0091-4169/13/10204-0965
THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY
Copyright © 2012 by Northwestern University School of Law

Vol. 102, No. 4
Printed in U.S.A.

CRIMINAL LAW
TWO MODELS OF THE PRISON:
ACCIDENTAL HUMANITY AND
HYPERMASCULINITY IN THE L.A.
COUNTY JAIL
SHARON DOLOVICH

*

This Article considers what can be learned about humanizing the
modern American prison from studying a small and unorthodox unit inside
L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail. This unit, known as K6G, has an inmate
culture that contrasts dramatically with that of the Jail’s general
*
Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law; Scholar-in-Residence, Center on the
Administration of Criminal Law, NYU School of Law. I owe a great debt of thanks to Joe
Doherty, Director of the UCLA School of Law’s Empirical Research Group, for helping me
design the research project on which this Article is based and for guiding me through a
lengthy IRB certification process. Thanks are also due to Jamie Binnall, Sam Bray, Ingrid
Eagley, Phil Goodman, Juan Haines, Russell Korobkin, Bart Lanni, Rob Mikos, Sasha
Natapoff, Cameron Saul, Joanna Schwartz, and Jed Shugerman, and to workshop
participants at the University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, Emory, Harvard,
Loyola, NYU, UCLA, and San Quentin for very helpful comments and conversation; to Erin
Earl, Rebecca Johns, Anne Marie Morris, Brian Priestley, Michael Reiss, Frank Sabatini,
Jules Torti, and the reference librarians of the UCLA School of Law Hugh & Hazel Darling
Law Library for their research assistance; to the UCLA Academic Senate, UCLA Dean’s
Office, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law’s
Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, and the Williams Institute for generous
support of this research; to Jody Freeman, for her long support and encouragement of this
project; and to several officers of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, including
Chief Alex Yim, Deputy Alan Shapiro, and most especially Senior Deputy Randy Bell and
Deputy Bart Lanni. Unless otherwise stated, descriptions of the structure and functioning of
the L.A. County Jail provided in this Article are drawn from my own research in the Jail.
All the views and conclusions presented here are based solely on my own observations and
research, and do not represent the views of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.

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population (GP) units. Most notably, whereas life in the Jail’s GP is
governed by rules created and violently enforced by powerful inmate gangs,
K6G is wholly free of gang politics and the threat of violence gang control
brings. In addition, unlike residents of GP, who must take care in most
instances to perform a hypermasculine identity or risk victimization,
residents of K6G face no pressure to “be hard and tough, and [not] show
weakness” and thus can just be themselves—a safer and less stressful
posture. The K6G unit is also relatively free of sexual assault, no small
thing given that K6G exclusively houses gay and transgender prisoners,
who would otherwise be among the Jail’s most vulnerable residents. This
Article draws on original research to provide an in-depth account of life in
both K6G and the Jail’s GP, with the aim of explaining K6G’s distinctive
character. The most obvious explanation may seem to lie in the sexual
identity of K6G’s residents, and this feature does help to account for many
positive aspects of the K6G experience. But this Article argues that the
primary explanation is far more basic: thanks to a variety of unrelated and
almost accidental developments, residents experience K6G as a relatively
safe space. They thus feel no need to resort to the self-help of gang
membership or hypermasculine posturing and are able to forego the
hypervigilance that often defines life in GP. As a consequence, life in K6G
is less dehumanizing than life in GP and is even in some key respects
affirmatively humanizing, providing space for residents to retain, express,
and develop their personal identity and sense of self in a way that is
psychologically healthier than the typical carceral experience.
Understanding the implications of these differences and how they arose has
much to offer those committed to making carceral conditions safer and
more humane not only in L.A. County, but in prisons and jails all over the
country.

CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION....................................................................................... 967
II. GP AND K6G: TWO MODELS OF THE PRISON ....................................... 978
A. K6G: The Basics .............................................................................. 978
B. Life in K6G ....................................................................................... 981
C. (Gang) Life in GP ............................................................................ 992
D. GP’s Hypermasculinity Imperative ............................................... 1002
E. K6G: No Gang Politics, No Hypermasculinity Imperative ............ 1013
F. Clarifying the Terms: Violence, Safety, Humanity ......................... 1021
III. WHAT MAKES K6G K6G? ................................................................ 1024
A. Apples to Apples? Levels of Criminality in GP and K6G .............. 1026

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B. Creating a Safe Space in the L.A. County Jail ............................... 1032
1. Relatively Impermeable Boundaries........................................... 1032
2. Trust, Communication, and Mutual Respect Between K6G’s
Residents and Its Supervising Officers ........................................... 1036
3. Community Creation .................................................................. 1046
4. A Possible Fourth Factor: External Attention ........................... 1053
5. Accidental Humanity? ................................................................ 1055
C. Identity Theories: Looking to Sexual Difference ........................... 1057
1. They Can’t .................................................................................. 1058
2. They Don’t Want To ................................................................... 1064
3. They Don’t Need To ................................................................... 1068
4. They Can’t and Won’t Redux ..................................................... 1084
IV. “THEY’VE GOT IT TOO GOOD”: THE LAW-AND-ORDER OBJECTION 1087
V. TOWARD INCREASED HUMANITY IN PRISON: LESSONS FROM THE L.A.
COUNTY JAIL ........................................................................................... 1099
A. Lessons ........................................................................................... 1100
B. Strategies ........................................................................................ 1107
VI. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 1116

I. INTRODUCTION
The Los Angeles County Jail (the Jail) does not typically spring to
mind as a place with lessons to teach about humane prison conditions. For
one thing, it is a notoriously volatile and even dangerous institution where
severe overcrowding, chronic understaffing, and strict racial divisions
rigidly policed by the detainees themselves create conditions ripe for riots
and other forms of violence. It is, moreover, massive: on any given day, as
many as 19,000 people1 are held in the eight facilities that make up the Jail

1

See Sharon Dolovich, Strategic Segregation in the Modern Prison, 48 AM. CRIM. L.
REV. 1, 19 n.100 (2011). These numbers are likely to increase as the California prison
system, seeking to comply with the population reduction order upheld by the Supreme Court
in Brown v. Plata, 131 S. Ct. 1910 (2011), shifts a portion of its population back to the
counties. See, e.g., CAL. PENAL CODE § 1170(h) (West 2008 & Supp. 2012) (providing that
people convicted of nonviolent, nonserious, nonsexual offenses will serve their sentences in
county jail rather than state prison); CNTY. OF L.A. CMTY. CORR. P’SHIP AB 109/117
IMPLEMENTATION PLAN 33 (Sept. 2011) (“CDCR statistics and estimates from the District
Attorney’s Office indicate that approximately 7,000 felons are currently sentenced to state
prison from Los Angeles County each year on charges that will no longer qualify for state
prison.”). But see CNTY. OF L.A. CMTY. CORR. P’SHIP AB 109/117 IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
40 (Sept. 2011) (explaining that if the Jail gets too crowded due to population shifts arising
from the Realignment, the Jail will use risk-assessment tools to determine which prisoners
may be safely released). Given that fully one-third of the state’s prison population comes
from L.A. County, the burden of this shift on the L.A. County Jail is likely to be
considerable. See infra note 113.

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system, and every year, over 160,000 people come through its Inmate
Reception Center (IRC).2
This sheer enormity creates almost
insurmountable management challenges and makes it difficult to ensure
even minimally decent conditions. In some parts of the Jail—especially
Men’s Central, the oldest and highest security facility in the L.A. County
system—a combination of crowding and a decaying physical plant has
created unsanitary conditions in which infections thrive and spread. At the
same time, innumerable stresses on the system have greatly diminished the
availability of rehabilitative programming,3 leaving thousands of detainees
with no productive pursuits for weeks, months, and even years. Among
other effects, these various structural features combine to make life in the
L.A. County Jail stressful and scary, even for those individuals fortunate
enough to escape physical harm.4
This is not a promising place to look for insights on how to make
prisons more humane. Yet this Article does exactly that. In particular, it
considers what we can learn about humanizing the modern American prison
from studying a small and unorthodox unit inside L.A. County’s Men’s
Central Jail.5 As a formal matter, this unit—known as K6G—is the same as
2
See E-mail from Sgt. Steve Suzuki, L.A. County Sheriff’s Dep’t, to author (Apr. 15,
2011, 1:42 PM PST) (on file with the author) (providing data indicating that between 2001
and 2010, the average annual admissions rate in the L.A. County Jail was approximately
166,000, and that in 2005, the year with the decade’s highest number of admissions, 182,471
people were admitted to the Jail).
3
L.A. County Sheriff Leroy Baca has committed to a policy of universal education in the
Jail. His stated aim is to have every detainee in the Jail engaged in some sort of
rehabilitative educational programming, an agenda known in the Jail as “Education-Based
Incarceration” or “EBI.” This initiative is to be applauded, although structural limitations—
including crowding, staffing shortages, and insufficient resources—may unfortunately
compromise the success of the enterprise.
4
Not all of the violence is inmate-on-inmate. See ACLU NAT’L PRISON PROJECT &
ACLU S. CAL., CRUEL AND USUAL PUNISHMENT: HOW A SAVAGE GANG OF DEPUTIES
CONTROLS LA COUNTY JAILS 1 (Sept. 2011), available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/
97165508/Cruel-and-Unusual-Punishment-How-a-Savage-Gang-of-Deputies-Controls-LACounty-Jails (documenting a culture in which deputies regularly use excessive and
unjustified violence against Jail detainees and noting that “[t]o be an inmate in the Los
Angeles County jails is to fear deputy attacks”). Following the release of the 2011 ACLU
report describing routine, excessive force used by deputies against Jail detainees, see supra,
Sheriff Baca began to consider the possibility of closing some or all of Men’s Central Jail
and shifting the displaced population to other Jail facilities. See, e.g., Baca May Shut Down
Part of Men’s Central Jail, Move Inmates to Lynwood, CONTRA COSTA TIMES (Mar. 21,
2012), http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_20222152/baca-may-shut-down-partmens-central-jail.
5
In corrections, prisons and jails serve distinct purposes. Prisons provide long-term
housing, typically for sentenced offenders serving terms of longer than one year, although
the precise cutoff can vary by state. See Margo Schlanger, Inmate Litigation, 116 HARV. L.
REV. 1555, 1579 n.76 (2003). Jails hold sentenced prisoners serving short terms, typically

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every other in Men’s Central, but for one key difference: its residents are
exclusively gay men and transgender women.6 In reality, however, life in
the unit contrasts dramatically with life in the rest of the Jail. Most notably,
whereas the Jail’s general population (GP) is governed by rules created and
violently enforced by racially stratified gangs, K6G is wholly free of socalled gang politics and the threat of collective violence (a.k.a. riots) that
gang rule creates. K6G is also relatively free of sexual assault, no small
feat given that those housed in this unit would otherwise be among the

less than one year (although recent shifts in California in the wake of Plata, 131 S. Ct. 1910,
are projected to increase the number of convicted offenders to be held in California jails, see
supra note 1; CAL. DEP’T OF CORR. & REHAB., OVERVIEW, AB 109 & AB 117 PUBLIC SAFETY
REALIGNMENT OF 2011 (2011); Andy Furillo, Sacramento Judge Sentences Drug Runners to
13 Years Each in ‘County Jail Prison’, THE SACRAMENTO BEE (Apr. 22, 2012),
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/21/4431234/sacramento-judge-sentences-drug.html).
In
addition, jails house individuals awaiting trial but denied bail, convicted offenders awaiting
sentencing, and prisoners sent from state or federal prison to serve as witnesses in trials,
whether their own or those of others. See Schlanger, supra, at 1579 n.76. The role of jails in
providing housing for detainees with court dates explains why jails are typically situated
adjacent to courthouses, although L.A. County is so large that most Jail inmates with court
dates have to be bused from the Jail to their respective courthouses.
Given these differences, one might wonder what a study of life in a jail has to teach
about life in prison. The answer is that, although there will be some significant differences
between prisons and jails in terms of both operation and culture, the aspects of the Jail
culture on which this Article focuses are also found to a varying degree in many men’s
prisons and jails around the country. See infra note 29. At the same time, the
hypermasculinity imperative, although a staple of prison life, may be at its height in jail,
when men who are on their way to prison look to make a reputation as someone not to be
“messed with.” The high turnover typical of jails also increases the pressure on detainees to
maintain a tough-guy image, since people are constantly being thrown into close quarters
with new and unknown companions, any one of whom could pose a threat. See infra Part
II.D. This is especially true in the L.A. County Jail, which admits over 160,000 people a
year despite an average daily count as high as 19,000. See supra note 2. The massive size of
the L.A. County Jail system compels repeat players to forge self-protective alliances with
strangers—hence the strong gang culture. See infra Part II.C (describing the Jail’s gang
culture and the role it plays in protecting members against immediate harm at the hands of
other prisoners). Thus, although the hypermasculine culture found in the Jail’s GP is a
standard feature of life in many men’s prisons, the pressures are at their sharpest in the jail
environment, which makes the jail an ideal context for the study of this phenomenon. One
hopes that, with a commitment to meaningful reform and proper institutional design, this
toxic culture might be replaced with one more like that of K6G, not only in L.A. County, but
in all carceral facilities governed by a hypermasculinity imperative. See Terry A. Kupers,
Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison, 61 J. CLINICAL
PSYCHOL. 713, 714 (2005) (describing toxic masculinity as “the constellation of socially
regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women,
homophobia, and wanton violence” in male prisons).
6
The term “transgender” denotes people whose gender identity does not match their
birth sex. Throughout this Article, I use the term “trans women” to refer to people who were
born biologically male but who self-identify and self-present as women.

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Jail’s most vulnerable residents.7 Although very far from ideal, in these and
other ways, life in K6G is markedly safer and more humane than elsewhere
in the Jail.
A close study of K6G’s unusual environment strongly suggests that at
least some of the destructive pathologies endemic to the Jail’s GP are not
inevitable, even in a facility with the deep structural problems that L.A.
County confronts. These problems—including overcrowding, violence,
gang control, and a “perverse” sexual culture in which the strong prey on
the weak8—are not unique to L.A. County. To the contrary, many jail and
prison administrators nationwide to some degree face the same issues. A
clear understanding of how the K6G unit operates, what distinguishes it
from GP, and how to explain the differences may thus have much to offer
those committed to making life in custody safer and more humane, not only
in L.A. County, but in prisons and jails all over the country.9
This Article is part ethnography and part policy assessment. First, it
provides a textured account—a “thick description”10—of life in the K6G
unit. This ethnographic account serves as a window into a highly
unconventional carceral community and should be of interest to students of
contemporary American penology, as well as anyone who wants to know
what life is like inside one of the country’s largest carceral institutions.11

7

See infra text accompanying notes 87–89.
See Wilbert Rideau, The Sexual Jungle, in LIFE SENTENCES 73, 75 (Wilbert Rideau &
Ron Wikberg eds., 1992) (describing the “perverse [sexual] subculture” of Angola prison).
9
Of course, some realism is appropriate here. Even assuming that humane imprisonment
is not an oxymoron—arguably an open question—making the conditions in American
prisons and jails truly humane would require at a minimum a wholesale redesign of existing
penal institutions and a significant drop in the number of people in custody. In the
meantime, there are real people—at present, over 2.3 million of them, see infra note 158—
being held in prisons and jails around the country. This simple fact creates an imperative to
make current carceral conditions, if not wholly humane, then at least as safe and humane as
possible.
10
CLIFFORD GEERTZ, THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES 9–10 (1973) (“[E]thnography is
thick description.”); see id. at 17 (“Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness,
because it is through the flow of behavior—or, more precisely, social action—that cultural
forms find articulation.”). As Geertz explains:
It is with the kind of material produced by long-term, mainly (though not exclusively)
qualitative, highly participative, and almost obsessively fine-comb field study in
confined contexts that the mega-concepts [of] social science . . . can be given the sort
of sensible actuality that makes it possible to think not only realistically and
concretely about them, but, what is more important, creatively and imaginatively with
them.
Id. at 23.
11
See Loic Wacquant, The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass
Incarceration, 3 ETHNOGRAPHY 371 (2002) (bemoaning the decline of prison ethnography).
8

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Second, as will be seen, a close study of the internal culture of the Jail, and
of the K6G unit in particular, yields valuable insight into the appropriate
direction for penal reform. What emerges is a portrait of two very different
inmate cultures—the “two models” of the Article’s title. The first model,
which reigns in the Jail’s GP units and exists to a greater or lesser extent in
men’s prisons and jails all over the country, puts pressure on residents to
seem “hard and tough, and [not] show weakness.”12 This pressure, which I
call the hypermasculinity imperative,13 can feed a culture of belligerence,
posturing, emotional repression, and ready violence that rewards both
indifference to others and the willingness of the strong to victimize the
weak. In such an environment, gangs flourish and trauma abounds.14 The
second model, found in K6G, is free of any hypermasculinity imperative.
In K6G, one instead finds a surprising sense of relative ease, along with
open emotional expression, the overt development of mutually supportive
friendships and intimate relationships, and demonstrations of creativity and
even levity. One also finds in K6G a collective and determined rejection of
any efforts to introduce into the unit either the gang code in force in the rest
of the Jail or the racial segregation that goes with it.
What explains the difference? This is the puzzle this Article aims to
resolve. At first, the answer may seem to lie in the sexual identity15 of
K6G’s residents, who are (or who are pretending to be16) uniformly gay
men and trans women. And to be sure, the sexual identity of the people in
K6G does help to explain the form of life that has emerged, which in turn
contributes to the relatively healthy character of the unit.17 Yet the primary
explanation for this character turns out to be much more basic, and not at all
contingent on the sexual identity of the people K6G serves. Put simply,

12

See Derrick Corley, Prison Friendships, in PRISON MASCULINITIES 106 (Don Sabo et
al. eds., 2001). For more on this pressure and its physical and psychological effects on
detainees, see infra Parts II.D–II.F.
13
See infra Part II.D; see also Dolovich, supra note 1, at 14–16.
14
See Craig Haney, The Perversions of Prison: On the Origins of Hypermasculinity and
Sexual Violence in Confinement, 48 AM. CRIM. L. REV. 121, 128 (2011) (citing Nancy Wolff
& Jing Shi, Trauma in Incarcerated Persons, in HANDBOOK OF CORRECTIONAL MENTAL
HEALTH 277, 293 tbl.11-3 (Charles L. Scott ed., 2d ed. 2010)). For more on this point, see
infra note 249.
15
Throughout this Article, I use the term “sexual identity” as shorthand for the sexual
orientation and gender identity of K6G’s residents. I do so for brevity’s sake only, and do
not intend to suggest that the two are not distinct and very different categories.
16
There are almost certainly some men in the unit who are neither gay nor trans, but
merely pretending to be so. I address this phenomenon below, see infra Part III.B.1, and at
greater length elsewhere. See also Dolovich, supra note 1, at 25–43.
17
See infra Part III.C.

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thanks to a variety of unrelated and almost accidental developments, K6G is
a place where people feel safe enough to relax and be themselves.
In men’s prisons,18 hypermasculine posturing is a mechanism of selfprotection employed by people who feel vulnerable to harm; behind bars,
people will only relax and let down their guard when they feel safe from
physical or sexual violence. Although GP units vary between—and even
within—institutions in the degree to which residents feel at risk, there is
nearly always a need for men in GP to band together and to collectively
project an image of toughness and implacability in order to ensure their
mutual protection.19 And as a general matter, all men in GP must be
vigilant to avoid making missteps in the wrong company that, by making
themselves seem weak, could expose them to violence as well as ongoing
harassment and abuse. By contrast, the relative ease of life in K6G exists
not because K6Gs are gay and trans, but because they do not fear being
victimized or violently punished by other prisoners for being themselves.
K6G thus suggests a dramatic possibility about the realities of
contemporary American penality, one that merits further attention and
study: that in American prisons and jails, prisoners’ hypermasculine
posturing and ensuing pathologies arise not from an inherent preference for
violence, but from a not-unreasonable belief that nothing else will secure
their physical safety. To put the point another way, in many cases, it may
not be the prisoners who make the prison, but rather the prison—and in
particular the widespread failure of the system to treat those in custody as
people deserving of protection—that makes the prisoners. If prisons and
jails do sometimes seem to operate as “monster factories,”20 it may not be
because the people the state incarcerates are naturally and essentially
monstrous, but because the toxic combination of fear, trauma, and official

18

In this Article, I focus on men’s prisons, although some of the lessons to be drawn
from K6G—most notably the need to keep people in custody safe from harm, to treat them
with respect, and to provide access to humanizing pursuits—apply equally to women’s
prisons.
19
As Shon Hopwood explains in a memoir of his time in federal prison, not all circles
(a.k.a. “cars”) of prisoners are gangs, and some men in custody “eventually find maybe half
a dozen friends who seem human—people who share something in the way of goals or
attitude” or even just “particular interests.” SHON HOPWOOD, LAWMAN 61 (2012). Such
connections are crucial because “the other guys in your car are the people who will have
your back,” and “[w]hen people know that you have representation, they are less likely to
rob, steal, or sucker you.” Id. at 63. As Hopwood observes, “[y]ou can try to serve your
time outside a circle of protection, but chances are you will be stolen from, beat on, and
generally abused.” Id.
20
See SUNNY SCHWARTZ WITH DAVID BOODELL, DREAMS FROM THE MONSTER FACTORY:
A TALE OF PRISON, REDEMPTION AND ONE WOMAN’S FIGHT TO RESTORE JUSTICE TO ALL, at
xi–xii (2009).

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disregard that can define daily life in custody makes at least some of them
feel compelled at times to act that way.21
This Article draws on original research conducted in the Jail over
seven weeks in the summer of 2007.22 During that time, I observed the
operation of K6G and the Jail more generally,23 sat in on K6G classification
interviews, spent countless hours in the officer’s booth overlooking the
K6G dorms, and had many informal conversations with unit residents,
custody officers, and other staff.24 I also conducted one-on-one interviews,
structured around a 176-question instrument,25 with a random sample of
K6G’s residents.26 The account of K6G offered here is based on data
gathered through this process.
In addition, over the course of my research, I learned much about life
in the Jail’s GP through the formal interviews, through informal
conversations with a range of people with direct experience of the Jail’s
GP,27 and through direct observation of the GP dorm that, due to its

21

For a powerful and moving account of the process by which this transformation
occurs, see Haney, supra note 14. See also Yvonne Jewkes, Men Behind Bars: “Doing”
Masculinity as an Adaptation to Imprisonment, 8 MEN & MASCULINITIES 44, 46, 62 (2005)
(“‘You definitely have to wear a mask in prison—if you don’t, you’re going to get eaten
away. When I came in I was green. I thought I was quite streetwise on the outside, but no.
You have to act tough. There’s always the threat of violence.’”) (quoting “Simon,” an
interview subject in a “Category C prison[] in the English Midlands”).
22
UCLA IRB # G07-01-106-03. For a detailed description of the research protocol, see
Dolovich, supra note 1, at 92–99.
23
This enterprise was made possible by Chief Alex Yim, who generously allowed me
open access to all parts of the facility.
24
I took lengthy field notes each day and dictated the notes each night, when what I had
seen was still fresh in my mind.
25
I developed this instrument with the help of my colleague, Joe Doherty. It is published
in its entirety in Dolovich, supra note 1, at 99–110.
26
See id. at 5 n.21 (explaining the constitution of my sample, including its racial
makeup). In all, I interviewed thirty-two residents, almost 10% of the unit’s population at
the time. Interviewees were assigned random interview numbers. The interviews were
recorded and later transcribed. Most interviews encompassed multiple audio files, which
were saved—and therefore transcribed—alphabetically, with the sequence restarting each
day. Citations to these interview transcripts will be referenced hereinafter in the following
manner: Int. # (Interviewee number), at file # (i.e., A–G) page # (transcript page reference);
e.g., Int. 46, at C3. The interview process yielded fifty-one hours of audio recordings, which
were subsequently transcribed. I thank the UCLA Academic Senate, the UCLA Dean’s
Office, Harvard Law School, and Georgetown University Law Center for their generous
support of this costly enterprise.
27
This group of informants included custody officers and other staff; then-current GP
residents, including trusties and people in the GP unit next to the K6G dorms; and people in
K6G who had previously done time in the Jail’s GP.

