fuck Joe Biden” T-shirt and the other father displaying a bumper sticker praising the Southern Confederacy explain to  their children why they expressed their hatred through these public symbols?

Did the Confederacy-loving father tell his teenage son that the Civil War was fought because of the price of cotton?

Did the “Fuck Joe Biden” father tell his daughter that the president is a satanic worshipping pedophile who hangs out in a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor?

The hatred in the minds of these fathers is passed on to their children—and that most assuredly is a crime worse than some piddling gas-station robbery.

Civil war now hangs over our American society much like a riot hangs over a prison infected with racist and senseless violence.

The 1950s gave America racial violence; the 1960s gave America political violence; the 1970s gave America utter lawlessness in politics, culture and fashion; the 1980s gave America its highest murder rates; and the 1990s gave America a glimpse at both foreign and domestic terrorism standing on the horizon.

But it was the election of a Black president, Barak Obama, and the racist Tea Party that election spawned that placed America on a path to its second Civil War—perhaps inevitably so.

The cowboy way and the social codes of civility suddenly gave way to cultural codes of behavior that mirror the criminal “convict code” that governs prison society.

In my 16-plus years in free society after 40 years in prison society, I’ve heard social and political conversations in the free world that belong in cellblocks in the prison world.

There have been times in the free world that I felt more unsafe and surrounded by more dangerous people visiting Facebook or simply doing job-related Google searches—not to mention going to San Antonio to make a doctor’s appointment—than I ever did in a maximum security prison.

I will leave this life knowing that I have seen and experienced life in two similarly situated failed societies.

Billly Sinclair

And if I have learned nothing else in this life, I know Fyodor Dostoevsky was right in 1866—just one year after this nation concluded its first Civil War—when he said that civilization in a free society is measured by its prison society.

Billy Sinclair spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, six of which were on death row. He is a published author, an award-winning journalist (a George Polk Award recipient), and the co-host with his wife Jodie of the criminal justice podcast, “Justice Delayed.”