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fortuitous proximity to the K6G dorms, served as my control.28 I also
learned about life in the California prisons more generally, both through the
formal interviews (since many of my interview subjects had previously
spent time in state prison), and through informal conversations with other
K6G residents who had also done time in state prison. The account of GP
offered here is drawn from what I learned through these various channels,
supplemented and reinforced by some of the many studies, articles, and
personal testimonials that describe life in general population units in men’s
prisons and jails around the country.29 In sum, by contrast with the portrait
of K6G, which rests entirely on original research, the picture provided here
of life in GP is a composite: in many instances it portrays life in the general
population of L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail, but in other instances—
noted as such—it offers a general account of a culture that the great weight
of the quantitative, ethnographic, journalistic, and testimonial evidence
strongly indicates pervades, to a greater or lesser degree, many men’s
carceral institutions around the country.30
28

See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 94.
See, e.g., K.C. CARCERAL, PRISON, INC. (Thomas J. Bernard ed., 2006) (discussing an
unnamed, privately operated prison in the American South); T.J. PARSELL, FISH: A MEMOIR
OF A BOY IN A MAN’S PRISON (2006) (discussing Michigan prisons); WILBERT RIDEAU, IN THE
PLACE OF JUSTICE (2010) (discussing Louisiana’s Angola prison); MICHAEL G. SANTOS,
INSIDE: LIFE BEHIND BARS IN AMERICA (2006) (discussing federal prisons); Haney, supra
note 14; Christopher D. Man & John P. Cronan, Forecasting Sexual Abuse in Prison: The
Prison Subculture of Masculinity as a Backdrop for “Deliberate Indifference”, 92 J. CRIM.
L. & CRIMINOLOGY 127, 164–75 (2001).
30
Although there are obviously differences between prisons, the GP culture I describe in
this Article represents the baseline from which positive departures, although welcome, are
notable. See Haney, supra note 14, at 127 n.22 (noting that although not all jails and prisons
are the same in terms of the pathologies they create, it is nonetheless possible to make
generalizations that are “normatively correct in many correctional settings” even if not
“universally applicable,” and that “the lack of universality does not undermine the capacity
of the jail and prison context to generate tremendous psychological pressure that is felt by
virtually all inmates, even though it may dramatically transform the behavior of only some”).
To illustrate the variance: a person I met at San Quentin State Prison reported a range of
experiences during his many decades in the California prison system. He described being at
Vacaville State Prison in the early 1980s and found the inmate culture there to
“accommodate all types of people,” including “[gang] dropouts, child molesters, [and]
gangbangers from all sides.” There was, in Vacaville at the time, a “high level of
acceptability.” This was “the only prison [he had] ever seen or heard of that two gays could
sit on the yard and kiss, even get caught having sex with no repercussions.” By contrast, in
the late 1980s, he was at Folsom State Prison where “there was an average of one stabbing
every three days. No transgenders here, some gays, way undercover. No mixing of races in
any way. Sometimes the air [was] so thi[ck] with tension that it was hard to breath[e]. A
person had to live by the code that their race or gang set, with just survival being the daily
goal.” Letter from Jeffrey Scott Long to author (Feb. 2012) (on file with the author).
Kenneth Hartman confirms Long’s account of Folsom prison in the 1980s. Hartman reports
that, on his arrival at Folsom shortly after being sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) in
29

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The remainder of this Article proceeds as follows. Part II describes
life in K6G and contrasts it with life in GP. What emerges is a picture of
two very different models of prison culture, only one of which—GP—
generates a hypermasculinity imperative and is a site of gang control.
Through close examination of these two models, this Part helps to clarify
the meanings of three terms—violence, safety, and humanity—that prove
key to understanding what is at stake in the comparison the Article offers.
Although in part, people in GP fear physical violence, they also frequently
experience the dehumanizing and psychologically destructive need to be
always on guard and, in particular, to avoid saying or doing anything that
might expose themselves as weak and therefore available for victimization.
In this climate, Part II suggests, humane conditions become those in which
people feel safe from the threat of physical harm and free of the
psychological pressure to suppress any word or act that might betray
ordinary human vulnerability.
Part III develops this Article’s central claims. Part III.A addresses the
question of whether K6G’s population is sufficiently similar to that of the
Jail’s GP in terms of its criminal history and propensity for violence to
permit comparison, and offers reasons for thinking that it is. Part III.B then
seeks to explain the dramatic differences between these two models. It
argues that the primary reason for K6G’s unusual character is that people in
this unit, unlike those who live in GP, feel independently safe from physical
assault. They therefore have no need to resort to self-help through either
hypermasculine posturing or gang allegiance, and feel able to relax and be
themselves. Part III.B argues that this collective sense of relative safety and
ease is best explained by several aspects of the K6G experience not
contingent on the sexual identity of its residents, including the relatively
impermeable physical boundaries between K6G and GP (Part III.B.1); the
deep reservoir of trust and mutual respect that has existed between K6G’s
residents and its two supervising officers (Part III.B.2); and the sense of
community found in the K6G dorms (Part III.B.3). It also suggests a fourth
possible reason: the attention K6G receives from outside organizations with
an interest in the unit’s population (Part III.B.4). Finally, Part III.B.5
explains why the combined effect of these factors is best understood as
“accidental” humanity. In addition to exposing the various institutional
arrangements that have come together to make K6G’s residents feel
the early 1980s, he and the other new arrivals were met by a prison official who offered two
“admonitions”: “If you try to escape, we’ll kill you. If you put your hands on one of my
guards, we’ll kill you. Other than that, we don’t give a shit what you do to each other.”
According to Hartman, “[n]o more accurate description of Folsom [wa]s ever offered.”
KENNETH E. HARTMAN, MOTHER CALIFORNIA: A STORY OF REDEMPTION BEHIND BARS 35
(2009).

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relatively safe, Part III.B reveals that the possibility of safe and humane
conditions hinges on an institutional commitment not only to identifying
and isolating predators, but also to cultivating an institutional culture in
which individuals in custody are treated fairly and with respect, as people
and not simply as “inmates.”31
Part III.C turns to the sexual identity of K6G’s residents32 and directly
addresses the view that, notwithstanding the features explored in Part III.B,
it is the sexual identity of K6G’s residents that best explains the unit’s
distinctive character. This Part considers several iterations of this
argument: that the sexual identity of people in K6G renders them incapable
of the hypermasculine performance demanded of men in GP (Part III.C.1);
that this sexual identity explains why they would prefer not to participate in
the governing culture of GP (Part III.C.2); that, because people in K6G
have access to their objects of desire, they do not need the benefits
hypermasculine performance provides (Part III.C.3); and finally—turning
the perspective around—that the sexual identity of heterosexual-identified
men in GP explains why they cannot or will not adopt the comparatively
healthy behavioral norms of K6G (Part III.C.4). No version of this
objection proves a sufficient explanation on its own, and each turns out to
rest on potentially misleading stereotypes. But taking the various forms of
this counterargument seriously helps to call attention to several important
differences between K6G and GP that might otherwise have gone
unremarked. Fortunately, even those differences that at first seem most
bound up with the sexual identity of K6G’s residents turn out on closer
inspection to reflect humanizing aspects of the K6G experience that may be
generalized to units serving a broader constituency.
Part IV responds to a possible objection that might be lodged against
any efforts to generalize the lessons of K6G: that the residents of K6G
“have it too good,” and that it is therefore K6G and not GP that should be
reformed. This Part argues that, to the contrary, the moral and
constitutional limits on what the state can legitimately do to prisoners
require that the state cease housing people under the stressful and corrosive
conditions that too often define life in GP. In closing, Part V identifies
several lessons that emerge from the study of K6G and suggests specific

31
As will be seen, there is a close connection between keeping people in custody safe
and respecting their humanity. This is both because a lack of safety generates persistent fear
and trauma that makes the experience deeply corrosive of a person’s sense of self, and
because a commitment to keeping people safe is an acknowledgement that those in custody
are fellow human beings whose well-being is a matter of institutional concern.
32
See supra note 15.

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strategies that might be adopted by prison and jail administrators seeking to
replicate some of K6G’s positive features.33
One final introductory note is in order regarding the enterprise of K6G
itself. This unit provides segregated housing for all gay men and trans
women34 detained in the Jail. Before people may be admitted to K6G,
classification officers must determine that they meet the standards for
admission, meaning that they are found to be either “homosexual”35 or
male-to-female transgender.36 Once admitted, K6G residents are kept
physically separated from the rest of the Jail’s population. This program
thus entails state-sponsored, identity-based segregation. There are many
objections that might be made to such an undertaking, including that it may
violate equal protection guarantees, endanger detainees whose
nonconforming sexual identities are thereby publicly exposed, and/or
entangle state officials in the unseemly project of prying into detainees’
private lives to assess whether they meet the official definition of
“homosexual.”37 These objections are serious ones and bear careful
consideration. In a companion piece, I address them directly and consider
at some length whether, in light of its many admittedly troubling aspects,
such a unit should even exist.38 In that piece, I focus on the way the
program works, the process by which individual detainees are identified as
eligible for admission, and the implications of that gatekeeping exercise
both for those detainees admitted to K6G and for those whose requests for
admission are refused. For present purposes, I leave to one side any
questions regarding the legitimacy of the K6G enterprise and, for the most
part, any consideration of the classification process. Instead, I focus here
on the ultimately far broader question of K6G’s implications for
incarceration in general: what life is like in a carceral unit populated
exclusively by gay men and trans women,39 the contrast between life in that
33

This project admittedly does little to challenge the overincarceration that currently
defines the American penal system. But while we wait (and work) for the emergence of a
broad-based societal commitment to radical decarceration, hundreds of thousands of people
continue to live behind bars. Making the conditions of confinement relatively more humane
is thus not just a worthy interim aim but a moral imperative.
34
See supra note 6.
35
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 26 (noting that official Jail policy restricts admission to
K6G to “male homosexuals”).
36
See id. at 23–24 (explaining that the decision was made in the early 1990s to house the
male-to-female transgender prisoners in K6G with the gay men).
37
See id. at 25–26 (discussing K6G’s admissions standards).
38
See id. at 55–87; infra Part V.B.
39
There are also some people in K6G who do not meet the admissions criteria but
pretend to do so in order to stay in the unit. Anyone classified to K6G who is subsequently
revealed not to meet its admissions criteria is “declassed”—i.e., declassified from K6G and

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unusual unit and life in GP, and what this contrast might teach about
making prisons and jails safer and more humane for everyone.40
II. GP AND K6G: TWO MODELS OF THE PRISON41
A. K6G: THE BASICS
K6G was established by consent decree in 1985, the product of a
lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Southern California on behalf of all gay men
in the Jail. The lawsuit charged Jail administrators with the failure to keep
safe the “homosexual inmates” in their custody, and it settled when the Jail
agreed to tighter procedures for ensuring the safety of this population. The
centerpiece of the settlement agreement was a housing unit designated
exclusively for detainees found to be gay. It also contained a series of
stipulations intended to keep the unit’s residents wholly separate and apart
from GP.42
To ensure that only eligible individuals would be admitted—a
precaution necessary to guard against predators seeking access to potential
victims43—the consent decree constructed a two-part classification process.
First, as Jail staff had already been doing, “[i]nmates entering [the IRC]”

reclassified to some other unit. In order not to be moved from K6G, those who are neither
gay nor trans but who were nonetheless admitted to the unit will do their best to “pass” as
gay in order to remain. The fact that detainees in a high-security carceral facility might fake
being gay in order to be housed with gay men and trans women may seem hard to fathom.
However, such pretense is a daily occurrence in the K6G classification office. For more on
this phenomenon, see id. at 33–43.
40
I recognize that this enterprise may expose me to the charge that, by seeking the means
to improve carceral conditions, I may only be further entrenching a fundamentally
illegitimate penal system. This is a risk of reform efforts in any context. Id. at 10–11.
People must make their own calculations as to the right course, and for me, the alleviation of
immediate suffering is the greater imperative. See id. at 10–11.
41
I use the term “prison” here in its broader, less technical sense, to refer to custodial
facilities in general. See supra note 5 (explaining the difference between jails and prisons,
and explaining why the study of a jail yields models of custody that are also relevant to
prisons).
42
For more details on the 1982 case and the consent decree, see id. at 21–23.
43
Earlier Jail efforts to protect gay men in custody were hampered by a policy allowing
access to the unit to anyone claiming to be gay, thus opening the door to potential predators.
See id. at 21–22. This same problem also arose at Rikers Island in New York City. There,
Jail officials for years operated a segregation unit for gay men and trans women, to which
people could gain admittance merely by declaring themselves eligible. See Paul von
Zielbauer, City Prepares to Close Rikers Housing for Gays, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 30, 2005, at
B9. As a consequence, the unit mixed genuinely vulnerable individuals with “violenceprone inmates” who claimed to be gay in order to prey on other residents of the unit. Id.

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were to be asked “if they are homosexual.”44 At this point, those “who state
that they are homosexual are immediately transferred to segregated housing
units for homosexuals.”45 Then, to make certain that all those people
initially classified to K6G told the truth in IRC about their sexuality, the
consent decree created a second step. During step two, “classification staff”
were to determine whether those individuals who declared themselves
homosexual at the IRC stage “[were] suitable for such segregated housing
units”46—in short, whether those men who claimed to be gay really
belonged in a unit reserved exclusively for “homosexual inmates.”
As I have described elsewhere, the measures in place in the Jail to
keep K6Gs separate from GPs work reasonably well.47 For the most part,
when K6Gs are out of the dorms, they are kept physically separate from any
GPs whose paths they cross.48 The classification process employed by the
two classification officers assigned to K6G also appears to have been
largely effective at weeding out those men who, knowing that they do not
satisfy K6G’s admissions criteria, nonetheless claim they do49 when they go
44

Stipulation and Request for Dismissal Order at 4, Robertson v. Block, No. 82-1442
(C.D. Cal. July 17, 1985) [hereinafter Order].
45
Id. Jail policy restricts admission to K6G to “male homosexuals.” L.A. CNTY. JAIL
REG. § 5.02/050.00 (Segregation and Classification of Male Homosexuals). In practice, this
directive is interpreted to include only those men who “live a homosexual lifestyle” when
not incarcerated. Dolovich, supra note 1, at 26. The precise meaning of this standard is a
somewhat shifting target, but at base, it reflects a binary, essentializing theory of male
sexuality, which supposes that one either is or is not gay and there is no in-between. See id.
As to each interview, what the classification officers seek to determine is whether
interviewees are “really gay,” by which is meant that, when they are free, they seek out men
and only men for sexual gratification, for romance, and for emotional intimacy. See id. at 26
n.149 (explaining the practical implications of this standard). This standard is deliberately
designed to exclude bisexuals, id. at 67–69 (discussing this policy), and in particular, men
who might be regarded as “situational homosexuals”—those who have sex with men while
incarcerated and sex with women when not in custody. See id. at 26 n.150 (on situational
homosexuality); see also id. at 67–69 (considering the reasons for the exclusion of
situational homosexuals from K6G).
46
Id.
47
See id. at 24–44. There is certainly room for improvement, especially in the
procedures in place to keep K6Gs physically inaccessible to GPs when they are outside their
dorms. For more on this issue, see id. at 24–25, 57–58. See also id. at 60 (describing one
notable failure of this system: the rape by a GP inmate of a K6G resident who was waiting in
the K6G court-line holding cell in Men’s Central for a transfer back to the unit).
48
See supra note 47.
49
Deputy Bart Lanni, who has served as one of K6G’s classification officers for over
two decades, tells of one such instance that occurred in the early years of the segregation. In
that case, a man was classified to “homosexual housing” (as it was then known) despite the
officers’ suspicions that he was lying about being gay, because the officers were unable to
confirm those suspicions with any tangible evidence. (In such cases, the officers will make
an all-things-considered judgment and will generally err on the side of admission. See

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through IRC.50 Although there are no doubt people in this category who
succeed in getting into K6G, it is well-known among unit residents that
anyone found not to belong will be removed from K6G and sent elsewhere
in the Jail (most likely to GP). This enforcement strategy appears at a
minimum to ensure that those who were wrongly classified to K6G will do
their best to stay under the radar and draw no undue attention to themselves
by threatening or harming other residents.
Today, K6G has an average population of 350–400 residents and
occupies three or four dorms in Men’s Central, depending on the daily
count and available space.51 In addition, several specially designated cells
in the Twin Towers facility (where the Jail houses all detainees with serious
mental illness) house K6Gs also judged to be seriously mentally ill, and a
separate row of single cells in Men’s Central serves as the unit’s
disciplinary wing. Until 1996, the trans women were housed separately
from the gay men.52 But this separation sparked vociferous complaints on
Dolovich, supra note 1, at 34.) Eventually, it was discovered that this detainee, who during
his interview had denied having a wife, was indeed married and had even taken the
precaution, while in the unit, of exchanging letters with his wife through a third party
(another detainee in the Jail) to avoid their being read by either Deputy Lanni or Senior
Deputy Ernest Cobarrubias, Lanni’s partner at the time in the unit’s classification office.
Once the subterfuge came out, the detainee, who freely admitted the scheme, was declassed
from homosexual housing and sent to GP.
50
This phenomenon of reverse-passing, in which men who know themselves to be
straight or bisexual seek to pass as gay, is highly unusual, especially given that men in
custody who are believed to be gay generally face an elevated risk of sexual assault. See
infra text accompanying notes 87–89. Moreover, the obvious privilege attached to
heterosexuality in modern society means that reverse-passing is likely to be relatively rare.
K6G is thus unusual in this regard. It may, however, not be unique; this phenomenon may
also arise in asylum hearings. People seeking asylum in the United States may qualify for
admission “if they can demonstrate past persecution or a well-founded fear of future
persecution based on membership in a particular social group,” and homosexuals are among
the recognized groups covered by this standard. See Dan Bilefsky, Gays Seeking Asylum in
U.S. Encounter A New Hurdle, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 29, 2011, at A19. Conceivably, asylum
seekers able to convince immigration officers that they are homosexual might be able to take
advantage of this provision. At least some experts in the field, however, maintain that it is
exceedingly rare for asylum seekers to present themselves falsely to immigration officials as
lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender in a bid for relief. See Victoria Neilson & Lori Adams,
Gay Asylum Seekers, N.Y. TIMES (Feb. 6, 2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/
opinion/lweb07gay.html (letter to the editor from the Legal Director of Immigration Equality
and a staff attorney of the Refugee Protection Program of Human Rights First). I thank
Allegra McLeod for drawing my attention to this example and for these sources.
51
When I conducted my research in the summer of 2007, K6G occupied just three
dorms. As of March 2012, the unit stood at approximately 390 people and occupied four
dorms. Interview with Senior Deputy Randy Bell, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, in L.A., Cal.
(Mar. 29, 2012).
52
The trans women originally lived separately in a unit on the top floor of the old Hall of
Justice Jail. In 1993, they were moved to a unit in the North County Correctional Facility

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the part of the trans women in particular, and eventually the decision was
made to house the two groups together.53 Although the numbers are
constantly shifting, trans women today typically make up anywhere from
10%–20% of the unit’s population.
B. LIFE IN K6G
In significant ways, life in K6G is no different from life in GP. K6G is
still jail, and locking people up inevitably inflicts all sorts of harms—
physical, psychological, and emotional—even on those detained under
model conditions. And K6Gs, as with people in the Jail more generally,
hardly live in model conditions. They occupy noisy, crowded dormitories
with as many as 110 men sleeping in fifty-five bunk beds in the drab
surroundings of a decrepit building. Dorm residents share six or eight
open-plan toilets and showers, with no privacy of any kind. The close
quarters and generally unhygienic conditions not only breed ill-health54 but
are also depressing and demoralizing.55 The food is unappetizing and varies
little day-to-day (dried soups are a particularly popular item for canteen
purchase or barter,56 presumably as an alternative to the food provided).57
And K6Gs, like other residents of Men’s Central, have outdoor access for
(NCCF) that became known as the “witches’ castle.” During this period, the gay men were
housed at Wayside, adjacent to NCCF. In 1996, the two units were moved downtown to the
Twin Towers facility and merged. Telephone Interview with Bart Lanni, Deputy Sheriff,
L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t (July 27, 2010).
53
See id. This arrangement creates some problems, although it is arguably still the more
humane approach. For more on this issue, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 43.
54
In 2007, a staphylococcus (staph) outbreak in the Jail meant that residents risked
infection if their sheets, clothing, or blankets touched the floor or any other infected areas.
Yet prisoners were issued clean blankets only once a month and clean sheets and clothes
only twice a week (on Tuesdays and Thursdays—leaving one to wonder about the state of
items received Thursday by the time of their exchange the following Tuesday). At least two
residents of the K6G dorms were hospitalized with staph infections during my time in the
Jail.
55
See Int. 103, at D6 (“[R]ight now, we’ve got maybe three toilets that work, four
showers for 108 people that work, and all the sinks work, but . . . we don’t get enough
cleaning supplies, we don’t get, like, real bleach or anything, we get ‘powdered bleach.’”);
Int. 92, at B5 (“Our restroom is falling apart. It stinks all the time. Our vents are clogged
up. Our ceilings are full of toilet paper and old—you can see they haven’t painted for a
while. There’s dirt everywhere. It’s just hideous. Hideous.”).
56
See Int. 47, at B15 (“I’ve seen people [who] slept with somebody [in the K6G dorms]
[f]or two soups.”).
57
To enumerate these features of the Jail is not to condemn the L.A. County Sheriff’s
Department, which from what I have seen does its best to provide for those in its custody.
Nor is it to suggest that prisoners should get gourmet meals in a hotel-quality atmosphere.
Here I am simply attempting to provide a picture of what it is like for K6G’s residents on a
day-to-day basis.

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only three hours a week and even that time, given the urban setting of the
facility, is spent in a rooftop enclosure with concrete walls and a chickenwire roof.
Other undesirable aspects of life in K6G also mirror those found in
GP. For example, the limited accommodation available in Twin Towers,
where the County houses those detainees found to be seriously mentally ill,
means that even people with severe mental illness are often placed in the
dorms, where they can create problems for other residents58 as well as for
the officers assigned to the floor. During my time in the Jail, I was told of
dorm residents who never showered because of mental illness, thus creating
an unpleasant atmosphere in the close quarters of the dorm. I also heard of
mentally ill residents who depended on other detainees to provide the care
that—it was alleged to me—should have been provided by trained
professionals.59 One incident in particular revealed the threat posed by such
misclassification. It involved an alleged use of force by several officers
against a dorm resident who refused to comply with an order to remain
quietly on his bunk during evening count. As the story was related to me,
the prisoner who failed to comply with this order—and who was
consequently forcibly restrained by several officers—was not being
willfully disobedient, but was instead incapable of conforming his behavior
to the officers’ demand due to mental illness. Had he been properly housed,
this detainee would not have been subjected to violent punishment for his
behavior.60 And although this person bore the brunt of his own incapacity,
any time officers use force in a custodial setting, it can be scary and
traumatizing even for those who are not the targets, but who are just in the
vicinity.61
Other problems endemic to life in the Jail are also present in K6G.
There is a constant danger that other residents will prove violent. As one of
my respondents put it:
58
See Int. 92, at C5 (reporting that at the time of the interview, there were “two people
that are . . . really mentally ill in [his dorm]” that he believed “shouldn’t [be] there”).
59
People who have been classified to K6G and who are found to have serious mental
illness are kept in segregated housing in Twin Towers.
60
This is not to say that the mental health care this individual would have received had
he been housed in Twin Towers would have been adequate. Certainly, if it is anything like
that provided by the California prison system to its seriously mentally ill prisoners, it would
have been sorely lacking. See Coleman v. Schwarzenegger, No. CIV S-90-0520 LKK JFM
P, 2009 WL 2430820, at *22–34 (E.D. Cal. Aug. 4, 2009) (documenting the extremely
inadequate and unconstitutional nature of mental health care in the California prison system).
61
Whether or not the details of this particular story were accurate as related to me,
housing people with serious mental illness in population, whether in segregation units like
K6G or in GP, will invariably carry the risk of such misunderstandings and thus the
possibility of inappropriately forceful responses by officers.

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We’re dealing with people that are rapists and criminals and carjackers and drug
addicts, and people that like to steal, people that are fighting murder cases up in here.
And sometimes I don’t feel very safe. Sometimes I wake up touching myself, saying,
62
“God, I’m still alive. Thank God.”

When I visited the row of single-person cells that functioned at the time as
K6G’s disciplinary wing, I met a Cuban trans woman63 who, I was told, had
the habit of slicing her enemies with a razor.64 At least two of my subjects
reported seeing blades used in fights in the K6G dorms.65 In my interviews,
I learned of at least one incident of violent rape of one K6G resident by
another,66 suggesting that this danger has not been completely eradicated in
the K6G dorms.67 Deputies also pose a threat to the people in K6G, as they
do to detainees in the Jail more generally.68 For example, in a sworn
declaration, one former resident of K6G described an unprovoked beating
of a K6G resident by several deputies, during which the victim was struck
with a flashlight, tasered, and hurt so badly that he was “screaming in agony
and calling for his mother”69—an incident corroborated during my formal
interviews.70
62

Int. 92, at C3.
This woman told me she had been in prison in Cuba and had come to the United States
via the Mariel boatlift. She reported that she spends most of her time in custody in
segregation because of her violent tendencies.
64
Although it is against the rules for prisoners to have such items, weapons of all kinds
can be readily procured in just about every carceral setting if detainees are determined
enough.
65
See infra note 243.
66
I was unable to confirm the fact of the matter, but the story I heard from more than one
respondent involved a violent man who forced his lover to remain permanently on his bunk
and one evening forcibly raped him. Although awful, if true, the story suggests an abusive
relationship of the sort unfortunately seen in society in general—and thus not necessarily the
product of carceral pathologies native to the Jail. Perhaps more to the point, the fact that I
heard only one such story is remarkable in itself, given that my interviewees had collectively
spent many years housed in K6G.
67
Nor should one expect it to be. After all, many people in K6G, as well as those
elsewhere in the Jail, have been accused of violent crimes, and it is not to be wondered if
some of them are prone to violence in this way.
68
See supra note 4 (describing the phenomenon of deputy-on-detainee violence in the
L.A. County Jail).
69
Declaration of Cameron Saul, June 22, 2011. This incident is unfortunately consistent
with the culture of violence among Jail deputies against detainees in general. See ACLU,
supra note 4.
70
This incident took place during the period of my research. The day after it occurred,
one of my interview subjects—who had been in the dorm where it occurred—described in
detail during a formal interview what had happened. The incident arose during the
distribution of meal trays in the unit. Meals are distributed in the dorms by trusties under the
supervision of the deputies. Residents of each dorm line up; receive their trays; and then,
63

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In K6G, as in GP, the strong inmates can prey on the weak, sometimes
taking “protection” money in exchange for “looking out” for someone.
Another iteration of this predatory behavior is the usurious practice known
as “two-for-one,” common in K6G and in the Jail as a whole. This practice
involves someone with resources buying desirable items from the
commissary and making them available to people who lack the necessary
funds in their Jail accounts. Commissary items—known in the Jail as
“store”—represent a rare treat for those in custody and are awaited with
palpable eagerness. The catch of two-for-one is that as the name suggests,
the debtor must pay the creditor back double the following week: two candy
bars if one was provided, two soups if one was provided, etc. Failing to pay
one’s debts in custody is a serious offense, and the debtor may be subject to
serious violence in retaliation.71 Debts can also be paid off with sex, and it
holding their trays in front of them, line up again in tight formation against the far dorm wall
with their backs turned towards the deputies. The rule is that no one is allowed to eat a bite
until everyone has received his tray and the deputies and trusties have left the dorm and the
door has been locked. According to my interview subject, the incident started when one of
the people who had already received his tray took a bite of food before the distribution was
complete. When that happened:
A certain deputy walked up to him, he snatched his tray and asked the inmate if it was
good. The inmate answered his question, yes it was. The deputy got so mad, he hit
the dude with a flat hand in the chest, knocking him back up against the wall. I was
up by the TV and I heard that. Then, the inmate said, “You don’t have a right to
touch me like that.” And the dude swung on him, connected, dropped him. Dude
swung back because he was legitimately right for it, and eight deputies beat this dude
and I think snapped his arm. They beat him with flashlights, they beat him with fists,
they beat him with—And then they pepper sprayed him outside in the hallway. They
had that dude crying for his mother, and he was 40 years old.
Int. 75, at A5. Later in the interview, my subject referred to this incident to explain why he
felt safe in K6G from “the [other] inmates,” but was afraid of the deputies. Id. at B12.
71
As one interview subject explained, in the Jail:
[There are] these people that do two-for-one, and you go to them and you get, like,
one cookie, you’ve got to pay two back. And sometimes I get like $60, $75 in twofor-one, and by the time the store comes I have to shovel out all my store, because
you can only spend $130 bucks. So, if I go to the store and spend $130 bucks, and
$95 of it or $100 bucks of it is me getting two-for-one, then I’ve got like $30 bucks in
there for myself. And I run out of that.
Int. 136, at C18.
What happens if people don’t pay their debts?
Oh, you can get in trouble. Some of them are very violent to people. Some of them
want to whup your butt and they threaten you. I mean, the people that are two-for-one
are people who are like drug dealers, actually, and they’re not very nice people. It’s
not very good to deal with them, actually. And one of them that I deal with is a very
nice guy, I like to pay him, because he gives me two-for-one. And I got myself in a
pattern to where it’s like a cycle for me. I have to pay him back, so then I have to go
back to him again for more, because I ran out. So it’s like a cycle.

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is likely that such exchanges occur in K6G; certainly, there is frequent
prostitution in the unit for store items as a matter of upfront exchange.72
K6G is thus hardly paradise. There are, however, some notable
aspects of life in the unit that make K6G a more appealing prospect than
GP. Most obviously, people in K6G feel far safer from physical and sexual
violence than they would in GP. This difference was a constant and
unmistakable theme in my interviews.73 I asked subjects several questions
that probed the issue of relative safety, and taken together, the answers
overwhelmingly indicated the heightened security K6G residents feel in the
unit. For example, my respondents almost unanimously reported feeling
safe in K6G, and almost all testified to feeling safer—from physical
assault,74 sexual harassment,75 and sexual assault76—than they would in
GP.77 One question asked: How safe do you feel in K6G78: very safe, safe,
unsafe, or very unsafe?79 Of the thirty-one interviewees to answer this
question, only two reported feeling anything less than safe.80 A further set
Id. A number of my interview subjects described one extremely violent incident that had
occurred in the K6G dorms, which arose when a debtor could not pay. I was unable to
confirm this account, nor am I able to say how often this happens in K6G.
72
See supra note 56.
73
During my research, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a random sample
of approximately 10% of K6G’s residents. See supra note 26. For a detailed description of
the research protocol, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 92–99 (Methodological Appendix); id.
at 100–10 (reproducing the questionnaire used in my interviews).
74
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 107 q.121.
75
Id. at 107 q.122.
76
See id. at 105 q.91.
77
The exceptions here were two interviewees with extremely muscular physiques—one a
former boxer—who both said they felt able to protect themselves and therefore felt safe in
any environment. However, even the former boxer, a trans woman, said elsewhere in the
interview that if she were attacked by a group of men bent on rape, she would “fight and
kick and get a couple of them before they [forced her to submit].” Int. 53, at B13.
78
Although the unit is now officially referred to as K6G, at the time of my interviews,
most of my respondents—many of them with a long history of detention in the unit—still
referred to it by its previous referent, K11. My interview questions therefore used the term
“K11” instead of “K6G.” To avoid confusion, in quoting from my interviews, I have
changed all references to K11 to reflect the current designation of K6G.
79
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 107 q.126.
80
It bears noting, moreover, that both of the people in that minority of two reported
feeling a mix of “safe and unsafe” and offered explanations for their mixed responses not
inconsistent with an overall sense of security as compared with GP. As to the first, he made
clear that he “feel[s] safe amongst the inmates,” but that he regarded the deputies who came
into the dorms as posing a real threat—a feeling he explicitly connected to an incident that
had occurred in the K6G dorm the previous evening, in which several officers reportedly
used excessive force against a K6G resident. His account of this incident, reproduced
verbatim above, see supra note 70, was corroborated by others during informal

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of questions asked interviewees to consider three different locations—K6G,
GP, and “out in the community”—and to rank the three in terms of the
interviewees’ feelings of relative safety from physical assault, sexual
harassment, and being harmed for “being yourself.”81 Here too, the results
confirm the heightened security K6G residents feel in the unit as compared
with GP. In the majority of cases, interviewees felt safest out in the
community, followed by K6G, and then finally GP. Remarkably, especially
among the trans women, K6G was frequently named as the place they felt
safest, followed by out in the community. But apart from two or three
respondents whose physical size and long experience in prison made them
confident they could handle themselves equally well in any environment,82
interviewees all named GP as the context in which they felt least safe from
physical assault.
Also noteworthy is the range of answers given to the question: If you
had five words to describe life in K6G, what would they be?83 As one
would expect from a description of life in jail, several of the listed words
carried a negative connotation. These included: “noisy” or “loud” (3
respondents),84 “nasty” (2), “hateful” (2), “sour” (1), and “depressing” or
“sad” (7). But of the negative words offered, only two (“anxietyproducing” (1) and “stressful” (1)) suggested anything of the tension, fear,
and threat of violence one would expect to hear about from people
describing life behind bars.85 And taking the responses to this question as a
whole, even more remarkable is the number of words that suggested a
positive experience of incarceration in K6G, including “fun” or “wow” (8),
“exciting” (1), “easy,” “easier,” or “easy-going” (4), “relax” or “relaxing”

conversations and by one fellow unit resident in a sworn declaration. See Int. 75, at A5;
supra text accompanying notes 69 & 70. As for the second, this person told a more
particularized story, one that suggests an even more complicated set of gender dynamics in
K6G than I was able to unearth in my time in the Jail. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 45
n.223 (describing the substance of this response). But the source of the discomfort, however
troubling, did not reflect the fear of sexual or physical violence against which the unit was
intended to protect.
81
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 106–07 qq.119–124.
82
See supra note 77.
83
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 102 q.35. I then followed up by asking for an
explanation of each descriptor offered. These questions, which proved very effective in
eliciting a picture of life in K6G, were Joe Doherty’s idea.
84
The numbers in parentheses refer to the number of respondents who offered each term.
85
It bears noting that the respondent who offered “anxiety-producing,” along with
several other words with negative connotations (“miserable,” “hateful,” and “depressing”),
stipulated that he would use the same words to describe “being in jail, period.” Int. 131, at
F11.

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(2), “nice” or “good” (3), “peaceful” or “calm” (3), “learning experience”
(3), and “serene” (1).
That a sizable portion of K6G residents have positive associations with
life in the unit may seem hard to credit. Yet the clear implication of these
responses—that many people find life in K6G tolerable and even to some
extent enjoyable—is entirely consistent with my interviews as a whole, as
well as with many casual conversations I had with residents and my
observations of life in the dorms. These responses, moreover, offer
powerful evidence that this program has succeeded in creating a relatively
safe carceral space inside the L.A. County Jail.86
This achievement is especially remarkable given the makeup of the
unit. As noted, K6G is designed to house gay men and trans women, two
groups well known to face an elevated risk of sexual victimization in
custody. As Human Rights Watch observed in its 2001 report on male rape
in American prisons, “gay inmates are much more likely than other inmates
to be victimized in prison.”87 A 2007 study in the California prison system
confirmed this dynamic, finding that “67 percent of inmates who identified
as LGBTQ reported having been sexually assaulted by another inmate
during their incarceration, a rate that was 15 times higher than for the
inmate population overall.”88 This same team of researchers also found that

86

K6G is by no means the only segregation unit in the Jail. Indeed, all Jail housing may
be understood as, in a sense, segregated; even the GP units are divided according to security
level. And the Jail has many other “special handles”—i.e., groups of detainees requiring
separate housing. These include detainees requiring medical attention, housed in the
infirmary wing; detainees with serious mental health needs, housed in Twin Towers; gang
dropouts, housed in the “green light” unit; as well as detainees who are developmentally
disabled, hearing impaired, in custody on sex offense charges, and former members of law
enforcement and their families, all of whom are housed separately from GP and from one
another. Other segregationist measures ensure that individuals known to have mutual
enmities—including, but not limited to, people in warring gangs or factions—are kept apart.
Yet judging from what I heard and observed during my time in the Jail, no other housing unit
is so widely thought to be as safe or desirable as K6G. The possible exception may be the
unit for military veterans. This research did not include a study of that unit, but the
experience of other jurisdictions suggests that units for veterans are also relatively humane.
See, e.g., Lizette Alvarez, In Florida, Using Military Discipline to Help Veterans in Prison,
N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 12, 2011, at A14. And, as will be seen, veterans’ units share many of
K6G’s positive features, making them more likely to replicate its positive overall character.
See infra Part III.C.3.
87
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, NO ESCAPE: MALE RAPE IN U.S. PRISONS 52 (2001), available
at http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/prison/report.html. The report goes on to note
that “many gay inmates—even those who are openly gay outside of prison—carefully hide
their sexual identities while incarcerated . . . because inmates who are perceived as gay by
other inmates face a very high risk of sexual abuse.” Id. at 57.
88
JUST DET. INT’L, LGTBQ DETAINEES CHIEF TARGETS FOR SEXUAL ABUSE IN
DETENTION 1 (2009) (citing VALERIE JENNESS ET AL., VIOLENCE IN CALIFORNIA

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“59% of [California’s] transgender population reported sexual victimization
as compared to 4% of the general prison population.”89
The acute vulnerability of gay men and trans women to sexual
victimization in GP came through clearly in my interviews. After asking
whether the subject had ever been forced to do sexual things against their
will in K6G90—a question unanimously answered in the negative—I asked:
Have you ever [over your whole incarceration history] had to do sexual
things against your will with other inmates?91 In response to this latter
question, one person reported having been raped by a cellmate,92 another
reported being twice forced into oral sex,93 and a third offered an answer
suggesting that he had faced pressure to engage in unwanted sexual
conduct.94 Others shared similar stories at other points during their
interviews. One person told of being attacked in state prison when his
cellmate “found out that [he] was gay.” His assailant reportedly made clear
to him that “the only point you [as a gay inmate] would be here in my cell is
to have sex with me . . . . [T]he only point of . . . you being here is to attend
to my sexual needs.”95 Another recounted a harrowing tale of being “the
only homosexual” in a four-man GP cell and being told by the others that

CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES: AN EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT (2007)),
available at http://justdetention.org/en/factsheets/JD_Fact_Sheet_LGBTQ_vD.pdf. Recent
Bureau of Justice Statistics findings suggest similarly disproportionate rates of assault for
LGBTQ detainees in juvenile facilities, with “[y]outh with a sexual orientation other than
heterosexual” reporting sexual victimization at a rate almost ten times higher (12.5%) than
that reported by heterosexual youth (1.3%). BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S. DEP’T OF
JUSTICE, SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION IN JUVENILE FACILITIES REPORTED BY YOUTH, 2008–09, at 1
(2010).
89
VALERIE JENNESS, THE VICTIMIZATION OF TRANSGENDER INMATES, at slide 14 (2006),
available at http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=
0CDUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fucicorrections.seweb.uci.edu%2Ffiles%2FVictimizati
on%2520of%2520Transgender%2520Inmates.ppt&ei=LaoT7ziBIqXgwfL2_y7CA&usg=AF
QjCNFUo6y2yqamhrPg7heq6hev8Yi2IQ.
90
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 105 q.91.
91
Id. at 105 q.94.
92
Int. 102, at E10.
93
Int. 140, at C8.
94
See Int. 101, at A23 (“Not force, they don’t force you at all. They just give you the
option that you can choose for your own. So, you force yourself, actually.”).
95
Int. 68, at G8–9. As this subject explained:
In the general population, whether you’re dressed as a girl or not . . . it would be
obvious to anybody if you are gay or not. And if they sense that you’re a homosexual
. . . of course, you’re going to become a target to be picked on, . . . you know,
sexually.
Id. at G12.

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he “was going to have sex with all three of them that night.”96 When this
interviewee resisted, he was told: “There is nothing you can do. You can
either give it up or we’ll take it.”97 He was saved from this fate when he got
the attention of a sympathetic deputy during the evening meal service. He
told this officer of his sexual orientation and was immediately transferred
out of the unit.98
Still further evidence of the relative security K6G offers is found in a
number of comments made by my interviewees over the course of the
interviews. One respondent, in explaining why he preferred K6G to GP,
said “I didn’t have to hide who I was. I could be myself and not have to
worry about . . . being in any kind of danger that was only because of my
sexuality.”99 Another, explaining his preference for K6G, said simply
“[b]ecause they’ll kill me in GP.”100 Another attested that in K6G, he can
“get in [his] bed and relax without having someone come and sexually
harass[] [him]. [In GP, he] couldn’t relax because you have the guys that
want to run in the showers and want to have sexual things done to them.” 101
Another said that “a lot of these guys in [GP] would expect it from us
because of the fact that oh well, he likes guys, so might as well fuck
him.”102
Yet K6G’s appeal, and in particular its promise of relative safety,
reaches well beyond its designated population, so that every day, men who
are not gay pretend to be so in order to gain access to the unit.103 Why
96

Int. 111, at C20.
Id.
98
This story indicates the importance of having an established policy for dealing with
people in custody who are at risk of sexual assault. Absent such a policy, even well-meaning
officers might be unsure how to respond to such a plea. They may thus simply take the path
of least resistance and send the person back to their cell. (Of course, were this the response,
the prisoner would have a strong case for failure to protect under the Eighth Amendment,
since the prison official would have had actual knowledge that the prisoner faced a
substantial risk of serious harm. See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 837 (1994).)
99
Int. 48, at F2.
100
Int. 92, at B1. This respondent continued: “[In K6G], I won’t have to worry about,
you know, when I’m taking a shower, to watch my back. In the general population . . . [y]ou
have to watch your back all the time.” Int. 92, at B8.
101
Int. 102, at D5.
102
Int. 71, at C5; see also Int. 41, at F10 (explaining that in GP, “you can’t tell them no
. . . you’re going to have to give up something if they come at you. You’re going to have to
do something.”).
103
To this, some may object that sexuality is more dynamic and complex than the binary
gay/not gay would allow, and that even men who may not “seem” gay in the conventional
sense of the term may experience same-sex attraction and thus not identify as “straight.”
This is no doubt the case. But my assertion in the text that some men lie to get access to
K6G is not based on a failure to credit either the complexity of sexual identity or the range of
97

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would anyone lie about being gay in the Jail? Over the course of my
research, I sat in on numerous classification interviews and so had several
opportunities to see this phenomenon in action.104 As best I could judge,
those seeking access to K6G under false pretenses do so for two main
reasons, which are not mutually exclusive. First, those with a long history
of institutionalization, who may have become accustomed to having sex
with men while incarcerated, know that in K6G, they will find many willing
sexual partners. Second—and more disturbing for what it says about the
Jail’s GP—was the desire for safe housing. In some cases, after their
efforts to pass as gay had been exposed as fraudulent, interviewees proved
to have specific reasons to fear placement elsewhere in the Jail. For
example, one individual turned out to be a witness in a murder trial that was
in process at the time. He himself had been arrested for an unrelated
offense and now found himself detained in the same facility that was also
holding the two men against whom he was testifying—men he had reason
to fear could get at him if he were housed anywhere besides K6G.105 In
another case, the interviewee had served time in a Texas prison, where he
had been a member of the Texas Aryan Nation—a status confirmed by his
tattoos. He explained that there is “gang warfare in prisons across the
country” and that “California doesn’t like Texas.” He was afraid that if
anyone (meaning any prisoner) in California saw his Texas tattoos, he
would be stabbed.106
But by far the most common reason for the pursuit of safety through
“reverse-passing” in K6G was the desire for a respite from the gang politics

ways people might understand and relate to their own sexuality. It is based on the frank
admissions by many men whose classification interviews I observed that their claims of
being gay, made in their initial sorting interview, had in fact been outright fabrications.
Although one’s stated self-understanding can certainly be complicated by fear of the
implications of connecting with those parts of oneself that are in conflict with prevailing
social norms, it would be a mistake to allow theoretical sophistication to blind us to the
possibility that, in many cases, the most accurate explanation is also the most obvious.
Sometimes, in other words, a lie is just a lie. And my experience in K6G leaves me
confident that the phenomenon of men seeking access to K6G by pretending to be gay is a
frequent occurrence. For more extended discussion of this phenomenon and how it plays out
during the second stage of the classification process, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 30–43.
104
In all, I observed approximately fifty classification interviews and took notes on
approximately thirty-four. For a more complete description of this component of my
research protocol, see id. at 92–99 (Methodological Appendix).
105
See Field Notes, July 4, 2007. When asked why he had not simply requested
protective custody in the K10 unit instead of pretending to be gay to get into K6G, he
explained that the two defendants in the trial had long arms and that, as he put it, “even in
K10, people always seem to run into those guys.” Id.
106
Or, as he put it, he’s “going to get stuck.” Field Notes, July 9, 2007. For a more
detailed discussion of this case, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 40–42.

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and consequent pressure and danger that define daily life in the Jail’s GP.107
K6G, well known to be the safest place in the Jail, is an attractive prospect
for repeat players who just want to do their stints in peace. This
explanation—the desire to escape the stress and danger of life in GP—may
at first seem hard to fathom. For one thing, life in the K6G dorms is by no
means free of danger.108 As already noted, extortion and usury continue
apace in K6G as elsewhere in the Jail, and the fact that at any given time at
least some K6Gs are fighting serious charges means there is an ever-present
possibility of violence. Moreover, violence by deputies against detainees is
an ongoing threat in K6G just as in GP,109 and the presence in the dorms of
people who are mentally ill contributes to a background sense of volatility.
As one of my respondents put it, “Regardless of where you’re at, anything
can happen to where it causes something to click in someone’s head. You
never know what they are capable of doing and you always have to keep
yourself aware.”110 There are, moreover, many more one-on-one physical

107
For more on the pressures that gang politics create in the Jail’s GP units, see infra
Part II.C.
108
One effect of segregating K6G’s population is that, when they are outside the dorms,
unit residents—who wear color-coded uniforms to distinguish them from the GPs—
experience considerable verbal harassment, both from GP inmates they happen to pass in the
hallways and from some deputies, who apparently feel no compunction in using homophobic
epithets in their interactions with K6Gs. See, e.g., Int. 48, at F3 (“Sometimes [the deputies]
call us a name, call us faggots and stuff like that . . . . It’s the worst kind of disrespect I’ve
lived with . . . in this kind of environment.”); Int. 71, at A4 (“[In K6G, t]he only thing you
need to worry about is discrimination from some of the officers.”). Indeed, a number of my
subjects noted that at least some custody officers treat K6Gs more harshly and less
respectfully than they treat GPs. As one interviewee explained, “GPs get more respect, I
believe, because they feel that . . . because we’re gay or transgender, that we don’t pose too
much of a threat, so they can talk to us any way that they want.” Int. 103, at D3–4; see also
Int. 140 at B1 (“They treat us more bullyish. The things they do on K6G, they don’t do on
the general population. . . . Like just fuck with us in general. Just talking crazy to us. They
don’t try that on the general population because general population tends to go off on them a
little bit.”). Some officers even bring the inclination to verbally harass the K6Gs right into
the dorms. See Int. 111, at C5 (“One guard called us faggots on the loudspeaker.”). As I
discuss at some length elsewhere, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 55–60, this behavior on the
part of sworn officers in the Jail is extremely troubling, and points to the strong need for
interventions by the Jail’s command staff, as well as more effective training for officers in
how to deal respectfully with the people K6G serves. But because my focus in this Article is
on what, if anything, can be learned about humane incarceration from the inmate culture of
K6G versus that of GP, for present purposes I leave to one side the troubling and
inappropriate behavior of deputies vis-à-vis K6G residents.
109
See supra note 4; supra text accompanying note 69.
110
Int 41, at F11. This interview subject explicitly traced the causes of this insecurity to
those dorm residents with mental illness. As he (impoliticly) put it, “[w]e always get the
looney tunes in K6G, . . . the ones that have slight mental problems.” Id.

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altercations in K6G than in GP.111 Yet despite the constant potential for
violence, the occasional extremely violent episode, and the greater
likelihood of spontaneous fighting between two or more individuals, many
of my respondents described life in K6G as “easy,” “relaxing,” “peaceful,”
and even “serene.”112 And as a regular matter, people newly admitted to the
Jail who do not meet K6G’s admissions standards try to lie their way into
the unit.
How can this be? In part, the answer lies in the most immediate and
obvious difference between K6G and the Jail’s GP units: the absence in
K6G of what is known in the Jail as “gang politics.” As will be seen,
making sense of this difference and its implications for the people in
custody in the Jail helps to expose some of the most destructive and
troubling aspects of the American carceral enterprise—and what it may take
to overcome them.
C. (GANG) LIFE IN GP
The gang culture in the L.A. County Jail directly mirrors that found in
the California prisons. Indeed, gang structures and imperatives flow
directly from the state prison system into the Jail itself, and vice versa. This
connection may seem puzzling. As a formal matter, these are two separate
systems; the L.A. County Jail is a municipal institution wholly independent
of the state prison system. Culturally speaking, though, the two systems
function as a unit. The California prison system is one of the biggest state
systems in the country, and fully one-third of its prisoners come through the
L.A. County Jail.113 Every night, busloads of sentenced prisoners are
transferred from the Jail to the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation (CDCR) reception centers.114 Moreover, high recidivism
rates mean that many people in the Jail on any given day have done time in
state prison.115 There are certainly some institution-specific features of the

111
See Int. 47, at D6 (explaining that people in K6G get into fist fights “all the time”).
For more on this phenomenon, see infra Part II.E.
112
See supra text accompanying note 85.
113
CAL. DEP’T OF CORR. & REHAB., CORRECTIONS: YEAR AT A GLANCE 18 (Fall 2011)
(reporting Institutional Population by County of Commitment; showing that 33.1% of the
CDCR population in the previous year came from L.A. County).
114
These transfers are such a common part of life in the Jail that there is even a slang
term for the experience: to be transferred to state prison is to “catch the chain.” For
example, if you ask where someone is, you might hear, as I was once told about one of my
interview subjects, that he “caught the chain” the previous night.
115
Indeed, of the three dorms assigned to the K6G unit during the summer of 2007, one
predominantly housed detainees who had previously spent extended time in prison. For
further discussion of this dorm, see infra, Part III.A.

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Jail’s gang life. But to a great extent, the gang culture that reigns in many
California prisons116—with its formal authority structure, clearly delineated
racial boundaries, rigidly enforced behavioral code, and well-established
rules for gang interaction—also governs in Men’s Central Jail and in the
L.A. County system more generally.
At the very top of this structure are seven prison gangs officially
recognized by the CDCR and designated as top-tier “security threat groups”
or “STG-I.”117 These include the Mexican Mafia, Black Guerilla Family,
Aryan Brotherhood, and Nazi Low Riders.118 As the names suggest, these
gangs are divided along racial lines. Membership is highly restricted;
joining is in many cases a matter of “blood in, blood out,” i.e., “assaulting
or killing an enemy of the gang to join and a promise of lifetime
membership, which if violated is punishable by death.”119 But the power of
these groups in the prison extends far beyond their official membership.
Gang leaders call the shots for virtually all prisoners in the system, with
non-members expected to show fealty to the gangs associated with their
race—Whites must obey the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood and the
Nazi Low Riders;120 Blacks, the Black Guerilla Family; etc. These
officially recognized prison gangs are not to be confused with street gangs.
Although large numbers of California prisoners are members of street
gangs, these affiliations are put to one side when a person enters the prison,
where racial allegiances trump.
Below this prison gang elite are four broad racial groupings. In each
of these four groups, the leadership takes its cues from the prison gang shot
callers of their race.121 It is this second-tier level that coordinates and

116
This is especially so in the prisons in the southern and central parts of the state, where
the “Sureños” or “Southsiders” dominate. See infra note 132.
117
CAL. DEP’T OF CORR. & REHAB., CORRECTIONS, SECURITY THREAT GROUP
PREVENTION, IDENTIFICATION AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGY 12 (2012).
118
The other gangs classified as “STG-I” are Northern Structure, Nuestra Familia, and
Texas Syndicate. Id. at 13. The CDCR also classifies several groups as STG II and notes
that they “may be subservient to an STG-I.” Id. Groups in this second category include
Crips, Norteños, Bloods, Sureños, and “White Supremacist[s].” Id.
119
David Skarbek, Governance and Prison Gangs, 105 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 702, 704
(2011). The main prison gangs are involved in much illegal activity, most notably the
business of selling illegal drugs both in prison and on the streets. See, e.g., id. at 702–14
(offering a detailed and fascinating account of the tax-collecting powers of the Mexican
Mafia as regards “Hispanic” and Sureño street gangs, which pay to the Mexican Mafia a
portion of the profits they earn selling drugs in the street).
120
Some coordination appears to exist among the prison gangs of the same race,
although I am unable to describe this process in any detail.
121
Shot callers of these four racial groupings may or may not be made members of
prison gangs.

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enforces the behavioral rules that govern daily life for prisoners in custody.
The key point is this: Every single person in GP, “made” gang member or
not,122 is expected to affiliate with one of these four racial groupings123 and
to obey the rules they set down.
In L.A. County’s iteration of this system, there are four such groupings
into which prisoners are divided124: Blacks; Whites; “Sureños” or
“Southsiders,” who are native-born Latinos from south of Fresno;125 and
“Paisas,”126 who are foreign-born Latinos.127 As these divisions suggest, the
122

Gang membership being so tightly restricted, the majority of prisoners in the
California prison system fall into the former category.
123
This arrangement creates the potential for terminological confusion. On the one hand,
the term “gang” is generally taken to refer to the more exclusive, officially acknowledged
prison gangs. On the other hand, reference to “gang politics,” “gang membership,” and
“gangbangers” (i.e., enthusiastic participants in gang politics) can also refer to the larger
racial groupings. Those familiar with this system sometimes refer to the officially
recognized groups as “prison gangs,” and the latter, larger racial groupings as simply
“gangs” or “races.” I adopt this usage here.
124
To say “are divided” rather than “divide themselves” may strike some as a failure to
understand the extent to which the prisoners themselves design, operate, and enforce this
system. But two factors of the system’s operation make it more appropriate to describe the
gang structure as one in which prisoners are assigned their affiliation rather than choosing it
for themselves. First, even those who seemingly choose their own affiliation really have
little choice in the matter, since even those who would prefer to have no part of this structure
are compelled, often under threat of physical reprisal, to participate. Second, in many ways,
prison officials actively support and even strengthen gang control over the prison culture,
even to the point of assigning individuals to one of the four groups. On this point, Philip
Goodman’s ethnographic work in the California prison system’s reception centers is
essential reading. See Philip Goodman, “It’s Just Black, White, or Hispanic”: An
Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California’s Segregated Prison Reception
Centers, 42 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 735 (2008). As Goodman shows, the assignment of race is
often a “negotiated settlement” reached by officers and inmates collaborating together to
arrive at a given racial characterization. Id. at 737. At least one of my interview subjects
suggested that at times, officers make the decision themselves about the “race” to which a
given prisoner will be assigned. This subject, an older American-born Latino, described how
California state prison officials assigned him to the Paisas. Int. 60, at C7–8. This was a wise
choice, since this decision allowed him to avoid having to run with the Southsiders, a more
disciplined and demanding operation with strenuous rules with which he might have had a
hard time complying.
125
For an explanation of what becomes of American-born Latinos from north of Fresno
or from Fresno itself when they wind up in custody in Southern Califorina, see infra note
131.
126
“Paisa” or “paisano” literally means “fellow countrymen.” See Jennifer Waite,
Prison Slang 104: Chicano Slang, YAHOO! VOICES (Aug. 12, 2009), http://voices.yahoo.com
/prison-slang-104-chicano-slang-3985278.html?cat=17 (explaining that, in prison, “paisa” is
a “slang term for Mexican immigrants who have not yet assimilated,” and that it “[c]an be
used derogatarily [sic], but is not necessarily an insult”).
127
Goodman’s work suggests that in the California prisons, the four designated groups
are Blacks, Whites, Southsiders, and “Other[s].” See Goodman, supra note 124, at 736. In

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organizing principle is primarily racial, although as with racial categories in
general, the meaning of “race” in this system is particular to the cultural
context. For example, in this world, Southsiders and Paisas are referred to
as two different “races,” although each group is comprised of Latinos. It is,
moreover, not unusual to find individuals who “run with” a group defined
by a different race. For example, there are whites who identify as Crips or
Bloods on the streets and thus affiliate with the Blacks in custody (and are
officially designated as such).128 And anyone who does not identify (or is
not identified by others) as white, black, or Latino—say, a person who is
Asian, Native American, or Middle Eastern—is known as “other” and is
automatically assigned to the Blacks.129
In this system, the terms “race” and “gang” are synonymous, and I use
them here as such.130 Both refer to the particular “racial” grouping to which
prisoners are assigned (i.e., Blacks, Whites, Southsiders, or Paisas).131 And
L.A. County, anyone who does not fit one of these four designated categories (i.e., who
qualifies as an “Other”) is expected to “run with” the Blacks, although they may have to pay
a tax to do so.
128
Id. at 754–55. Goodman found these cross-racial moves to be “most common among
inmates who identified themselves as ‘White.’” Id. at 756. During his time studying the
classification process at several California prisons, Goodman reports that:
[He] never witnessed an inmate declare his “race” to be “Black” and also claim his
membership in a “White” prison gang or other white affiliation. . . . Likewise, those
inmates who said they were “Hispanic” never declared themselves to be a member of
gangs considered to be “White” gangs or “Black” gangs.
Id. From my own experience, however, I know that it is not impossible for people of a race
other than white to choose to affiliate with the Whites. During my time in the Jail, I got to
know one detainee who fit this description exactly. Although he was born and raised in a
Latino family and had a common Latino surname, this individual told me he grew up in an
all-white neighborhood and had learned early on to hate all non-whites. He thus fit in well
with the white supremacist group with which he affiliated while in custody. It was clear,
moreover, that his racial animus toward non-whites ran deep. When I met him, he was
fighting an assault charge with a hate-crime enhancement, a charge on which he was
eventually convicted.
129
See supra note 127.
130
See supra note 123.
131
A word about intraracial violence is in order here. For the most part, there is
surprisingly little intraracial tension in the California prison system. This contrasts
dramatically with life in the streets, where enmity between gangs often pits people of the
same race against each other, frequently with lethal consequences. For example, the virulent
hostility between the Crips and the Bloods, two predominantly African-American gangs, is
well-known. In some neighborhoods, even wearing an item of clothing of the color
associated with the rival gang—i.e., wearing red in Crip territory or blue in Blood territory—
can be enough to spark a shooting. Yet in custody, whether in the Jail or in prison, Crips and
Bloods put aside their mutual enmities and affiliate with (and fight on behalf of) the same
group. The same is true of rival Sureño street gangs. In other words, street-gang enmities,
although they do not disappear, are generally put on hold while gang members are in

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most crucially, it is a person’s affiliation with one of these four groupings
that defines his “race” for purposes of the “race politics” that define all
aspects of life in the Jail’s GP. In this culture, strict rules govern individual
behavior and interaction.132 At their most basic, these rules arise from two
foundational principles: racial segregation133 and mutual “respect.” The
custody. As a consequence, it is not uncommon to have people fighting on the same side in
custody, despite the fact that they might readily kill one another when free. This subtle point
of race politics in the California prisons appears to have eluded Justice Stevens in his
opinion in Johnson v. California, 543 U.S. 499 (2005). In that opinion, Justice Stevens
raised the well-known hostility between Crips and Bloods as evidence that the California
prison system’s practice of housing people of the same race together could backfire given the
propensity of street gangs for intraracial violence. Id. at 523. In fact, however, the racial
politics in the California prisons means that Crips and Bloods (or, for that matter, two people
of warring sects of the same gang) can in many cases be housed together in a single cell
without fear of gang violence, notwithstanding the real possibility of violence between those
same individuals in the street.
There is, however, one notable exception to the proscription on intraracial violence in
custody: the internal divisions among Latinos in the California prisons into three separate
groups to which individuals are assigned on the basis of geographic origin. Those who hail
from north of Fresno are known as “Norteños” or “Northsiders”; those who hail from south
of Fresno, known as “Sureños” or “Southsiders”; and those who come from the Fresno area
are known as Fresno Bulldogs. Latinos from the same geographic region form a tight and
powerful band. But the hostility between these groups is as extreme as any between rival
gangs, and perhaps even more violent than that between racial groups. (However, even here
there can be exceptions. I am told that in Soledad prison in 2005, Norteños and Sureños
were able to walk the yard together without problems. I thank Juan Haines for this
information.) The California prison system, recognizing this hostility, tries to house
members of these groups—especially Norteños and Southsiders—at different prisons, since
an inmate housed in a prison with a majority of the other grouping (say, a Southsider in a
northern California prison) will usually have to be placed in protective custody for the
duration of his stay. I cannot say for certain why the rules of California prison culture are
this way, although it has been suggested to me that it has something to do with the
willingness of Norteños to affiliate with Blacks, against whom the Southsiders have a
virulent hostility.
132
When I presented this paper at San Quentin, many workshop participants—most of
whom had experienced life in a range of California prisons—insisted that it is the
Southsiders who most vociferously enforce these rules. This was one explanation given for
why the GP at San Quentin, a northern California prison with virtually no Southsiders on the
yard, was relatively safe compared with southern California prisons. Others I have spoken
with who have done time in California prisons emphasize that the racial divisions most
strenuously enforced are those between Hispanics and Whites on the one hand, and Blacks
and “Others” on the other. See, e.g., Telephone Interview with Cameron Saul, Case
Manager, Tarzana Treatment Ctr. (Oct. 27, 2011). Although this feature of the gang code is
less important for purposes of the present discussion, a full understanding of this toxic and
troubling set of cultural norms, and of the role of race and racism in the prison culture more
generally, would require further investigation.
133
Again, it bears emphasizing that the “racial” segregation so strenuously enforced in
this particular social system is governed by a cultural construction of the category of race
that is unique to this context.

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corollaries of these two principles are the two cardinal sins: racial mixing
and interracial disrespect. Behavior is strictly controlled and rigidly policed
by the gangs themselves to guard against transgressions, and the
commission of any offense may bring swift and violent reprisal, often from
the wrongdoer’s own gang.134
The rules that define life in the Jail’s GP reflect this moral universe.
First, detailed precepts designed to prevent racial mixing govern everyday
conduct.135 Between individuals of different “races,” there can be no
touching, no sharing of food or utensils, no overt displays of mutual regard.
People of different races can talk to one another and, depending on the
dorm, may even be able to play cards or chess with one another. But even
in that case, they would not be able to sit on the same bunk to do so: one
person would have to play standing up next to the bunk on which the game
board or cards are placed.
Bunks, too, are designated by race to ensure that the top and bottom of
each bunk are occupied by two people of the same race.136 Members of
different races cannot use the same showers, phones, or toilets;137 for this

134
I am well aware that the cultural system I am describing here is deeply offensive and
troubling. The fact of the description should in no way be taken as evidence of endorsement.
To understand K6G and the difference it represents, it is necessary that the larger gang
culture be understood, which is why I am describing it in such detail here.
135
But see supra note 132 and infra note 137 (suggesting that the strongest hostilities
may be between Whites and Hispanics on the one hand, and Blacks and “Others” on the
other).
136
This particular practice may have to change in the near future, at least in the
California prison system. After the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Johnson,
543 U.S. 499, the state agreed to a policy of racial integration in all its facilities. This policy
commits the state to racially integrate as much as possible both its cells and its dorms. The
experience of such integration in Texas suggests that the racial integration of cells may
actually reduce violence between cellmates. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 84 n.382
(discussing findings reported in CHAD R. TRULSON & JAMES W. MARQUART, FIRST
AVAILABLE CELL: DESEGREGATION OF THE TEXAS PRISON SYSTEM, 182–83 (2009), and Chad
Trulson & James W. Marquart, The Caged Melting Pot: Toward an Understanding of the
Consequences of Desegregation in Prisons, 36 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 743 (2002)). As to the
dorms, however, the public nature of the living quarters, along with intense pressure from
the various gangs that currently enforce a strict segregationist code, may mean that even
those prisoners who do not object to sharing a bunk bed with someone of another race will
feel compelled to perform disgust, anger, and recalcitrance at the integration. This
difference may prove to complicate California’s integrationist efforts in its prison dorms—
efforts that in any case appear as of this writing to have been put on hold while the state
grapples with its obligations under Brown v. Plata, 131 S. Ct. 1910 (2011).
137
There was occasional suggestion in some of my conversations that these rules are
most strongly enforced against Blacks, so that while Whites, Southsiders, and Paisas may
share food, phones, toilets, etc., with one another, members of these three groups would
under no circumstances do so with Blacks or the “Others” (i.e., those of a race other than

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reason, in the dorms, each shower, phone, and toilet has been designated as
“belonging” to one race or another.138 Compliance with these rules is
enforced by the gang leadership in the dorms. In each dorm, each of the
four “races” has a “rep,” whose responsibility it is to make sure that his
“soldiers” comply with these rules. New arrivals are taken aside and
informed of their obligations, and violations are met with intra-gang
reprisals ranging from strong rebukes to physical violence.
A second set of rules, designed to guard against any signs of mutual
disrespect, provides for a scrupulous equity in the distribution of benefits.139
What benefits could possibly be had in a jail dormitory? Apart from the
much-sought-after commissary items, which are available to anyone who
can afford them or who cuts a deal with someone who can,140 there are two
main benefits: being the first to get your meal at chow time and having a
say in the channel to which the dorm’s communal television is set.
Consistent with the demands of racial equity and the imperative not to be
disrespected, the gangs141 in the Jail have worked out a system. As to both
white, Latino, or black) who are expected to affiliate with the Blacks. See Telephone
Interview with Cameron Saul, Case Manager, Tarzana Treatment Ctr. (Oct. 27, 2011).
138
Goodman describes an analogous phenomenon of racial segregation in the California
prisons he studied. While on a tour of one of the facilities, he noticed “three small metal
boxes, none bigger than a small residential mailbox. Below each box was carefully printed:
‘Black Barber,’ ‘White Barber,’ and ‘Hispanic Barber.’” Goodman, supra note 124, at 746.
Goodman reports being informed by the lieutenant leading his tour that:
[I]nmates refuse to use hair clippers that have been used by someone of another
“race.” According to this lieutenant, when an inmate wants a haircut, he puts a
request in the appropriate box and will then get his hair cut by an inmate barber of
“his own” “race” and using tools that have not been used on someone of a different
“race.”
Id. at 746.
139
I myself witnessed these rules in action in the GP dorm that served as a (fortuitous)
control during my time in the Jail. The dorms in Men’s Central are arranged in groups of
four, with a single officer’s booth affording visual access to, and some interaction with,
residents of all four dorms. In the summer of 2007, one such grouping included the three
K6G dorms and one dorm that served for a time as a GP medium-security dorm. (For some
of the time I was there, that same dorm housed people awaiting trial on immigration crimes
and also briefly housed accused sex offenders.) I learned a lot about GP from observing that
medium-security GP dorm and from informal conversations with some of its residents. I
later confirmed what I learned from that vantage point in conversations with custody
officials and residents of K6G.
140
See Int. 136, at C18 (discussing “two-for-one”).
141
After I presented an early draft of this Article at San Quentin State Prison, one
workshop participant, Juan Haines, gave me a marked-up copy of the draft. Throughout this
section, he had crossed out the word “gang” and replaced it with “race.” Haines did so
because, in the prison culture I am describing, these rules are enforced as to all prisoners,
whether or not they are “made” members of officially recognized prison gangs. The people
living in this environment thus refer to the four main groupings as “races” and not as gangs.

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being first in line at mealtimes and choosing what TV show to watch
(within the parameters for available programming set by the Jail itself), the
prizes rotate. The gangs take turns being the first to line up for chow, and
on any given day, the group whose turn it is to go first at mealtimes gets to
decide what they will watch on TV that day.142
The combination of this culturally contextual form of racial
segregation and the rotating privilege of who gets to eat first turns each
meal in the GP dorms into a carefully choreographed ritual. In Men’s
Central, meals are delivered to the dorms by inmate workers (or “trusties”)
who, under the supervision of custody officials, hand out preloaded trays
prepared in the Jail’s kitchen. About fifteen minutes before each meal
arrives, the booth officer tells each dorm to “line up for chow.” In response
(typically after several exhortations to get moving), the dorm’s residents
arrange themselves in preset racial groupings. The group whose turn it is to
go first that day goes to the head of the line, followed by the group whose
turn it will be to go first the next day, and so on. The pattern is the same
every day; in the dorm I observed, it was Blacks, then Whites, then
Southsiders, then Paisas. Every day, each group gets closer to the front of
the line until, having taken its turn being first, it drops back to last place.
The rigid observation of these rules means that, for the most part, life
in the Jail’s GP appears remarkably calm. Indeed, this relative calm is
arguably what leads Jail officials to tolerate and even facilitate gang control
of the internal jail culture, since it generally ensures order and stability. It
is, however, crucial to understand that this seeming calm masks the intense
stress created for GP residents by the imperative to follow the rules or risk
violent reprisal. It also masks the ever-present possibility of collective
See supra text accompanying notes 118–121 (explaining the difference between prison
gangs and the gangs or “races” whose behavior I am describing here). For purposes of this
Article, however, I am largely interested in the broader racial groupings that claim everyone
in custody as members, whether or not they actually belong to a prison gang or street gang.
And when people in the Jail talk about gang politics or the gang code, it is the rules
governing these comprehensive groupings to which they refer. So for purposes of this paper,
I refer to these larger groupings as “gangs” and not “races,” notwithstanding that in so doing,
I am self-consciously departing from the usage dominant among the prisoners themselves.
142
Kenneth Hartman reports that a similar set of rules were in force at Lancaster State
Prison in early 1996. Here is what he found waiting for him when he arrived:
The six different shower stalls are divided up among the groups. The clothes irons are
divided up by race. The television on the black side invariably has black shows, the
other one Spanish-language programming. (There are so few whites, we rate low in
the television schedule.) The telephones are allotted by race. The separation is so
complete that it outstrips any official policy of apartheid that a racist government
could design. The saddest thing about it is that we have done this to ourselves,
adopted these separatist policies as holy writ.
HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 156.

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violence. In this highly calibrated system, collective violence—i.e., riots—
can break out at any time. They can be prompted by anything from a
perceived slight of one person by someone of another race, to long-brewing
tensions between different racial groupings, to a decision made by the
prison gang leadership—usually far off in Pelican Bay or some other highsecurity California prison—to launch an all-out war with another gang.143
Often, the people who fight will not even know why they are fighting, but
their knowledge of the reasons is irrelevant. This brings us to the
preeminent obligation for all prisoners caught up in this system: the
imperative to “jump in” (i.e., join the fight) whenever the signal is given.
Those who fail to respond to this signal know that they can expect to be
violently punished by their own gangs once the dust has settled.144
The system just described, with its rigid code of conduct and violent
penalties for violations, is known in the Jail as “gang politics” or just
“politics.” These politics make life in GP scary, stressful, and dangerous.145
As one of my (black) subjects explained:
[Y]ou don’t know when something is going to snap. And if something snaps, even if
you don’t have nothing to do with it, you have something to do with it because if it is
Southside against Blacks, you Black, so you automatically in it. And if you don’t get
in it, when it’s over, then the Blacks beat you up. So you really don’t have any
146
choice.

143
The most senior gang leaders in the custody of the California prison system are
typically held in “secure housing units” (a.k.a. the SHU). However, they are nonetheless
able to reach into the jail dorms through the use of inmate “soldiers” transferred between
facilities, otherwise known as the “inmate wire.”
144
As one of my (black) respondents explained, “[i]f a Mexican and a black fight, and
another Mexican jumps on the black and beat on the black, I may be called to where I have
to jump in and fight. And if I don’t, then the Blacks may all beat me up later.” Int. 119, at
C4.
145
This effect came through clearly in my interviews, as subjects described their
experiences of life in GP. One (white) respondent described it as follows:
I was scared to death. Because where I was [housed], I was with nothing but
Mexicans. They were all gangbangers [i.e., someone deeply involved in the gang
culture], every one of them were gangbangers. I forget what clique they were from.
But in [the overhead light in my cell] we had thirty-two shanks, knives, handmade
knives. And then one day somebody disrespected one of the Mexicans, and the
Mexicans they all went off on the Whites. The only reason why they didn’t go off on
me is because our tank had all those shanks in them. And that’s the only thing that
saved me from being jumped on by six other gangbangers.
Int. 123, at E6.
146
Int. 140, at B3; see also Int. 53, at B11 (“In main line, you don’t know when them
fools is going to wake up and you enter a riot between the Mexicans and Blacks or the
Whites and Blacks or whatever. And you got to be part of that because of your culture,
because of your skin.”).

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For those with experience of GP, life in K6G offers a dramatic
contrast, because in K6G there are no gang politics. Anyone can use any
phone, any toilet, any shower, without fear of being disciplined. No one
prevents people of different races from sitting together, sharing food or
utensils, touching, kissing, or otherwise being intimate with one another.
As a result, this kind of interracial engagement is routine. At meal times,
everyone crowds together and people get their trays on a first-come, firstserved basis.
In my interviews, the absence of such politics was raised repeatedly as
a welcome feature of life in K6G. Here is just a sampling of these
comments:


There’s no politics . . . , and we don’t have to worry about . . . talking to the
147
wrong person or saying the wrong thing.



I can intermingle with everybody. . . . I can sit down and play cards with you if
you white, I can sit down and play cards with you if you Hispanic and I can
enjoy myself. I don’t have to say, well, damn, I can’t play with you because
you Mexican and I’m black, we can’t associate with each other. That’s not a
148
problem in [K6G].



Because we don’t play this [way]—the Whites can only talk to the Whites, the
149
Mexicans can only talk to the Mexicans.



We don’t have the politics and stuff like that. You know, you can talk to
whoever you want to. You could go and talk on any phone you want to. You
could shower at any time you want to, you could use any toilet that you want
to. It’s not a Black toilet, Mexican toilet, White toilet, other toilet. It’s an
150
easygoing program.

To be sure, there are gang members in K6G, and on occasion some of
them “tr[y] to turn it into a political thing,” as in one case when “a couple of
the inmates [in one of the K6G dorms] . . . tried to segregate it with Blacks,
Whites, [etc.].”151 Or people might “start throwing up these gang signs or
wherever they’re from.”152 But these efforts are readily put down by other
dorm residents.153 The effect is a unit free from the constant threat of gang-

147

Int. 50, at G2.
Int. 140, at B9–10.
149
Int. 75, at A11.
150
Int. 71, at B6.
151
Int. 71, at A7.
152
Int. 31, at F4.
153
See, e.g., Int. 119, at B11 (explaining that gang politics are “not taken seriously in
K6G” and “if they was causing too much of a problem, Bloods or Crips, [or] whichever, I’m
pretty sure that we would probably whup them . . . to stop problems for everybody”); Int. 53,
at C11 (“We don’t play [gang politics] up here. We don’t play that at all. If they are going
148

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related violence and the stress of having to follow the rules or risk
punishment.
People in K6G thus face no pressure to conform to the rigid behavioral
code that governs in the Jail’s GP and need not worry about being ready to
jump in when a fight breaks out.154 As a consequence, life in K6G is much
more relaxed than GP, which in part explains how so many of my
respondents could have used words like “easy-going,” “relaxing,” “nice,”
and “serene” to describe life locked inside a crowded dorm of the L.A.
County Jail.155 One of my respondents went so far as to call K6Gs “free
spirits” compared to the people in GP.156 That he was describing people
who are incarcerated, who have been deprived of all freedom of movement
and confined in a carceral facility that is crowded, decrepit, and dirty should
give some idea of just how oppressive life can be in the gang-controlled GP
units.
D. GP’S HYPERMASCULINITY IMPERATIVE
Why are there no gang politics in K6G? The best way to answer this
question is by exploring yet another notable difference between GP and
K6G: the absence in K6G of any pressure to perform a hypermasculine
identity. This hypermasculinity imperative157 is a staple of life in GP, not
only in L.A. County, but in many men’s prisons and jails all over the
country, in which literally hundreds of thousands of men158 are spending
to come up there gangbanging . . . you’re in the wrong place. I’m one of the ones that lets
them know.”).
154
See infra note 245 (describing the way people in GP talk of “having to sleep with
[their] shoes on” in case they have to wake up fighting).
155
See supra Part II.B.
156
Int. 71, at A7. This subject lived in a K6G dorm, the entrance to which was right
across from the entrance to a GP dorm. He found the men in GP to have “a lot of curiosity”
about what goes on in K6G:
They are always on the door, looking out the door, like “what are those guys doing?”
And they see us running around laughing and stuff. And I think it is like they are
stuck inside that door with these politics and these rules and regulations and we’re in
there like free spirits. (Sings) La da da da da. And it’s a lot less stressful in there for
us compared to a mainline dorm where there’s Blacks, Whites, others.
Id.; see also Int. 108, at E9–10 (explaining the “stressful quality” of life in GP compared to
that in K6G, where residents “don’t have to stress about are we . . . going to have to fight the
other race, or am I going to be the next one to have my head split”).
157
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 15–17.
158
There are at present over 2.3 million people being held in prisons and jails in the
United States, see Sharon Dolovich, Exclusion and Control in the Carceral State, 16
BERKELEY J. CRIM. L. 259, 307 & n.151 (2011), the vast majority of whom are men. See
U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, JAIL INMATES AT MIDYEAR 2010—STATISTICAL TABLES (NCJ
233431) 7 (Apr. 2011); U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, PRISONERS IN 2010 (NCJ 236096) 15–16

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their days doing their best to appear “hard and tough, and [not] show
weakness.”159
There are both internal and external pressures to perform a “hyper”
male identity. The more complex of the two is the internally generated
pressure, which seems to have two key facets. The first relates to gender
identity, and is consistent—in kind, if not degree—with similar pressures at
work in other all-male or male-dominated contexts160 like fraternities,161 the
military,162 and even investment banks and other financial institutions.163 In

(Dec. 2011) (reporting that as of midyear 2010, 656,360 of the 748,728 people being held in
local jails were men and that 1,499,573 men but only 112,822 women were under the
jurisdiction of state and federal correctional authorities).
159
Corley, supra note 12, at 106; see also Jewkes, supra note 21, at 53 (“‘Wearing a
mask’ is arguably the most common strategy for coping with the rigors of imprisonment, and
all prison researchers will be familiar with the sentiment that inmates feel it necessary to
adopt a façade while inside.”).
160
At least one key difference, of course, is that in these non-carceral settings, ongoing
physical and sexual victimization is not typically the price of nonconformity, although it
might be in the most extreme cases.
161
See, e.g., E. Timothy Bleecker & Sarah K. Murnen, Fraternity Membership, the
Display of Degrading Sexual Images of Women, and Rape Myth Acceptance, 53 SEX ROLES
487, 492 (2005) (citing research “reveal[ing] differences in attitudes and behaviors between
fraternity and non-fraternity men that are reflective of acceptance of hypermasculinity” and
finding that “[f]raternity men report a belief in male dominance and the inferiority of
women” and “use language and possess pictures of women that are judged as degrading”).
162
See, e.g., Donald L. Mosher & Silvan S. Tomkins, Scripting the Macho Man:
Hypermasculine Socialization and Enculturation, 25 J. SEX RES. 60, 74 (1988) (describing
the “macho ritual” following “boot camp in the military” during which “[t]he recruit, shorn
of his civilian dignity [is] hazed as a coward, a faggot, a mama’s boy, and the like, [and]
undergoes an ordeal,” after which he “assume[s] his new military identity as a warrior” and
celebrates by “go[ing] to the bar, get[ting] drunk, get[ting] laid, get[ting] into a fight with an
outgroup member, and do[ing] something daring”); Megan N. Schmid, Comment,
Combating a Different Enemy: Proposals to Change the Culture of Sexual Assault in the
Military, 55 VILL. L. REV. 475, 492 (2010) (“[T]he military distances itself from persons
perceived as not masculine, such as women and homosexuals, which may explain the
restrictions on these groups. . . . As an example, drill instructors at boot camp put down
male recruits by feminizing them, calling them ‘pussies,’ ‘sissies,’ or ‘girls,’ to teach them
that ‘to be degraded is to be female.’”).
163
Christine Sgarlata Chung, From Lily Bart to the Boom-Boom Room: How Wall
Street’s Social and Cultural Response to Women has Shaped Securities Regulation, 33
HARV. J.L. & GENDER 175, 180–81 (2010) (“In Wall Street lore, the movers and shakers of
the securities markets are almost invariably men—they are the ‘masters of the universe,’ the
‘Big Swinging Dicks,’ the regulators, the decision-makers, and even the scoundrels thought
to have shaped the markets and our system of securities regulation. Women, by contrast, are
portrayed as social and cultural outsiders . . . presumed to lack the skills and characteristics
necessary to navigate Wall Street.”); Valentine M. Moghadam, Women, Gender, and
Economic Crisis Revisited, 10 PERSP. ON GLOBAL DEV. & TECH. 30, 37 (2011) (“The
masculinist institution par excellence may be the military, but hyper-masculinity is also a

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such environments, men tend to experience “anxieties . . . concerning their
masculinity,”164 which prompt the “competition” among men that is
endemic in American culture in general. This competition leads to an
exaggeration of the typical features of the identity that Frank Rudy Cooper
associates with the “hegemonic patterns of U.S. masculinity,”165 features
that are familiar and destructive both in prison and in society more
generally. As Cooper describes it, this hegemonic model of the American
male has four distinct features. First, he is “concerned with how other men
rate him” as to his own masculinity level.166 Second, he is “chronically
insecure that he has not sufficiently proved that he is as masculine as he
should be.”167 Third, he is driven to compete with other men, “to outdo
[them] in collecting indicia of manhood.”168 Fourth and finally, men in this
competition must “[repudiate] that model’s contrast figures,” among them
“women [and] gays.”169 As Cooper explains, the hegemony of this model
manifests itself in a compulsion on the part of those who are “denied the
stature of the normative man” to project “hypermasculinity.”170 Displays of
hypermasculinity compensate for a failure to “meet the masculine cultural
ideal.”171

defining feature of the corporate domain—with its risk-takers, rogue traders, reckless
speculators, and manipulative financiers.”).
164
James E. Robertson, Cruel and Unusual in United States Prisons: Sexual Harassment
Among Male Inmates, 36 AM. CRIM. L. REV. 1, 13 (1999) (quoting GRESHAM M. SYKES, THE
SOCIETY OF CAPTIVES 71 (1958)). As Robertson observes, “[i]mprisonment represents more
than a loss of freedom; it also diminishes you as an adult male.” Id. at 12.
165
See Frank Rudy Cooper, “Who’s the Man?”: Masculinities Studies, Terry Stops, and
Police Training, 18 COLUM. J. GENDER & L. 671, 687 (2009); see also id. (discussing
MICHAEL KIMMEL, MANHOOD IN AMERICA: A CULTURAL HISTORY (1996)).
166
Id. at 687.
167
Id. at 688 (“Manhood is a relentless test of how close you are to the ideal. . . . [M]en
are constantly suffering from anxiety that other men will unmask them as insufficiently
manly.”).
168
Id.
169
Id. at 689; see also Elijah G. Ward, Homophobia, Hypermasculinity and the US Black
Church, 7 CULTURE, HEALTH & SEXUALITY 493, 496 (2005) (“[H]ypermasculinity is a value
system extolling male physical strength, aggression, violence, competition and dominance
that despises the dearth of these characteristics as weak and feminine. . . . Because of the
conflation of gender and sexuality, to be seen as masculine requires being heterosexual,
prompting the hypermasculinisation of behaviour among males in order to avoid being
labeled a ‘fag’ or ‘queer.’”). Cooper observes that “racial minorities” also function as
contrast figures for a hegemonic masculinity for which the standard is not only middle-class,
“early middle-aged,” and heterosexual, but also white. Cooper, supra note 165, at 689.
170
Cooper, supra note 165, at 691.
171
See id.

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The archetype of the stoic, weightlifting, muscle-bound prisoner has
its origins in this dynamic.172 But in prison, displays of strength and
toughness alone are not always sufficient proof of masculinity for men
anxious about others’ perceptions of their gender identities. As in society in
general, the construction of identity in prison is relational: claims to
masculinity are “only meaningful in relation to constructions of
femininity.”173 Would-be men must therefore struggle against and
ultimately vanquish the seemingly feminine in themselves, and in others.174
In the absence of other socially productive means to prove their manhood
(business, politics, family, “cars and the like”175), the domination of women,
sexual and otherwise, becomes the method of choice.176 In society in
general, the imperative to conquer and repudiate the feminine frequently
motivates rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and other forms of
violence against women.177 In the prison, men seeking to prove their
masculinity will do their best to “punk” other, weaker inmates—harassing
them, humiliating them, stealing their stuff. At its most extreme, this abuse
will culminate in the “ownership” of weaker inmates—the “women” in this
social system—whose utter subordination, known to include ongoing sexual
access, stands as public proof of the abuser’s masculine power.178 In this
172

Don Sabo, Doing Time, Doing Masculinity: Sports and Prison, in PRISON
MASCULINITIES, supra note 12, at 61, 65. Indeed, in men’s prisons, muscles are arguably
“the sign of masculinity.” Id. (quoting BARRY GLASSNER, BODIES: WHY WE LOOK THE WAY
WE DO (AND HOW WE FEEL ABOUT IT) 114 (1988)).
173
SUE LEES, RULING PASSIONS 105 (1997).
174
See Cooper, supra note 165, at 690 (“Most of all, masculinity is the repudiation of
femininity.”).
175
James E. Robertson, A Clean Heart and an Empty Head: The Supreme Court and
Sexual Terrorism in Prison, 81 N.C. L. REV. 433, 441 (2003).
176
As feminist theorists have argued, in society in general, rape or the threat of rape is a
central mechanism by which men—especially those men insecure about their own relative
social positions—reaffirm their masculine self-images. See Man & Cronan, supra note 29,
at 148 (explaining that rape can symbolize “the act of putting women ‘back in their place,’”
and that “rapists are often men who feel threatened by the fear that women or a particular
woman may achieve equality or superiority over them”). In prison, rape or the threat thereof
becomes the “premier” means for demonstrating and reaffirming one’s “masculinity and
strength.” Robertson, supra note 164, at 14.
177
See supra text accompanying note 176.
178
A 2001 Human Rights Watch report documented the experience of people in prisons
across the United States who had been “forced into this type of sexual slavery, having even
been ‘sold’ or ‘rented’ out to other inmates.” HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 87, at 13–
14; see also id. at 93–95. However, the extent to which ownership of other inmates operates
to affirm one’s manhood varies across prison environments and among groups. At least one
informant suggested to me that the Southsiders frown on any kind of sexual activity in
custody, even sex with a feminized prisoner, i.e., a “punk.” Telephone Interview with
Cameron Saul, Case Manager, Tarzana Treatment Ctr. (Oct. 27, 2011). Although it is

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culture, the performance of rape—the sexual penetration of another inmate
defined as female—is a way to shore up the rapist’s own claim to
maleness179 and, thus, his status and power in the prison hierarchy.
Understanding this set of destructive gender dynamics makes clear the
external source of pressure on men to perform a hypermasculine identity:
the desire to avoid being victimized by other people who are also trying to
prove their own manhood.180 Displays of physical violence can serve the
same purpose as raping someone or “owning” him as a sexual slave. As
one of my interviewees put it, “If I’m in GP, and I shank [i.e., stab]
someone, it’s just like . . . a strip[e] on my arm.”181 “[P]eople are going to
respect you for it . . . [b]ecause the more respect you have, the less you’re
going to have to answer to.”182 In order to protect himself, a man in prison
sometimes tolerated in this group if it is kept quiet, once it becomes publicly known, both
parties—top and bottom—are forced off the yard and into protective custody to make room
for other Southsiders who are expected to be better “soldiers” than those who have
consensual sex with other men. Id.
179
That the sexual penetration of one man by another could work to reinforce the
masculine image of one of the participants may seem strange given that, generally speaking,
men who have sex with other men are regarded in mainstream culture as homosexual—and
thus perceived as not “real men.” But this puzzle is resolved once it is recognized that in
prison, those who take the passive sexual position or who perform oral sex on other men are
not regarded in the prison as men at all. See Man & Cronan, supra note 29, at 167–68 (“By
raping someone perceived as feminine, an inmate can assert his dominance without thinking
of himself as a homosexual and, thereby, securing his male identity. Thus, the inmate
redefines seemingly homosexual activity as a heterosexual activity.”). As was explained by
Human Rights Watch in its 2001 report about male rape in U.S. prisons, most prison rapists
continue to view themselves as heterosexual since the victim is “substituting” for a woman.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 87, at 56 (“[T]he crucial point is not that [the aggressor
is] having sex with a man; instead it is that they are the aggressor, as opposed to the victim—
the person doing the penetration, as opposed to the one being penetrated. Indeed, if they see
anyone as gay, it is the victim (even where the victim’s clear sexual preference is for
heterosexual activity).”).
180
See Haney, supra note 14, at 128 (explaining that men in this situation can face the
ugly choice of “raping or being raped—or, at least, appearing capable of raping or risking
the increased chance of suffering it yourself”); see also id. at 129 (explaining that “the
primordial fear” of rape in prison motivates both “hyper-vigilance and preemptive,
aggressive posturing”). As one prison official put it:
[S]ex and power go hand-in-hand in prison . . . . Deprived of the normal avenues,
there are very few ways in prison for a man to show how powerful he is—and the best
way to do so is for [him] to have a [sex] slave, another who is in total submission to
him.
Rideau, supra note 8, at 75 (quoting C. Paul Phelps, then-secretary of the Louisiana
Department of Corrections); see also supra note 179 (explaining how it is that men who
force themselves sexually on other men in prison are viewed as “real men” and not, as in
society in general, as homosexual).
181
Int. 89, at D2.
182
Id.

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may cultivate an image as someone capable of anything, since someone
who is feared by others has less chance of being “punked” himself.
In such an environment, any sign of weakness is like blood to sharks;
it draws the abusive attention of other (fearful) men trying to avoid being
victimized themselves. The imperative not to be seen as weak can
dominate the lives of men in custody, especially in high-security facilities.
Men cannot be perpetually violent, but they can be—and in the worst prison
environments, must be—constantly vigilant lest they convey an impression
of vulnerability. Among the qualities explicitly suppressed to this end are
any that might be associated with femininity: emotional expression,
sensitivity, kindness, etc. In this culture, these behaviors can be code for
weakness and signal a person’s availability for victimization. Putting up a
hard front is thus a key component of the hypermasculinity imperative.
The imperative of hypermasculine performance sparked by anxiety
about gender identity is to a greater or lesser extent a feature of life in
virtually all male-dominated environments.183 But in prison, there is a
second source of internal pressure to engage in this performance, one that
may be expected to arise in contexts in which participants are
systematically regarded with some combination of contempt and
indifference and thus routinely made to feel worthless and invisible. To
occupy this position—in which prisoners are denied any social standing and
treated as if they were of no account—can be a source of constant
humiliation and disrespect.184 It is an experience shared to some extent by
many people of low socioeconomic status, whose needs, interests, and
concerns are systematically ignored by society at large. This experience
appears to ground what Elijah Anderson calls the “code of the streets,” a set
of “informal rules of behavior”185 that is “trace[able] to the profound sense
of alienation from mainstream society and its institutions felt by many poor

183

See supra notes 161–163 and accompanying text.
The craving for respect may even drive some people to criminal activity. As James
Gilligan reports in his study of the origins of violence:
[W]hen you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit [armed robbery],
what you hear is, “I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first
pointed a gun at somebody,” or “[y]ou wouldn’t believe how much respect you get
when you have a gun pointed at some dude’s face.”
JAMES GILLIGAN, VIOLENCE: REFLECTIONS ON A NATIONAL EPIDEMIC 109 (1997). As
Gilligan observes, “For men who have lived for a lifetime on a diet of contempt and disdain,
the temptation to gain instant respect in this way can be worth far more than the cost of
going to prison, or even of dying.” Id.
185
ELIJAH ANDERSON, CODE OF THE STREET: DECENCY, VIOLENCE, AND THE MORAL LIFE
OF THE INNER CITY 10 (1999).
184

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inner-city black people, particularly the young”186 and is “organized around
a desperate search for respect.”187
But perhaps no group suffers more collective disdain and indifference
than prisoners. The incarcerated population is already comprised of people
disproportionately likely to be socially and economically marginalized—
those who are indigent, undereducated, unskilled, illiterate, learning
disabled, mentally ill, and/or drug-addicted.188 Taken collectively, these are
not only people about whom mainstream society cares very little, but they
are also very often people who, even when free, are shown little respect in
their interactions with individuals and institutions. Imprisonment seals their
status as outside society’s moral circle, and the experience of being
incarcerated demonstrates daily in myriad ways how little value they are
thought to hold.189 As Craig Haney puts it:
[V]irtually every man in prison is a failed or fallen man, in some important ways, and
they are constantly reminded of their devalued status as an “inmate” by the levels of
deprivation they endure, the humiliation and degradation they experience at the hands
of their captors, and the stigmatization and other obstacles that they know await them
190
once they are released.

For men in this position, hypermasculine performance can provide a way to
garner some power, status, and respect191 in a climate that offers them few if
any other means to do so.192

186

Id. at 34.
Id. at 10.
188
See Dolovich, supra note 158, at 276–77 & nn.48–52 (2011). People in custody are
also disproportionately people of color. See id. at 311 & n.168.
189
See, e.g., HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 13 (recounting an experience in the L.A.
County Jail in the early 1980s, when he was ordered by a deputy to stand naked against a
wall, and an “older deputy . . . calmly explained to a younger one that [Hartman’s] tattoos
were a clear indication [that he] was ‘a piece of shit’”).
190
Haney, supra note 14, at 134–35 (citing Terry A. Kupers, The Role of Misogyny and
Homophobia in Prison Sexual Abuse, 18 UCLA WOMEN’S L.J. 107, 114 (2010) (“The failed
or fallen man is the one who is not ‘manly.’”)).
191
Again, there is a direct connection here to Anderson’s “code of the street,” which no
doubt governs life for many men in custody when they are free. This makes the transition
from hypermasculine performance on the streets to hypermasculine performance in prison a
seamless one:
At the heart of the code is the issue of respect—loosely defined as being treated
“right” or being granted one’s “props” (or proper due) or the deference one
deserves. . . . The rules of the code in fact provide a framework for negotiating
respect. With the right amount of respect, individuals can avoid being bothered in
public. This security is important, for if they are bothered, not only may they face
physical danger, but they will have been disgraced or “dissed” (disrespected).
ANDERSON, supra note 185, at 33–34.
187

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The link between hypermasculine performance and the craving for
respect is evident from the urgency and alacrity with which men in prison
may police and punish any displays of “disrespect.”193 For some men in
custody, the craving for respect seems to put them on the offensive; it
makes them willing to respond to all perceived slights, however minor, with
unhesitating and even pitiless aggression. But even for these men,
hypermasculine performance is best understood as a defensive posture
against the ever-present threat of being “dissed” and revealed to be weak
and therefore a “punk”194—i.e., someone to be disrespected and humiliated
192

See Haney, supra note 14, at 135 (“In many ways, maintaining some semblance of
self esteem in prison requires [men in this position] to do whatever they can in order to avoid
becoming even more ‘failed or fallen.’”). Indeed, for many people in custody, respect of this
form may be the only respect they will ever enjoy. See Telephone Interview with Cameron
Saul, Case Manager, Tarzana Treatment Ctr. (Oct. 27, 2011) (describing a friend who
preferred the gang life in prison to freedom, since “on the streets,” he was “nobody” and
“get[s] no respect,” whereas in prison, [he has] power . . .”).
193
In a hypermasculine culture, any show of disrespect is a threat to one’s masculine
identity. As Cooper explains in a related hypermasculine context:
The reason police officers punish disrespect is that, for them, a challenge to their
respect is a challenge to their manhood. . . . [W]ithin the police role there is a distinct
connotation of masculinity, virility, aggressiveness, and all the qualities considered
worthy of being a man. Hence, to make depreciatory remarks about the police role is
to cast aspersion upon the policemen’s conceptions of themselves as men.
Cooper, supra note 165, at 697 (internal quotations omitted). Already in a sense
emasculated and infantilized by their incarceration, men in prison are prone to react strongly
to being “dissed.” The hair-trigger temper; belligerence; and inability to admit error, back
down, or compromise—typical accompaniments of hypermasculine performance—suggest a
psychologically vulnerable person with a tenuous hold on his sense of self-worth. Yet
paradoxically, in the prison context, the exercise of these destructive tendencies to induce
fear in others may be the only way a “failed and fallen man” can get any respect. See Haney,
supra note 14, at 134 (citing Kupers, supra note 190).
194
In his memoir, Hartman describes how he “killed a man in a drunken, drugged-up
fistfight,” earning himself an LWOP sentence in the California prisons. The story he tells of
his crime conveys just how desperate some men feel to not be regarded as a “punk,” and how
conditioned they can become over years in custody to respond with violence to any
suggestion that they are one. Hartman spent his early years in and out of juvenile hall—
raised, as he puts it, in the Youth Authority (YA) system by “Mother California.”
HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 1. One night, “fresh out of [his] latest stint” in YA, high on
meth and “blind drunk on tequila,” he accosted a man named Thomas Allen Fellowes, who
was sleeping on a bench in what Hartman had decided was “his” park. Id. at 3, 5. The man
jumped up and a “verbal joust” ensued. Id. When Hartman threatened him, the man—
“prov[ing] he wasn’t state-raised”—came back with “‘[y]ou aren’t going to do anything, you
punk.’” Id. at 5–6. According to Hartman, this response enraged him, and he wound up
beating the man to death. Id. For Hartman at that point in his life, it was self-evident that he
had to respond to such a sally with violence. But of course, as Hartman notes, in the
courtroom, “[m]y attempts to explain how it all started when Mr. Fellowes called me a punk
[we]re met with incredulous stares. I’m from a different world, a world without courts and
lawyers, a world incomprehensible to those not of it.” Id. at 15.

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even by fellow prisoners. Here is where the fear of being “unmanned” and
the desperate desire for respect come together: in men’s prisons, one path to
respect and status is to show how tough you are.195 The harder and tougher
you are, the more respect and status you enjoy, and the less likely you are to
be victimized.196 And the most obvious way to show how hard and tough
you are is to reveal someone else to be a “punk.” This dynamic explains
the constant pressure men in GP can feel to maintain their places in the
pecking order.197
What does all this have to do with gangs? Gang culture thrives where
people anxious not to be seen as weak and therefore vulnerable are willing
to enforce the rules.198 Recall the rules that govern life in the Jail’s GP.
People in GP cannot, under pain of violence, mix with members of another
race, or even use objects that someone of another race has used. And at the
slightest sign from a shot caller, they must be willing to jump in and

195

There are other pathways as well. In men’s carceral facilities, individuals can often
over the years gain a reputation as someone who is a “stand up” person who treats others
with respect and honors the prison code that expects people to mind their own business and
do their own time. It also helps to have a valued skill (for example, to be a tattoo artist or to
know one’s way around the law) or to have money and be willing to share one’s largess with
a few select friends. See Telephone Interview with Cameron Saul, Case Manager, Tarzana
Treatment Ctr. (Oct. 27, 2011). It also helps to have a “posse”—a group of friends or
associates who are known by all to stick together and watch each others’ backs. See
HOPWOOD, supra note 19, at 61. The development of such friendships also proves valuable
in another way that guards against the worst effects of the hypermasculine imperative: it
creates a safe space in which men in custody are able to let down the mask, express
emotions, and be themselves. See E-mail from Jamie Binnall, Adjunct Professor of Law,
Georgetown Univ. Law Ctr., to author (Oct. 15, 2012, 6:58 PM EST) (“Prison is about
making alliances and then finding a niche where you can be comfortable. The first time I
played softball with other cell blocks – I wore the mask – [but] by the time my fourth
softball season came around, I would openly discuss my feelings of loneliness and agony
with fellow [teammates].”). But depending on the environment, one may need to take care
not to broadcast this show of emotions any more broadly, lest one be labeled weak and
therefore a potential victim. I thank Jamie Binnall for helpful conversation on this point.
196
See ANDERSON, supra note 185, at 11 (“Possession of respect—and the credible threat
of vengeance—is highly valued for shielding the ordinary person from the interpersonal
violence of the street.”).
197
HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 2 (“In every jail and juvenile camp I learned the same
lesson. No one ever wanted to know what I did for a living; they wanted to see if I was
predator or prey. Shoved against a wall, surrounded in a dark alley, looking into the barrel of
a battered service revolver, I always got the same message: Will you stand up and fight or
will you bow down?”).
198
As Haney explains, “[g]angs only flourish in a jail or prison society where there is a
strong undercurrent of fear and reminders of one’s own vulnerability.” Haney, supra note
14, at 136; see also id. (explaining that through the “racial gang culture . . . people who live
under conditions of scarcity, threat, and alienation often band together to create a sense of
security and safety”).

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physically attack other people simply because of their race or gang
affiliations. Reading between the lines of these explicit directives reveals a
further set of unspoken precepts governing life in the Jail’s GP:
unquestioned loyalty to one’s own group; hostility toward members of other
groups, even people who under other circumstances might have been your
friends or intimates; and lack of ambivalence toward, or even embrace of,
this oppressive regime. In a culture governed by gang politics, weakness is
despised not only for what it reveals about an individual prisoner’s lack of
manhood, but also because it reduces the collective power of his gang,
thereby making the whole group seem weak and less able to stand and fight.
Recognizing the danger any time one race outnumbers another, Jail officials
work hard to ensure balance among the races in any given housing unit—a
practice that, although necessary, fuels efforts on the part of the gangs to
purge weaker links from their own ranks. A Southsider who cannot fight,
or whose heart seems not to be in the “game,” will be one less able-bodied
“soldier” in the fight if something snaps; by removing him, the other
Southsiders will get another person on their side who, it is hoped, will be a
more effective fighter.199
There is thus a symbiotic relationship in prison between gang politics
and the hypermasculinity imperative. The gang code demands overt and
persistent displays of toughness, an absence of weakness, and a propensity
for violence, all of which are core components of hypermasculinity.200 At
the same time, demonstrated dedication to the rigors of gang life is the
perfect way to command respect and protect against aspersions of
weakness, cowardice, or being a sissy.201 For men in custody, gang
membership—and especially leadership roles with their attendant power
and status—ensures personal security in a climate where the unaffiliated
make easy targets.202

199
The perception that gay men are weaker than heterosexuals was an explanation I
heard during my time in the Jail for the “green light” that, during the summer of 2007,
Southsiders put on any gay member of the gang. For more on this incident, see infra Part
III.C.1.
200
See supra note 169.
201
In environments dominated by gangs, being insufficiently committed to the cultural
code is itself a sign of weakness that invites victimization. Thus, for example, failure to
jump in when the sign is given may earn a person not only a beating once the dust clears but
also a reputation as a “punk,” which will mark him as a victim and may follow him
throughout his time in custody and even back into the streets.
202
See Haney, supra note 14, at 136 (“People who live under conditions of scarcity,
threat, and alienation often band together to create a sense of security and safety.”); see also
id. (“Gangs only flourish in a jail or prison society where there is a strong undercurrent of
fear and reminders of one’s own vulnerability.”); HOPWOOD, supra note 19, at 61.

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Equally important, as Craig Haney insightfully observes, gang
membership provides a way for prisoners to navigate a “[t]hreatening
correctional environment[]” by readily identifying potentially dangerous
others as “friend or foe.”203 As Haney notes, especially in large and
crowded facilities, “[i]nmates do not have the luxury of carefully and
systematically forming their ‘character assessments’ of the people with
whom they are forced to live or gradually size up the trustworthiness or
violence potential of the persons who surround them.”204 Frequently
transferred among housing units and even institutions, often thrown
together in locked dorms or cells with people they have never seen before,
men in custody have to make “rapid judgments” about whom they can
count on and whom they should fear “based on very little if any reliable
information.”205 In this uncertain world, “outward racial characteristics and
visual or public displays of group allegiance (such as tattoos)” provide a
shorthand way to size up the situation and take the measure of others in the
room.206 For people in this situation, the embrace of gang politics and the
hypermasculinity imperative has a certain logic. Gang markers such as
race, tattoos, and grooming standards207 signal affiliation, functioning as a
calling card of sorts among people who may have never seen each other
before but who have been brought together in intimate, high-pressure, and
dangerous circumstances.
At the same time, displays of
hypermasculinity—large muscles, extreme self-control, a cool and
inscrutable affect, etc.—assure the strangers with whom the newcomer will
now align that he knows the game and can be trusted and relied upon to
play his part. A group’s power in any setting turns on the strength and
power of its members. In every GP dorm and cell block in the Jail and in
the California prison system more generally, people who barely know each
other may be called upon to fight or sacrifice for one another and for the
sake of the group. The balance of power is carefully calibrated and anyone
who is weak or ignorant of the prison code is a serious liability. Men who
are “hard and tough, and don’t show weakness” enjoy the security the group
provides. Others do not.
There is, moreover, a more subtle connection between the
hypermasculinity imperative and the Jail’s gang culture. The need to put up
203

Haney, supra note 14, at 134.
Id. at 136.
205
Id. This is especially true in jails, where high turnover means people have little
opportunity to get to know each other as individuals.
206
Id.
207
In the California prison system, all Southsiders are expected to shave their heads.
Among other benefits, this rule allows for easy recognition of loyal new arrivals to any
facility, cellblock, or dorm.
204

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a front, to seem hard and tough and not to show weakness, can take a
profound emotional toll.208 Men who have lived under these conditions
report corrosive effects on meaningful interpersonal interaction, since
“[w]ithout . . . letting someone know at least some of your weaknesses, no
strong bonds can develop.”209 This is certainly not a universal experience;
many men in custody forge close friendships with others, friendships that
persist even after release.210 But for many others, the need to maintain
emotional barriers can be lonely and alienating. And for those in this latter
group, gangs offer not only a sense of security and safety in an
unpredictable and dangerous world, but also a way for men in custody “to
feel connected and bonded, to belong.”211 To be sure, the price of this
connection is high, but the fact that so many people in the Jail, the
California prison system, and elsewhere appear willing to pay it indicates
just how desperate and scary the conditions men in these systems confront,
and how deeply diminished their options are.
E. K6G: NO GANG POLITICS, NO HYPERMASCULINITY
IMPERATIVE
In the Jail’s GP, gang politics and the hypermasculinity imperative are
mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, the violent enforcement of the gang
code elicits hypermasculine behavior by those eager to demonstrate
compliance. On the other hand, the imperative to prove one’s toughness
and thereby command respect creates a constituency for the regime imposed
by the gangs.

208
Hartman, currently serving an LWOP sentence in California, describes his younger
hypermasculine self, “fresh out of [his] latest stint” in a YA facility, in this way:
Two hundred and twenty pounds, six foot two, a coiled spring of hostility, I had the
dead eyes familiar to prison guards and combat veterans. I walked with the studied
indifference of the fearless, although my impetus was, on deeper reflection from this
distant vantage, undistilled fear: fear of the other, fear that I would be discovered to
be weaker than my act.
Deeper still, down beyond my casual, bruised
comprehension, I was desperately lonely and sad.
HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 3.
209
See, e.g., Corley, supra note 12, at 106–07.
210
See, e.g., HOPWOOD, supra note 19, at 61 (explaining that in his experience of federal
prison, men in custody “eventually find maybe half a dozen friends who seem human—
people who share something in the way of goals or attitude” or even just “particular
interests”); see also E-mail from Jamie Binnall, Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown
Univ. Law Ctr., to author (Oct. 15, 2012, 6:58 PM EST) (“[P]rison . . . can be a place where
truly meaningful and healthy friendships are formed. Some of my best, most trusted friends
are those with whom I was incarcerated.”).
211
Haney, supra note 14, at 136.

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In K6G, neither of these forces is present. As has been seen, there are
no gang politics; everybody “intermingle[s] with everybody,”212 and efforts
to organize K6G residents along gang lines get nowhere.213 But there is
also no hypermasculinity imperative. In K6G, there is no premium on
seeming hard or tough, on being stoic, on suppressing one’s feelings. As a
consequence, the people in K6G are free to have relatively ordinary human
reactions and interactions, and to be themselves.214 This freedom manifests
itself in many ways, all of which contrast sharply with life in the Jail’s GP.
First, despite being locked up, people in K6G are affirmatively able to have
emotional lives. This was in stark contrast to the GP unit that served as my
control, where I observed a constant preternatural calm. Men moved
slowly, spoke quietly, kept to themselves. What I saw just by turning 180
degrees in the officers’ booth (i.e., towards K6G) was very different. Many
residents of K6G also kept to themselves. But many others routinely
expressed a range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, delight,
irritation, frustration, and anger. At least some of them touched each other,
hugged and kissed, laughed out loud,215 sang or danced to the music on the
television when they felt like it, or just lay next to each other in their
bunks.216 They also yelled, complained, and argued.217 People in K6G fall
in love, form relationships, or just have sex (lots of it).218 They also, in a
parallel to what is reported to be the case in women’s prisons, form family

212

Int. 140, at B9.
As one of my respondents recalled, “there was a time when a couple of the inmates
tried to turn it into a political thing and they tried to segregate it with Blacks, Whites and it
didn’t fly. It didn’t fly.” Int. 71, at A7. Another of my respondents explained that active
gang members “are not taken seriously in [K6G] . . . [I]f they was causing too much of a
problem, Bloods or Crips, [or] whichever, I’m pretty sure that we would probably whup
them . . . to stop problems for everybody.” Int. 119, at B11; see also Int. 89, at C3 (“K6Gs
are usually nicer than people in mainline. You know, you ain’t got nothing to prove.
There’s no stripes in the K6G dorm, you know, not a bunch of testosterone . . . unchecked.”).
214
See Int. 119, at B2 (“I don’t have to put up any front [in K6G] . . . . I don’t have to
alter my attitude or tell kind of a fake jailhouse story. I can just be myself.”); Int. 79, at E1
(“People [in K6G] are more free to be who they are.”).
215
See Int. 79, at E1 (“Every day I laugh and it’s not the worst thing in my situation.”).
216
See Int. 89, at C7 (“In K6G, [there are] people laying on beds together, holding each
other . . . . You wouldn’t see that in the regular general population.”).
217
By no means did everyone participate in these behaviors. But their clear presence
indicated that in K6G, the expression of emotion is not prohibited.
218
See Nina T. Harawa et al., Sex and Condom Use in a Large Unit for Men Who Have
Sex with Men (MSM) and Male-to-Female Transgenders, 21 J. HEALTH FOR POOR &
UNDERSERVED 1071, 1076 (2010) (reporting results of a study of K6G that found that “most
participants” reported “sex during incarceration (for up to the prior 30 days of their current
jail stay)” with “oral sex by two thirds and anal sex reported by slightly over half (53%)”).
213

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groupings, in which members share “store” (i.e. items bought at the
canteen), as well as companionship and emotional support.219
It is not that none of this ever occurs in GP. But in the Jail’s GP, as in
GP units in men’s facilities all over the country, many features of a healthy
emotional life are often strongly discouraged and even penalized with
violence. Because shows of emotion suggest weakness and vulnerability,
men in GP often feel compelled to send “the message that [they are]
somebody to contend with, not a pushover, not somebody to ‘fuck’ with.”220
There is a premium on displays of control: speaking calmly and quietly,
acting deliberately, resisting any demonstrative impulses, etc.221 Again,
many men in custody are able to forge meaningful bonds with fellow
prisoners.222 But in GP, genuine, mutually supportive friendships are harder
to forge; as Derek Corley observes, pressure on men in GP to “be hard and
tough, and [not] show weakness,” combined with the “prison code” that
says mind your own business, “makes it hard to develop trust, a necessary
ingredient of friendship.”223 As for the possibility of “sexually reciprocal”

219

See infra note 342.
Sabo, supra note 172, at 64. As Don Sabo explains, in prison:
To be called hard is a compliment. To be labeled soft can be a playful rebuke or a
serious putdown. The meanings around hardness and softness also flow from and
feed homophobia, which is rampant in prison. The stigma of being labeled a
homosexual can make a man more vulnerable to ridicule, attack, ostracism or
victimization.

220

Id.
221

While conducting this research, I myself witnessed a startling display of the
determination of men in GP to maintain mastery over their natural impulses. One afternoon
in the medium-security GP dorm that served as my control, the pop song Sweet Dreams Are
Made of These by the Eurythmics was playing on the television. This is a catchy song, and
people familiar with it will often find themselves singing along or at least moving to the
music. But although many in the dorm were glued to the television, they were all sitting or
standing stock still. As I wrote in my field notes, “[t]hey were not moving. They were not
singing. They were not dancing, they were not swaying to the music.” Field Notes, July 4,
2007. The lone exception was one young man, plainly having difficulty retaining this level
of control, who was mouthing the words of the song with an otherwise straight face.
Overall, the effect was that of people fiercely willing themselves not to react—an effort that,
given the naturalness of responding to music, must have been extremely psychically costly.
As I wrote at the time, “this is totally in contrast to [K6G], which is often like a party. If
there is music [coming] from the television, people are dancing. They’re strutting around,
they’re hugging each other, they’re smiling and laughing and camping it up.” Field Notes,
July 4, 2007. I also describe this incident in Sharon Dolovich, Incarceration AmericanStyle, 3 HARV. L. & POL’Y REV. 237, 250 n.92 (2009).
222
See supra, note 210.
223
Corley, supra note 12, at 106.

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relationships, this certainly happens in GP.224 But as Stephen Donaldson
explains, such relationships are generally regarded as transgressive: “[I]n
ongoing sexual relationships, a Man is paired off or ‘hooked up’ with a
catcher; no other possibilities, such as a reciprocal gay pair, are
tolerated.”225 Thus, in GP, even those inclined to forge mutual and
consensual sexual relationships run a considerable risk in doing so because,
if the relationship were discovered, the pair would be labeled as gay and
may thus become “fair game” for sexual victimization by others.226 At best,
such liaisons, however mutual, meaningful, and fulfilling, must be
conducted covertly.
What is covert in GP is extremely overt in K6G. Again, K6G should
not be idealized. Jail is still jail, and the conditions in Men’s Central leave
much to be desired.227 But whatever else may be said about K6G, residents
face few if any corresponding pressures to suppress emotions, avoid forging
mutually supportive intimate relationships, or resist reciprocated sexual
impulses. In this regard, K6G is extremely unusual in the carceral context,
if not unique.
This freedom to express emotion yields numerous benefits for K6G
residents. It allows for the possibility of forging mutually supportive
interpersonal bonds, which can help people cope with the pressures and
challenges of imprisonment. It eases the psychological stress of being in
custody and allows for emotional as well as sexual release, thus promoting
a healthier mental state among unit residents. It opens the way for a sense
of community and mutual acceptance without exacting the high and
destructive price of gang membership. Consequently, as a day-to-day
matter, life in the K6G dorms is much less stressful and much more relaxed,
despite its location in the otherwise violent and volatile Men’s Central Jail.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the absence of pressure to suppress emotion
and exude a hard and controlled persona frees the residents of K6G to
alleviate the boredom of custody with moments of creativity and even
levity. Over the course of my research, from the vantage point of the
officers’ booth, I witnessed: a spontaneous dance competition performed to
224

“There is even consensual sex in prison. Many men may find partners, have sex as a
sexual outlet in an all-male world. . . . There is even affection—sometimes great affection.”
Terry A. Kupers, Rape and the Prison Code, in PRISON MASCULINITIES, supra note 12, at
111, 115.
225
Stephen “Donny” Donaldson, A Million Jockers, Punks, and Queens, in PRISON
MASCULINITIES, supra note 12, at 118, 120.
226
See supra Part II.D; see also WAYNE S. WOODEN & JAY PARKER, MEN BEHIND BARS
22 (1982).
227
See supra Part II.B (describing the many ways in which life in K6G is still
demoralizing and dangerous).

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a beat pounded out with spoons on the bunks; an improvised runway down
which residents, having devised new looks out of prison issue (light) blues,
strutted like fashion models; and crowds of residents in front of the
television dancing and singing along to whatever music video was playing,
while others in various places around the dorm watched or joined in. And
most memorably, one night I watched a wedding performed in one of the
dorms, complete with bride, groom, bridesmaids, mother of the bride,
justice of the peace, wedding dress, wedding rings, and a three-layer cake
made from items bought from the commissary. Among the most notable
features of this event was the astonishingly high style and sophistication of
the outfits that had been improvised out of county-issue sheets and clothing.
Virtually every person in the dorm joined in, either as a central participant,
a “guest” in the crowd, or simply an onlooker. This was a collective
enterprise, in anticipation of which the dorm was—there is no other way to
describe this—buzzing with excitement from 7:30 p.m., when the people
with roles to play in the drama began fashioning their outfits and preening
over hair and makeup at the bathroom mirror, until 12:30 a.m., when the
ceremony was completed, the cake was eaten, and the bride and bridegroom
had been ushered into a private “tent” made by draping sheets over a
bottom bunk.228 It is events like this, and the psychological and emotional
relief they provide from the otherwise depressing and oppressive experience
of being in jail, that help to explain several of the surprisingly positive
words—including “fun” or “wow,” “wild,” “crazy,” or “crazy fun,”
“creative,” and “party-like”—used by my subjects to describe life in the
dorms.229
The absence of any hypermasculinity imperative in K6G distinguishes
the unit from GP in other notable ways. For example, K6G residents do not
hesitate to voice complaints to jail officials about their treatment in custody,
whether by jail staff or other detainees—or to provide details to back up
their complaints.230 This feature represents a dramatic difference between
228
This marital bliss did not last long. Less than a week later, the “groom” was in the
hospital wing having contracted a staph infection and the “bride” was flirting with a trustie
who was distributing food at meal times.
229
See supra Part II.B; see also supra Part IV (arguing against the notion that K6Gs
“have it too good”).
230
A further difference: although plenty of people in K6G have sex for “store”—i.e.,
goods from the canteen—there are no pimps in K6G. Everyone keeps all they get for
themselves. This is very different from what is found in many men’s prisons, where those
who “own” weaker inmates will often pimp them out for their own personal benefit. In my
interviews, I asked interviewees about prostitution and pimping in K6G. Specifically, I
asked: How often do K6Gs trade sex for money . . . or other things? See Dolovich, supra
note 1, at 104 qq.71–72. I also asked: When K6Gs trade sex for money or other things, how
often do they keep the money or other things for themselves . . . and how often do they give

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K6G and GP. In carceral settings generally, complaining about one’s
circumstances can be regarded as a sign of weakness. Consistent with this
norm, jail officials assigned to the officers’ booths overlooking GP dorms
can pass an eight-hour shift with almost no one asking them for anything.
By contrast, K6Gs show no hesitation about asking for things.231 Because
there is no premium in K6G on seeming “hard or tough,” residents have no
reason to keep silent when they are unhappy—and, from what I observed,
many do not.232 This same lack of reticence applies to making formal
complaints. During one of my visits, the two classification officers in
charge of K6G received a stack of “kites” (notes sent out from the dorm to
the classification office) formally complaining about the behavior of an
officer on the floor where K6G is located. According to the complaints,
this officer had for some time been verbally abusive to unit residents,
frequently referring to them using derogatory terms (“you faggots,” etc.).
The kites were clearly the coordinated action of people who were tired of
this treatment, and they eventually resulted in the removal of the abusive
deputy.233
the money or other things to someone else? See id. at 104 qq.74–75. My respondents were
unanimous in reporting that in K6G, although there is plenty of prostitution (the unfortunate
term “store ho” is in widespread use), there is no pimping. People who trade sex for store do
it on their own initiative and keep 100% of the proceeds.
231
As one deputy put it, “the GP will go for an entire shift, eight hours, and almost no
one will ask for anything. [K6Gs], on the other hand, every 10 minutes are asking me for
this or that. Can I have a pass? Can I have pill call, can I have my mail?” Field Notes, July
4, 2007.
232
This readiness of K6Gs to voice their needs and to file complaints represents a
startling difference between K6G and GP. It further confirms that the prison culture of
hypermasculinity is absent from K6G—and that this absence gives rise to a living
environment that, despite the discomfort attending life in the Jail, is an easier,
psychologically healthier one than that experienced in GP.
233
This appropriate official reaction was in part due to the identity of the officers who
received the kites. Other officers may well have ignored the complaints. But the two
officers who run the unit, Senior Deputy Randy Bell and Deputy Bart Lanni, routinely treat
the people in K6G with respect, a disposition that includes taking their complaints seriously.
For a more extended discussion of the significance of these two officers and their respectful
attitude toward K6G’s residents, see infra Part III.B.3. As one of my respondents described
the incident:
We got [the officer] out. That was another one of our little collective things. He
came in one day and said, “All you faggots get on your bed.” We wrote a complaint
form, we all wrote complaint forms. The next day, he was off. The next day he came
back and he said—Got on the microphone, he said, “All you mother fuckers want to
write complaints against me? I’m here, I’m going to make your life a living hell.”
Int. 75, at A7. Instead, the kites prompted unannounced observation by senior Jail officials
of this staff member while he was on duty, and when the inappropriate behavior was
confirmed, he was removed from his post and reassigned. Other official steps may have also
been taken in response to the revelation of this misconduct—and arguably ought to have

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In K6G, in other words, there is no “anti-snitching” norm—a norm
that in GP arises from the fear of seeming weak, and from the knowledge
that violations of the norm may be punished with violence.234 In addition,
somewhat counterintuitively, K6G’s freedom from gang politics and the
pressure to perform a hypermasculine identity has the effect of making oneon-one physical altercations between dorm residents far more common in
K6G than in GP. In GP, there are few if any spontaneous one-on-one
displays of mutual aggression. This is because, in the Jail’s GP units, as in
the California prisons, the gangs have a monopoly on inmate-on-inmate
violence. If a prisoner in GP has a personal score to settle, he approaches
the senior representative (“rep”) of his gang in the unit.235 If the object of
his anger is a fellow gang member, he must ask permission to engage that
person in single hand-to-hand combat. If the score is with someone in
another gang, the rep will meet with the rep of the other person’s gang.
Typically, at this point, “there is some type of adjudication of the
complaint, then the guilty party gets a beat-down by his own race.”236 The
reason why ad hoc fighting is so tightly controlled lies in the cardinal rule
of the Jail’s GP: any unauthorized physical aggression must be met with an
instant violent response by all fellow members of the victim’s “race”
been, given what this incident revealed about the officer’s attitude toward people detained in
the Jail. Unfortunately, I am unable to say whether any further disciplinary steps were taken
in this case.
234
As one of my subjects explained:
[The K6Gs] will tell on you in a heartbeat . . . when somebody gets mad at them [and]
hit them, they run to the [officers’] booth [to report it] . . . . [T]hat’s the norm down
there. But in general population, you would be in real trouble. And if you was in
prison, you’d have to leave the yard or . . . go into a protective housing unit because
you couldn’t be out there.
Int. 140, at A5. There do, however, seem to be some limits on snitching enforced in K6G.
One of my subjects told of an experience he had while he was in the Twin Towers pod
reserved for the K6Gs found to have serious mental illness, where he was beaten up by a
fellow resident who suspected him of telling the deputies about alcohol and contraband
hidden in the cells, thus precipitating a search of the pod. See Int. 118, at H19–20 (“One of
the inmates accused me that I was the one who called the deputies . . . I got beat up real
bad.”). In addition, another subject described the way dorm residents will collude to prevent
a fistfight between residents from coming to the attention of the officers. As he explained,
people in the dorm will watch two “people start arguing and watch a fight escalate until it
becomes a fistfight . . . [then] we’ll all start clapping or something to make it seem like we
were celebrating something instead of someone fighting, to cover it up.” Int. 50, at G3. In
such cases, however, there is an instrumental reason for the subterfuge: if “two people get in
a fight, the whole dorm suffers” by losing privileges like phones or television. Id.
235
See supra Part II.C.
236
Notes from Juan Haines, San Quentin State Prison, to author (Jan. 12, 2012) (on file
with the author). On rare occasions, the gang reps may decide to let the two individuals fight
it out.

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against all members of the race of the assailant. In short, unauthorized
assaults across gang lines spark race riots, since the duty to jump in the
fight on the side of your own race is the paramount obligation of everyone
in GP.237
By contrast, aggression in K6G is much looser. No universal code
binds all residents. At the same time, the absence of strictures on emotional
expression releases the people in K6G to manifest a host of negative
feelings—irritability, annoyance, anger, resentment, hostility, etc.—which
can lead to open antagonism and aggression. What in GP would be
perceived as a dangerous and risky lack of self-control does not raise an
eyebrow in K6G. And the absence of the imperative to jump in when
someone of a person’s own race happens to be fighting someone of another
race means that others in the dorm have no stake in whether other people
fight or not—just as long as they can stay out of it.238 Perhaps
counterintuitively, this set of differences makes for a much more relaxed
environment. As one of my subjects explained it, “in K6G, I only have to
worry about me fighting with another person, [over] . . . a personal
issue.”239 By contrast, “[in] general population, if they jump, if the others
jump, I have to jump too.”240
True, in some ways, this freedom to fight makes for a more rancorous
living environment, as small irritations are more readily allowed to escalate
into yelling241 or physical altercations242 that in some cases involve serious
237

The absence of this imperative was a feature of K6G frequently mentioned with
appreciation and relief by my respondents.
238
Although depending on the circumstances, others may try to keep the officers from
seeing what is going on. See supra note 234.
239
Int. 47, at D7–8.
240
Id. at D8.
241
As one of my subjects described it, “Someone will wake someone up and they’ll be
like, ‘Get the F out of my area,’ or ‘shut the F up.’ You know, and the person will be like,
‘No, you shut the –.’ And then it starts like that. Really over nothing.” Int. 50, at G4.
242
Int. 123, at F19 (“I just disrespected somebody or said the wrong thing to somebody
and they just socked me one time. Knocked a tooth out, too, I remember that.”); Int. 140, at
B10 (“Yeah. I’ve been in a lot of fights in K6G. I don’t think I’ve ever lost one, but I’ve
been in them.”); Int. 119, at C3 (“They didn’t actually bite my leg. That wasn’t the first
move. We argued, we argued, and, you know, it was like a cat fight, kind of like. . . . They
went for a punch. So, we instantly started fighting, and they bit me in the face above the
eyebrow and broke the skin there, and then they bit me in the leg, because I was beating
them up, basically. So, when I was beating them up, you know, that was their only option.
And they fight dirty in jail regardless of where you are.”); Int. 53, at A1 (“I was punched
playing cards. . . . There was a gangbanger out there. So, we started arguing over cards, and
you, when you don’t expect it, it just happen. He just hit my ass. . . . I broke his nose.”); Int.
45, at B3 (“[I]t was a fight . . . . The person that hit the other person got put in the hole. And
it was just because the certain individual didn’t like, you know, queens. And, so, you know,

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violence.243 As a result, on the surface, the Jail’s GP can look much calmer
and more relaxed than K6G.244 But the responses of my subjects, together
with the clear desire of many non-K6Gs to get into the unit to escape the
pressures and politics of GP, indicate that this superficial assessment belies
the reality. The trade-offs were succinctly stated by one of my subjects:
I would rather go through the drama of the K[6G] dorm. I’d rather be woken up . . . in
the middle of the night with two people arguing . . . than go back to the mainline and
245
have to keep my shoes on, have to put my back against the wall.

F. CLARIFYING THE TERMS: VIOLENCE, SAFETY, HUMANITY
The foregoing discussion seems to raise a paradox: although K6G
dorms are more overtly antagonistic than GP, more chaotic, and more likely
to be the site of physical altercations, K6G’s residents—many of whom
have previously done time in GP, either in the Jail or in state prison or
both—uniformly feel safer and more able to relax in K6G than they would
in GP. That this situation seems paradoxical, however, only indicates the
need for a more precise description of the violence GP inflicts, the safety
K6G provides, and the relative humanity K6G represents.246

the gay boy beat up the queen and she got all scarred up and she had a bad bruise on her
face.”).
243
Int. 101, at A21 (“[T]his guy got sliced up—he was my homeboy—by this girl named
Ray-Ray, who’s a queen. And she just sliced him up and went to the hole and she got an
added charge . . . . They will hurt [you with] razors. I’ve seen a lot of razors.” In K6G?
“Yeah, the little razors. I don’t know how they give those to us, but, I mean, we all need
shaving. But they’ll hurt you with the razors.); Int. 111, at D4 (“I’ve seen people pull out
razors and use them to cut people in the face and all that before. I mean, people have broken
razors and used them.”); Int. 89, at D12 (“[I’ve seen] someone get his face bashed in with a
lock in a sock. You know, a big old can of roast beef inside a sock.”); Int. 89, at C14 (“I was
in [one of the K6G dorms], and these two, a couple, got into a fight. And she pulled out a
blade and just whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom—cut a hole right here in
his mouth. You could see right through. It was just horrible. There was blood
everywhere.”).
244
See Int. 89, at C6 (“[M]ore people are running their heads against the wall in K[6G]
than GP. Now, I say it like that because in GP, you may get your head ran against the
wall . . . . But in the K[6G] tank, you’re running your own head against the wall.”).
245
Int. 89, at C19. People who have done time in the Jail’s GP will speak of having to
“sleep with [their] shoes on” because they never knew when something would snap and they
would have to wake up fighting. Id. at D13. No one wanted to be caught in the middle of an
outbreak of collective violence without shoes. Hartman found a similar imperative in force
on his arrival at CSP Lancaster in the mid-1990s, where he learned that, among other
“bizarre and inane rules that most of [his] fellow prisoners regard[ed] as nearly
sacrosanct, . . . you aren’t supposed to walk out of the shower before putting your boots back
on. This is, ostensibly, because we all have to be prepared to fight at any time.” See
HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 156.
246
I thank Aziz Huq for pushing me on this point.

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As has been seen, K6Gs know they still face an ongoing threat of
physical violence in the K6G dorms. They might be the target of a random
assault by someone who is mentally ill. They might be hurt by someone to
whom they owe a debt. They might get into a brawl with someone whom
they provoked or who provoked them. At the same time, they do not fear
being the victim of sexual or physical predation because they are gay or
trans or do not otherwise fit the model of the tough alpha male. And they
do not fear being forced at a moment’s notice to engage in physical
violence against people with whom they have no issue—indeed, whom they
may affirmatively like and respect—in order to avoid either being
physically disciplined later on for failing to jump in, or seeming weak in the
eyes of men looking for ready victims.
Thus, as might be expected, to some extent the violence from which
K6Gs feel protected is physical violence: being raped, stabbed, beaten, or
otherwise harmed by fellow inmates who are policing compliance with the
gang code247 or otherwise looking to shore up their own images. But there
is another crucial dimension to the safety K6G provides—again, despite the
real possibility of bodily assault from a number of quarters—that is largely
separate from the threat of physical violence. I am referring here to the
psychological violence of life in GP, and the psychological relief to be had
from living in an environment where people need not be constantly on their
guard against saying or doing anything that might violate the culture’s strict
behavioral norms or otherwise expose themselves as weak and thus a target.
At its most extreme, the hypermasculinity imperative demands
constant vigilance by people who are continually being sized up by their
fellows for signs of weakness and vulnerability. This scrutiny can be
exhausting, and the demands it makes—that one be forever checking
oneself, suppressing natural instincts, and even looking for ways to exhibit
unprovoked aggression and hostility—may over time corrode one’s sense of
self and compromise one’s ability to connect with the best parts of one’s
own humanity. Some men in GP no doubt thrive on this culture: one can,
for example, imagine young men who have spent much of their lives
moving between the streets and juvenile facilities, and who know no other
way of being. But it seems fair to assume that most people in GP find this
brutalizing dynamic unwelcome and oppressive, and would prefer to live in

247

One long-term prisoner in the California prison system told me of “Cowboy,” a friend
of his at Folsom Prison in the late 1980s. Cowboy was a white man who one day received a
visit from a black woman. At the end of that visit, they “kissed goodbye.” For that
transgression of the racial divide, gang soldiers policing the color line “cut his neck open.”
Letter from Jeffrey Scott Long, San Quentin State Prison, to author (Feb. 2012) (on file with
the author).

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an environment where they could relax, drop the mask, and do their time in
peace.
K6G offers such an environment.
In K6G, there is no
hypermasculinity imperative, because there is no one in the unit with either
an investment in having other people behave a certain way or the broad
support required to implement a regime in which people are always being
watched and judged. When, on occasion, a newcomer tries to “start
something,” he is quickly shot down.248 This freedom from scrutiny and the
need to be on one’s guard is a large part of what makes the place feel so
safe. The sense of safety it confers is partly physical, because an
environment where hypervigilance is required is one in which a person may
be physically victimized if he fails to keep the mask in place. But again, it
is also psychological, because once people are able to relax the vigilance
and self-constraint, it becomes possible for them to stay connected to who
they are and to the essential aspects of their personhood. It is the possible
sundering of this connection that is part of what can make life in GP so
scary and degrading: scary because, where this pressure is the greatest, one
can lose a sense of who one is and become something frightening even to
oneself, and degrading because this demeaning posture—at best denying
one’s own humanity and at worst being the agent by which others lose
theirs—may sometimes be the only realistic option, given the conditions in
which people are held. That some men who are not gay will nonetheless
pretend to be gay to try to get into K6G and away from the Jail’s GP gives
some idea of how oppressive the experience of GP can be when this
pressure is at its height.
All this raises a question: if this is what violence and safety mean for
the people in K6G—and arguably, by extension, for many people in the
Jail’s GP—what would humane carceral conditions look like? The
experience of K6G suggests at least a partial answer to this question.
Humane conditions are those in which people feel safe both from the threat
of physical harm and from the need to be constantly on their guard, lest they
say or do anything that might suggest human vulnerability. Humane
conditions allow people to maintain and develop a connection to their own
identities and senses of self. In the sections that follow, I identify several
factors that have—almost accidentally—come together to make K6G a
relatively safe and humane environment in these three important respects
(i.e., protecting people from physical harm; affording them psychological
relief from the need for constant vigilance; and creating mechanisms by

248

K6G’s “easy-going program” is a big part of what makes it so appealing to many men
with a long history of time in GP, who feel the need for a break from the gang life that
governs in the rest of the Jail.

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which they can remain connected to—and develop—who they are as
people). As will be seen, this account suggests that the possibility of
genuinely humane conditions requires an institutional commitment, not
only to ensuring the physical safety of those in custody, but also to treating
them with fairness and respect, as people and not simply as inmates. To
regard those the state has incarcerated as somehow outside society’s moral
circle, as no longer entitled to the respect and consideration owed fellow
human beings, is the essence of dehumanization. A careful study of the
factors that explain the relative humanity of K6G begins to suggest what a
shift away from dehumanizing practices toward humane and humanizing
ones might require as a practical matter.
III. WHAT MAKES K6G K6G?
In the Jail’s GP, gang culture and the hypermasculinity imperative are
mutually reinforcing. The resulting environment is both scary and stressful,
even for those who manage to keep the mask from slipping. 249 In K6G, by
contrast, not only are there no gang politics, but there is no
hypermasculinity imperative. Residents are free to be themselves.250 The
unit is consequently much more relaxed and, though not without its
dangers, much safer and more humane than GP.251
What explains this dramatic difference, the absence in K6G of
destructive dynamics that are found not only in the Jail’s GP but to a greater

249
In such a climate, almost anyone can be a target. As Craig Haney reports, “one study
of a large and representative sample of prisoners found that fully one third of male prisoners
reported having been victimized through some form of physical harm” in the preceding six
months of their incarceration, and among those suffering from “mental disorders, the rate
was nearly half” of the sampled prisoners. Haney, supra note 14, at 128 (citing Nancy Wolff
and Jing Shi, Trauma in Incarcerated Persons, in HANDBOOK OF CORRECTIONAL MENTAL
HEALTH 277, 283 (Charles Scott ed., 2010)). In those facilities where the pressure for
hypermasculine performance is at its most intense, life in custody can be a daily hell for
those people most readily seen as weak. For example, Roderick Johnson, “a black gay man
with a gentle manner,” spent eighteen months in a Texas prison as a sex slave to the
Gangster Disciples prison gang. Adam Liptak, Ex-Inmate’s Suit Offers View into Sexual
Slavery in Prisons, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 16, 2004, at A1. Renamed “Coco” by the gang,
Johnson was “forced into oral sex and anal sex on a daily basis,” “bought and sold,” and
“rented” out for sex for the benefit of the gang. Id. During this period, Johnson was
repeatedly gang raped in the prison’s cells, stairwells, and showers. Id. A 2001 Human
Rights Watch report documented similar cases of sexual slavery in prisons in Illinois,
Michigan, California, and Arkansas, as well as Texas, where, according to prisoners’ reports,
sexual slavery is “commonplace in the system’s more dangerous prison units.” HUMAN
RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 87, at 14.
250
See supra note 214.
251
I use these terms in the sense just explored. See supra Part II.F.

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or lesser degree in many men’s carceral facilities around the country?252 It
is tempting to try to explain the unusual climate of K6G by the sexual
identity of its residents. Later in this Part, I consider the various forms such
an argument might take, and assess their respective explanatory powers. As
will be seen,253 sexual identity is not irrelevant here. But it would be
misguided to look no further than this factor to explain K6G’s distinctive
environment. K6G is full of people well acquainted with the GP code.
Many have spent years in GP units in the Jail or California prisons or both,
pretending to be straight to avoid being victimized or escaping the worst
effects of this cultural system by hooking up with a stronger prisoner,
exchanging regular sexual access and obedience for protection from assault
by others.254 For people with direct experience of GP suddenly to relax and
engage openly in the very behaviors that they know would endanger them
elsewhere in the Jail, something more has to be true about their new
environment besides simply close proximity to other gay men.
That “something more” is simple: unlike the men in the Jail’s GP,
people in K6G independently feel sufficiently safe and protected that they
do not have to posture or look to the gangs for protection. The puzzle then
becomes: how, in a facility as violent and dangerous as Men’s Central, have
the people in K6G come to feel secure enough to abandon many of the
artifices on which men in GP routinely rely for self-protection? Why do
K6Gs feel largely able to be themselves while men in GP often feel
compelled to work hard to deny the very things—the emotions, the needs,
the vulnerabilities—that make them human? There is no single answer to
this puzzle. Instead, my research suggests several factors that have come
together to help create the conditions in which the people in K6G feel safe
enough to relax and be themselves—factors that are only contingently
connected to the sexual identity of people in the unit. These factors
include: (1) an institutional commitment to rigorous implementation of the
consent decree that first established K6G; (2) the fact that for almost its
entire history, the unit has been run by the same two officers, who have
treated unit residents with respect, evenhandedness, and concern for their
well-being; and (3) the small size of the unit, which, together with a high
recidivism rate and the automatic reclassification to K6G of former unit
residents who return to the Jail, has fostered over time a sense of
community and personal connection among those in K6G.255 There is also

252

See supra notes 30, 197.
See infra Part III.C.
254
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 11–19 (explaining the process by which weaker
prisoners may “hook up” with more powerful prisoners in a protective pairing).
255
See infra Parts III.B.1–3.
253

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a possible fourth factor: the degree of attention K6G has received from
outside organizations, media outlets, and even researchers like me.
Arguably, none of these factors alone would have been enough to
make K6G’s relative humanity possible. None, moreover, was the intended
result of deliberate efforts to reduce the appeal of gang politics or
hypermasculine performance. Instead, each emerged almost accidentally in
the wake of the 1985 court order that created K6G.256 Together, they have
helped create a relatively safe space in which hypermasculine performance
is unnecessary. This safe space represents the primary background
condition without which, I argue, no humane carceral environment can
emerge. At the same time, the K6G experience demonstrates that, once the
conditions of safety are in place, the resulting culture can have its own
positive second-order effects, enabling the subsequent emergence of
multiple avenues for healthy self-expression, which can in turn help to
mitigate the destructive and dehumanizing effects of imprisonment and
further promote a relatively healthy climate for the people inside.257 In
short, to a significant extent, K6G is a case of accidental humanity
begetting a virtuous circle of desirable effects, a vivid contrast to the too
frequent inhumanity of incarceration in American prisons and jails and the
vicious circle of violence and abuse it can yield.
The sections that follow explore the four distinct factors just noted,
which inadvertently have helped make K6G what it is.258 First, however, I
address a question that the contrasting accounts of GP and K6G are likely to
raise: whether K6G’s population is sufficiently similar to GP’s to warrant
comparative judgments.
A. APPLES TO APPLES? LEVELS OF CRIMINALITY IN GP AND
K6G
Above, I describe two very different carceral environments. GP is
governed by gang politics and full of men striving for successful
hypermasculine performance. K6G, although less overtly calm, is a safer,
more relaxed, and less scary place to be. One obvious question thus arises:
to what extent are the populations sufficiently similar to allow meaningful
comparison? If it turned out that everyone in the Jail’s GP is awaiting trial
for murder and other violent crimes, whereas people in K6G are uniformly

256

For a discussion of what makes the implementation of a court-ordered consent decree
“accidental,” see infra Part III.B.5.
257
If the specifics of that emergent culture reflect in some way the sexual identity of its
residents, they are still best understood, not as the cause of the collective feeling of safety
and security in the unit, but as its effects. For more on this point, see infra Part III.C.4.
258
See infra Part III.B.5.

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facing charges for drug use, prostitution, and petty theft, the relatively safe
and humane character of K6G might be far less puzzling.
An ideal response to this inquiry would cite data concerning the
criminal history and current charges of the people in GP and K6G at the
time I conducted my research, demonstrating parity in these regards.
Unfortunately, such data is unavailable. The Jail does not collect and
maintain such information, and the size of the institution (a daily average
population of 19,000 people259), combined with the scale of the operation
(an average of 166,000 people cycle through the Jail every year260) and the
lengthy criminal histories of many of the people in custody at any one
time,261 make it difficult to draw conclusions about the character of a given
housing unit at a particular moment. Indeed, given the scale and turnover,
what is striking about life in the Jail is the seeming continuity of the cultural
character and social dynamics of the two environments I describe.262
I can thus offer no comprehensive quantitative data to confirm that the
two populations are sufficiently alike as to either criminal histories or
violent propensities to warrant comparison. Still, there are grounds for
thinking that K6G’s relatively humane character cannot be explained solely
by the comparatively nonviolent nature of those who wind up in the unit.
To some extent, the validity of the comparison can be seen by considering
the security profiles of the respective populations. Like all carceral
facilities, the Jail has a classification system that sorts detainees into
security levels. In this case, available levels range from 1 to 9. During the
time of my research, levels 1, 2, and 3 roughly corresponded to
minimum/low security; 4, 5, and 6 to medium security; and 7, 8, and 9 to
maximum/high security. (This allocation has since shifted slightly, so that

259

See supra note 1; Dolovich, supra note 1, at 19 & n.100.
See id. at 19 & n.101.
261
In my sample alone, six people—just under 20% of the total—reported having been in
jail or prison more than twenty times.
262
Although the bulk of my research was conducted during one concentrated period,
many of my subjects had a lengthy institutional history, both at the Jail and elsewhere. The
interviews strongly suggested that the character of the K6G unit has been consistent over
time. Moreover, the impressions of the unit conveyed during my interviews and
observations are consistent with what I saw and heard from dorm residents during visits to
the unit both before and after the summer of 2007. As for the character of GP, what I
learned during the period of my research regarding the character of the Jail’s GP units is
entirely consistent with descriptions of life in the Jail—and in the California prisons more
broadly—as reported by others familiar with the experience as well as with written accounts
of life in men’s carceral facilities more generally from the 1970s, see Rideau, supra note 8,
right up to the present day. See, e.g., sources cited supra note 29.
260

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4s are now considered as low security and 7s as medium.263) The security
level to which a given individual is assigned depends on a variety of
factors, including criminal charge, criminal history, escape risk, and
previous behavior in jail or prison.
K6Gs are assigned security classifications with the same intake
instrument and thus on the same basis as those housed in GP. The ratios are
always shifting in a facility that turns over its population almost nine times
every year,264 but data gathered on two random days comparing the average
security level of K6G and GP suggests that although GP has a relatively
higher percentage of 7s and 8s,265 K6G still has a fairly sizeable percentage
of 7s and 8s,266 as well as a higher percentage of 5s and 6s than GP.267
Moreover, it may be that too much should not be made of the relatively
higher proportion of 7s and 8s in GP as compared with K6G, given that
K6G, in direct contrast to GP, houses their highest security residents in the
same open plan (i.e., dorm) environment as everybody else.268
This is a telling difference. A person’s security level reflects the
relative danger he is perceived to represent. The higher the security level,
the greater the threat a person is thought to pose and the greater the
expectation that he will be violent, predatory, or otherwise act out or put
others at risk. For this reason, high-security prisoners are viewed as most in
need of a restrictive housing environment. In GP, those classified as low

263
See Telephone Interview with Randy Bell, Senior Deputy, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t
(Mar. 29, 2012). This move seems more likely driven by a need for greater flexibility in
housing than by an affirmative determination that 7s are no longer as serious a security threat
as previously supposed.
264
Over the past several years, L.A. County has had an average daily count of 19,000,
see supra note 1, and an average annual admission rate of approximately 166,000. See
Dolovich, supra note 1, at 19 n.101. These numbers have dipped somewhat recently, but are
expected to increase significantly with the implementation of the Realignment. See supra
note 1.
265
E-mail from Bart Lanni, Deputy, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, to author (June 9, 2012,
9:39 PM PST) (reporting a breakdown of 30% 7s and 6.4% 8s in K6G as compared with
39% 7s and 14% 8s in the Jail more generally); E-mail from Bart Lanni, Deputy, L.A. Cnty.
Sheriff’s Dep’t, to author (Apr. 5, 2012, 9:13 AM PST) (reporting a breakdown of 31% 7s
and 6.7% 8s in K6G as compared with 40% 7s and 14% 8s in the Jail more generally).
266
See supra note 265.
267
E-mail from Deputy Bart Lanni, Deputy, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, to author (June
9, 2012. 9:39 PM PST) (reporting a breakdown of 8.8% 5s and 42.9% 6s in K6G as
compared with 5.9% 5s and 32.5% 6s in the Jail more generally); E-mail from Deputy Bart
Lanni, Deputy, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, to author (April 5, 2012, 9:13 AM PST)
(reporting a breakdown of 7.8% 5s, and 38% 6s in K6G as compared with 6% 5s and 30% 6s
in the Jail more generally).
268
The exception is the 9s, who are automatically classified as K10s and housed in
solitary confinement (a.k.a. ad seg) whatever their sexual identity.

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and medium security may be housed in a dorm setting (i.e., the least
restrictive housing environment). However, this less restrictive housing is
generally thought inappropriate for the high-security prisoners, who are
housed only under conditions of administrative segregation (the level 9s) or
in two- or four-man cells (formerly the level 7s and 8s; today, just the level
8s).269
As in GP, the security levels in K6G run the full range from 1 to 9.
Yet in K6G at the time of my research in 2007, the 7s and 8s—who if they
had been in GP would have been regarded as ineligible for dorm living—
were placed in the K6G dorms like everyone else.270 In 2007, the size of
K6G was around 350 people, and the unit occupied three dorms. At that
time, the officers in charge of the unit allocated residents to the three dorms
roughly according to security level, with 1s, 2s, and 3s in one dorm; 4s, 5s,
and 6s, in another; and 7s and 8s in the third.271 These divisions were not
always precise, since the population was not always evenly split between
the three groups. Indeed, at times, when the daily count is high enough, the
unit takes over a fourth dorm, which in the summer of 2007 necessarily
meant the mixing of security levels even when there was an effort at
separation. Moreover, the inevitable emergence of interpersonal enmities, a
problem in any carceral environment, meant that the officers would often
need to house two people with the same security level in different dorms,
thus requiring the dorms to be integrated by security level to some degree.
Still, as a day-to-day matter, K6G did feature three dorms, one of which—
call it Dorm A—was made up of primarily 7s and 8s. Because of the way
these classifications are made, this meant that there was a dorm in K6G
housing a group of ninety people or more, many of whom had done serious
prison time and were found at intake to require a highly restrictive custodial
setting. Yet in K6G, this group of people routinely lived in the least
restrictive housing option available in Men’s Central—and today the 7s and
8s are mixed in with everyone else. That the unit as a whole is nonetheless
widely regarded as safe and secure suggests that it is not the security level

269
Depending on what housing is available, people classified to medium security might
be housed in dorms or cells, but people classified as high security will never be housed in
dorms. See Telephone Interview with Bart Lanni, Deputy, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t (Mar.
29, 2012).
270
Even in K6G, level 9s have always been placed in solitary confinement, and thus have
the same housing as they would if they were in GP.
271
Bell and Lanni have since discontinued this practice, which means that people of all
security levels are integrated in the K6G dorms, with the exception of the 9s, who are
automatically placed in ad seg. See Telephone Interview with Bart Lanni, Deputy, L.A.
Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t (Mar. 29, 2012).

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of the people in K6G as compared with those in GP that explains K6G’s
relatively humane character.
The previous K6G strategy of concentrating people with high security
classifications in Dorm A did yield a more aggressive environment than the
other K6G dorms;272 it was, for example, clear from observation that Dorm
A was the site of more one-on-one physical altercations than the other two
dorms. This feature of Dorm A appeared to be well-known among unit
residents: my interview subjects reported that Dorm A was known among
K6Gs as the “Thunderdorm.” However—and here is the key point for our
purposes—the view of K6G’s relative safety and security was no different
in Dorm A than in the other dorms. Instead, the assessment of the K6G
experience was fairly uniform,273 suggesting that the relatively relaxed
character of K6G more generally was enjoyed by residents of Dorm A as
well as those of Dorms B and C, despite the fact that they were living in a
dorm setting among many and even a majority of people classified by the
Jail as maximum security.
It thus seems mistaken to think that the differences between GP and
K6G may be wholly explained by the relatively non-violent or low-security
character of the people in K6G. Nor are the K6Gs unfamiliar with life in
GP. Of my sample, over half had previously done time in GP, whether in
L.A. County, state prison, or elsewhere. K6G also has its share of gang
members, some of whom demonstrated to me how easily they are able to
switch from their natural demeanor into the self-presentation of hard-core
gangster when the occasion required. It even appeared, from his answers to
interview questions and from things others told me, that at least one of my
272
It would be interesting to know how the integration of K6G’s dorms by security
level—implemented after the period of my research—affected life in the unit.
273
One piece of data indicating this relative uniformity came from answers to a
particular question: If you had to give five words to describe life in K6G, what would they
be? See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 102 q.35. The answers given were classified into
“positive,” “negative,” and “neutral.” My interview sample fortuitously turned out to divide
roughly equally between the three dorms. I interviewed twelve people from Dorm A, ten
people from Dorm B (the mostly medium-security dorm), and eleven people from Dorm C
(the mostly minimum-security dorm). The results were as follows:
Positive Words
Negative Words
Neutral Words
Dorm A
25
18
12
Dorm B
24
12
13
Dorm C
21
22
7
And perhaps even more notable were some of the positive words offered by residents of
Dorm A. Despite living in the “Thunderdorm,” some of my interview subjects used words
like “relaxing,” “peaceful,” “happ[y],” “friendly,” “less stressful,” “fun,” “delightful,”
“enjoyable most of the time,” “comfortable,” “easy,” “safe,” “respectful,” and “more
relaxed” to describe life in Dorm A.

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subjects was a “shot caller,” i.e., a high-ranking gang member, for one of
the prison gangs. At least one of my subjects had served twenty-two years
for murder. Eleven of the thirty-three people I interviewed had served more
than five years in prison, and five had served at least twelve years in
prison—and in the California state prisons, it bears noting, there is no K6G,
which means that when my subjects were in prison, they were not
segregated from GP as they are in the Jail.
Admittedly, these features of K6G’s population do not establish a
perfect match with GP in terms of criminal history, carceral exposure, or
violent tendencies. And as will be seen in Part III.C, it does seem
reasonable to assume that K6G has a higher proportion of residents who are
unlikely to be successful at performing a hypermasculine identity, and thus
more likely to be victims of the GP culture than its promoters. But to
motivate a meaningful comparison, it is not necessary that K6G and GP be
identical as to their populations’ collective tendencies to aggression and
predation. It is only necessary that the populations be sufficiently similar as
to criminal and carceral histories and violent tendencies that the unique
character of K6G demands an explanation. And the foregoing discussion at
a minimum makes clear that K6G houses plenty of people who are familiar
with “the game”—i.e., life in GP—and have profiles that would ordinarily
have landed them in high-security settings.
Some may point to other features of K6G as evidence that the two
contexts do not bear comparison. For example, in K6G, once people are
identified as predators, they are immediately removed from the unit and
placed in administrative segregation or its equivalent, whereas in GP, it is
the victims who are more likely to be removed after an incident. This
difference means that GP is likely to have a higher ongoing concentration
of predators than K6G. Or it might be argued the comparison is inapt
because the Jail plainly invests more in keeping K6G safe than it does for
GP. But to invoke these distinctions here is to confuse features of the
institutional commitment to keeping K6G safe—i.e., the program’s
design—with the question of whether the populations are comparable as an
initial matter. If there are fewer predators in K6G because the Jail removes
them as soon as they emerge, or because the Jail invests more in preventing
predation in K6G, this welcome feature does not reflect an essential
difference in the population characteristics of the two units, but a
programmatic difference in the way the Jail chooses to respond to predatory
behavior.274 Indeed, the fact that predators are immediately removed from
K6G only reinforces my claim that the populations are sufficiently similar

274

I thank Jed Shugerman for helpful conversation on this point.

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to bear comparison, since it shows that, absent external intervention, each
unit is prone to be a site of predation against weaker inmates.
There are certainly plenty of people in K6G without lengthy criminal
histories, who are facing charges for non-violent or other relatively nonserious crimes or do not have extensive experience behind bars.275 But the
same is also true of GP. The difference is that those first- or second-timers
who get sent to GP find themselves in a scary, stressful, potentially
dangerous environment in which a lack of experience and an ignorance of
cultural norms can be a serious liability, while those newcomers who end
up in K6G will do their time in an environment that, although in many ways
“nasty” and “horrible” (as one K6G first-timer put it276), is nonetheless, in
the words of two other K6G first-timers, “peaceful,” “controlled,”277 and
even “fun.”278
The question is how to explain the difference. In what follows, I
explore the main factors that have come together to make K6G’s residents
feel sufficiently safe and secure not to have to resort to the self-protective
mechanisms of hypermasculine posturing and gang involvement—factors
that, as will be seen, are only contingently connected to the sexual identity
of the people in the unit.
B. CREATING A SAFE SPACE IN THE L.A. COUNTY JAIL
1. Relatively Impermeable Boundaries
The lawsuit that produced K6G arose as a challenge to the procedures
then in place for housing gay men in the Jail. Prior to 1985, there was some
effort to keep homosexual prisoners segregated from the general population,
with one housing module in the Jail set aside for their exclusive use.
However, this early program suffered from profound design flaws. On the
one hand, no efforts were made to keep gay detainees separate from GP
detainees when they were outside the dorms. This meant that gay prisoners
were still vulnerable to predation during the admissions process; in the
court-line holding cells; and in transit to and from court, the infirmary, pill
call, the visiting room, or elsewhere in the facility.279 On the other hand,

275
Although it is worth noting that only six people out of the thirty-three I interviewed
had been in Jail only once or twice before, and only three were in Jail for the first time.
276
Int. 49, at E4.
277
Int. 93, at D5.
278
Int. 88, at A8.
279
See First Amended Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief at 7–8, Robertson
v. Block, No. 82 1442 WPG (Px) (C.D. Cal. Apr. 12, 1982); Dolovich, supra note 1, at 21–
23 (explaining the origins of K6G).

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the program lacked controls for ensuring that only homosexuals280 were
admitted to the unit.281 As a consequence, all a would-be predator needed
to do to gain access to potential victims was to aver his homosexuality on
entrance to the Jail.282
The consent decree that settled the case addressed both these concerns.
It committed the Jail to adopting practices that would keep K6Gs physically
separate from GPs when moving through the facility. And it created a twostage classification process that required classification officers to interview
every person who claimed to be gay on admission to the Jail, to assess the
veracity of that claim.283 Both these components are still in place today and
are key to the success of the enterprise. First, policies have been
implemented to manage the risk of detainee movement whenever K6Gs are
outside the dorms. When in the visiting room, for example, K6Gs are
seated in the first row of booths,284 directly in the sight line of the
deputies.285 In the court-processing line, K6Gs are kept in a specifically
designated holding cell, and en route to the courthouses, they sit in the front
seat of the vans, protected where possible by wire cages.286 Until recently,
280

I realize that using terms like “homosexual” and “gay” in the way I do risks implying
that it is possible both to determine who is “really” gay and to separate out those who “are”
gay from those who are not. The formulations employed here thus court charges of both
essentializing and oversimplifying the inherently fluid and even mercurial character of samesex attraction. Even as to those men who self-identify as gay, there is a danger inherent in
any effort to distinguish on the basis of sexual identity: that of equating characteristics
stereotypically associated with a given identity with the identity itself, thereby making
invisible those who, although they do self-identify, lack those characteristics conventionally
associated with gay men. See Russell Robinson, Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity,
Race, and Incarceration, 99 CALIF. L. REV. 1309, 1345, 1359 (2011). I address these
concerns in more detail elsewhere. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 64–81. Here, I adopt the
construction employed by the Jail, by the ACLU lawyers who eventually brought suit
challenging the conditions I describe, and by the consent decree discussed in the text.
281
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 21–22 (describing the design flaws of the Jail’s preK6G housing program for gay detainees).
282
Interview with Bart Lanni, Deputy Sheriff, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, in L.A., Cal.
(Feb. 11, 2010).
283
For a detailed account of this process, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 25–43.
284
In Men’s Central, all visits are non-contact. Detainees sit on stools facing a glass wall
and speak via handsets with their visitors, who are seated on the other side of the glass. The
absence of contact visits was challenged by the ACLU of Southern California, but the
constitutionality of the practice was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court. See Block v.
Rutherford, 468 U.S. 576 (1984).
285
The L.A. County Jail is administered by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Most
custodial staff at the Jail are deputy sheriffs, who rotate between staffing the Jail and
patrolling the County.
286
Several of these procedures, including segregation in the Men’s Central court line and
en route to the courthouses, were provided for in the original court decree. That decree also

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before medications began to be distributed in the dorms themselves, K6Gs
were brought to pill call as a group, one dorm at a time, and monitored by
deputies as they waited in the hallway to see the nurse. And whenever
K6Gs move through the facility for any reason—to the classroom,287 the
infirmary, the visiting room, or the court line—they must be escorted by a
deputy.
This last measure is particularly significant. The combination of
extreme crowding and chronic understaffing in the Jail means that in most
cases, when detainees are moving between their housing units and other
parts of the facility, they are unescorted. It is standard when walking
through the halls of the Jail to pass lines of unescorted detainees en route
from one part of the facility to another.288 There are only two exceptions to
this rule. The first is the K10s, the facility’s highest security inmates, who
are always escorted (in shackles) when out of their cells. The other is the
K6Gs.289
Even with deputies as escorts, when K6Gs are outside the dorms, they
are frequently subjected to verbal harassment of various sorts—catcalls,
whistling, explicitly homophobic epithets, etc.—by the GP inmates whose
paths they cross, and even by some deputies.290 But the rule that K6Gs may
not be outside the dorms unescorted by an officer is strictly observed. As a
consequence, for the most part, K6Gs are kept from physical contact with
GPs and thus protected from physical assault by them.291 Although there

provided for the segregation of “homosexual inmates” while they are at “the court facilities
for which the Sheriff is responsible and are visually checked for their well-being as often as
court routine permits.” Consent Decree at 7, Robertson v. Block, No. 82 1442 WPG (Px)
(C.D. Cal. July 22, 1985) (on file with the author). Unfortunately, I was not able to establish
whether and to what extent this segregation and regular monitoring is actually effected in the
various courtrooms to which L.A. County detainees may be sent.
287
There is a classroom allocated for the exclusive use of K6G. It is through this
classroom that Senior Deputy Randy Bell and Deputy Bart Lanni, K6G’s classification
officers, run what they call the SMART program (for Social Mentoring and Academic
Rehabilitative Training), which features an array of programming exclusively for the K6Gs.
For further discussion of this program and consideration of the objection that such
programming is only a way to paper over the violence of incarceration with empty reforms,
see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 24 n.139.
288
It bears noting that in all my time in the Jail, I never felt the slightest bit of unease
when encountering unescorted detainees.
289
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 25 n.142 (discussing the views of Jail deputies
regarding this perceived special treatment).
290
See supra note 108; Dolovich, supra note 1, at 57–60 (discussing the routine verbal
harassment of K6Gs by GPs and custodial staff when they are outside the dorms).
291
Although they are, unfortunately, sometimes spit at by GPs.

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are exceptions,292 the relative impermeability of the physical boundaries
between K6Gs and GPs means that, despite the inmate code that defines
gay men and trans women as available for victimization, Jail procedure
largely keeps at bay any would-be GP predators.
Alongside the policies for keeping K6Gs safe from harm when outside
the dorms, the two-stage K6G classification process also keeps the unit
relatively free from internal predators.293 Anyone who succeeds in being
classified to K6G who proves to pose a serious threat of physical harm to
others is immediately removed from the dorms and housed in one of the
single cells that serve as K6G’s disciplinary wing—or, in the case of
someone found to be extremely dangerous, sent to K10, the Jail’s highest
security designation, and subjected to single-celling and other security
measures.294
The two-step classification process enhances the physical safety of the
people in K6G. The scrutiny given those who claim to qualify for
admission helps to screen out would-be predators seeking access to
potential victims.295 And any prisoners in K6G who are tempted to take
advantage of their proximity to people who would be prone to victimization
in GP know that they risk immediate removal, whether to GP if their
behavior calls into question the veracity of their initial claims to be gay, or,
if not, to the unit’s disciplinary wing. Taken together with the measures
that maintain the physical boundary between K6Gs and GPs when K6Gs
are out of the dorms, these efforts contribute to a strong feeling of physical

292

I learned of one such exception during my time in the Jail, from an interview subject
who reported being raped in the K6G court-line holding cell in Men’s Central by a GP
inmate who threatened him with a razor. This assault was made possible by two flaws in the
design of the court-line area. First, the holding cells have revolving entrances with
horizontal metal bars like those one might see in a subway station, which allow someone to
enter simply by pushing the bars. As in a subway, the rotation is one-way. Once someone
has entered the cell, there is no exit without the assistance of an officer with the key. And
second, the cell designated for K6Gs is not in the direct sight-line of the officers, which
creates the opportunity for GPs or other non-K6G prisoners to enter the cell freely if they
choose without being seen by a deputy. The problem with this layout, in other words, is that
it makes K6Gs accessible to enterprising GP inmates without any deputies necessarily
keeping watch. It is therefore crucial that this configuration be changed.
293
See supra Part II.A.
294
The original consent decree stipulated that no one properly classified to K6G may be
removed from the unit as punishment for disciplinary infractions. See Stipulation and
Request for Dismissal Order at 5, Robertson v. Block, No. 82 1442 WPG (Px) (C.D. Cal.
July 17, 1985) (“Under no circumstances is the classification process to be used as a
disciplinary tool.”).
295
As noted, this problem plagued earlier efforts by Jail administrators to segregate gay
detainees from predatory GPs. It also compromised similar efforts in New York City’s
Rikers Island facility. See supra note 43.

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security among K6G residents—and have unexpectedly helped to create a
space in which K6Gs have felt free to abandon the hypermasculine
posturing that is a staple of life in the Jail’s GP.296
2. Trust, Communication, and Mutual Respect Between K6G’s Residents
and Its Supervising Officers
The hypermasculinity imperative prevails in contexts where men who
seem weak are at risk of victimization. That this imperative should govern
where men live day and night under the control and authority of “guards”
responsible for their well being297 may at first seem curious: is it not the job
of correctional officers (COs) to keep prisoners safe, thereby making it
unnecessary for the people in custody to take responsibility for their own
protection? Unfortunately, the state routinely fails to fulfill this obligation,
forcing prisoners to fall back on their own resources.298 Where there ought
to be channels of trust and open communication between COs and prisoners
through which officers could hear of potential dangers and take steps to
avert them, there is instead in too many carceral institutions a wall of
silence and mistrust.
Many men in custody have learned from experience that COs are often
neither willing nor able to ensure prisoners’ safety.299 Efforts to enlist
official aid frequently bear little fruit in terms of increased protection, and
indeed may only earn those seeking help a reputation as a “snitch” and
therefore as weak and contemptible—a recipe for victimization. As a
result, even those officials who might be inclined to take protective
296
It might be wondered why, given that this program was implemented pursuant to a
court order, the features just described should be considered “accidental.” I address this
issue below. See infra Part III.B.5.
297
This responsibility is both a constitutional imperative and a moral one. See, e.g.,
Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 833 (1994) (“Having incarcerated persons with
demonstrated proclivities for anti-social criminal, and often violent, conduct, having stripped
them of virtually every means of self-protection and foreclosed their access to outside aid,
the government and its officials are not free to let the state of nature take its course.”
(internal citations omitted)); Sharon Dolovich, Cruelty, Prison Conditions, and the Eighth
Amendment, 84 N.Y.U. L. REV. 881, 921–22 (2009) (arguing that when the state opts to
incarcerate convicted offenders as punishment, it is committing itself to providing for
prisoners’ basic needs in an ongoing way while they are in custody).
298
See, e.g., John J. Gibbons & Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, Confronting Confinement: A
Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, 22 WASH U. J.L. &
POL’Y 385 (2006) (describing routine violence in prisons and jails).
299
Prisoners at risk of rape who seek protection from correctional officers report being
advised to “fight or fuck”—that is, to fight their aggressors or suffer the consequences.
Robertson, supra note 164, at 33; see also James E. Robertson, “Fight or F . . .” and
Constitutional Liberty: An Inmate’s Right To Self-Defense When Targeted By Aggressors, 29
IND. L. REV. 339 (1995).

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measures to keep vulnerable prisoners safe will often hear nothing even
from those individuals who are most at risk, and will thus be unable to
intervene. Under these circumstances, it is unsurprising that many people
in custody rarely feel sufficiently secure to relax their own vigilance.
If this unhealthy dynamic is to be overcome in any carceral context,
responsible COs must be committed to ensuring the safety and well-being
of the people in their custody, and the people in custody must in turn trust
COs’ ability to do so. This latter requirement may be especially difficult to
meet. The adversarial “us” versus “them” mentality that often exists
between officers and detainees in carceral facilities, combined with high
recidivism rates, means that many people in custody will have learned over
time to regard COs with distrust and even scorn. They are thus not likely to
see custody staff as allies.
Yet remarkably, in K6G, the wall of mistrust and hostility between
COs and detainees has been breached, at least as to the two classification
officers assigned to the unit. This welcome development arose partly by
luck. For almost its entire history, K6G has been administered by the same
two officers, Senior Deputy Randy Bell and Deputy Bart Lanni, who have
committed themselves to making K6G as humane an environment as
possible.300 The resulting dynamics between these two officers and K6G’s
residents is a further important factor contributing to the general sense of
safety and security in K6G. The primary responsibility of these officers is
classification: it is their job to conduct in-depth interviews of each person
who at intake answered the question are you homosexual? in the
affirmative, in order to determine which of those people in fact satisfy
K6G’s admissions criteria. But Officers Bell and Lanni also wear many
other hats. Among other things, they run the SMART program, an
educational program of their own devising, exclusively for K6Gs;301
manage the many providers who serve the K6G population;302 maintain

300
Perhaps the strongest evidence of this ongoing commitment is that both officers chose
not to try to promote within the Sheriff’s Department, since promotion usually brings a
transfer within the Department, and neither Bell nor Lanni wanted to leave the unit.
301
For more on the SMART program, see supra note 287; Dolovich, supra note 1, at 24
n.138.
302
These providers include the L.A. Department of Health, whose staff, permanently
assigned to K6G, provide testing for sexually transmitted infections, including syphilis,
hepatitis C, and HIV, see Dolovich supra note 1, at 92 n.406 (explaining the reason for the
presence at K6G’s secondary classification stage of the city’s health department);
caseworkers from Tarzana Treatment Center, which provides reentry services and drug
treatment for HIV-positive detainees on their release; an on-site psychiatric technician;
teachers from the Hacienda LaPuente School District, who have in the past held the contract
to provide GED classes in the Jail; and staff from the Center for Health Justice, who provide

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security in the classroom, holding cell, and hallway outside their office;
monitor goings-on in the dorms (although they are somewhat hampered in
doing so by the physical separation between their office and the dorms,
which are on different floors); mediate disputes between dorm residents;
and provide general assistance and even counseling for those dorm
residents who seek them out.
In all these capacities, these two officers unfailingly treat K6G’s
residents with respect and without judgment or prejudice, which is
especially notable given the extreme discomfort many other deputies
plainly feel at interacting with gay or trans detainees. In return, Bell and
Lanni have earned the trust and respect of many people in the unit, who will
not hesitate to bring to their attention problems needing resolution.
Several structural features of K6G have come together to enable the
mutual trust between these two officers and the populations K6G serves.
First and foremost, no one gets into K6G without first having an extended
conversation with Bell or Lanni or both officers together. This exchange
and the detailed file it yields form a foundation for future interactions.
Second, the unfortunately high recidivism rates and the fact that anyone
previously classified to K6G will be automatically sent straight to K6G on
return trips to the Jail means that these two officers will interact on a fairly
regular basis with people in the unit. Although people who have previously
been classified to K6G are not reinterviewed on return trips, Bell and Lanni
will generally talk to them (and often express unhappiness at seeing them
back in jail), thus reestablishing some connection. This means that, at any
given time, everyone in K6G will have personally interacted with one or
both of these officers on their way into the unit. Everyone knows this, and
many people in the unit have experienced directly the evenhandedness with
which Bell and Lanni treat K6G’s residents. The effect is a collective sense
that these two officers are on the side of the residents. If not everyone
shares the general appreciation for Bell and Lanni felt in K6G, that a
majority seems to do so appears enough to create a bond of trust and mutual
respect and a channel of communication that enhances the quality of life for
unit residents.
These structural features have laid the groundwork for a positive
relationship. But the crucial element in forging this bond—the “x factor”—
has been the fair, humane, and respectful way Officers Bell and Lanni have
interacted with K6G residents over their years with the unit. During my
time in the Jail, I spent many hours in the classification office with these
two officers and watched them handle any number of problems and

HIV counseling and preventive education to K6Gs and who distribute condoms in the dorms
once a week.

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conflicts. Bell and Lanni are no pushovers. They know when they are
being played. But I was continually struck by the mixture of savvy,
wisdom, and evenhandedness they brought to each incident.
For example, one day, the GED instructor came across the hall to the
office and showed Bell and Lanni the sign-in sheet for the class that had
just commenced, on which someone had signed in as “Killa Hoe” and also
provided a fake inmate number.303 Identifying the responsible party was
easy enough; underneath “Killa Hoe,” in the same handwriting and written
with the same pen, was a real name and valid inmate number. In itself, this
infraction was hardly serious. But the imperative of keeping order in a
setting in which one civilian teacher and one (unarmed) custody assistant
were outnumbered by what may have been as many as twenty students
meant that even this seemingly minor show of disrespect demanded some
official response. Given the adversarial nature of the Jail culture,304 it is
very possible that had this incident occurred elsewhere in Men’s Central,
custodial staff may have responded by storming into the classroom, pulling
out the responsible party, and sending him to disciplinary segregation,
thereby disrupting the class and imposing unnecessary stress and even
trauma on all parties. But Bell and Lanni responded very differently.
Instead, they called the culprit—call him Andres—into the office and began
chatting with him in a perfectly friendly way. Having checked out his
criminal record in the Jail’s computer system, Bell knew that Andres had a
past conviction for forgery. In a conversational tone, Bell asked, “When
you were a forger, did you ever do any handwriting analysis?” Andres
answered in the negative, and the two then engaged in a brief chat about
how Andres had accomplished his forgery. Then Bell said:
[W]hen I was first in the [Sheriff’s] [D]epartment, I did some handwriting analysis,
and it was really interesting . . . . You wouldn’t believe what we learned . . . . [D]id
you know that you can tell the neighborhood that a guy is from by the way he makes
his letters? . . . [Y]ou can tell just about anything from somebody’s handwriting.

As he was saying all this, Bell was busy fixing himself a coffee. When he
was done, he sat down in a chair across from Andres and the following
exchange ensued:
Bell: Tell me something. Do you ever go by the name Killa Hoe?
Andres: [Pause.] Yeah, I guess I do.
Bell: That was pretty stupid, right?

303

The following account of this incident is drawn from Field Notes, July 6, 2007, at E1–

2.
304
See ACLU, supra note 4, at 1 (“To be an inmate in the Los Angeles County Jails is to
fear deputy attacks.”).

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Andres: Yeah, I guess.
Bell: Well, just don’t do it again, okay?

With that, Bell sent him back to the classroom. Afterwards, Bell
explained to me that Andres was a good student and he did not want to kick
him out of the class or discipline him for something so minor. If he had not
been such a good student or had been known as a troublemaker, Bell may
not have given him the same break, but may instead have sent him back to
the dorms and perhaps denied him access to the classroom for a time.305
Another day, a unit resident—call him Ben—came upstairs to the
office306 and told Bell and Lanni that someone in his dorm had threatened to
punch him and knock out his teeth. As a result, Ben reported, he was afraid
to remain downstairs.307 The person he named as having issued the threat—
call him Charles—was someone the two officers had known for years and
viewed as a good and truthful person who did not generally cause problems
or threaten others. Bell sent a pass for Charles, and when he got upstairs,
Lanni questioned the pair to get each side of the story. What emerged was
that Ben had been sitting on Charles’s bunk giving a third person—call him
Diego—a foot massage. When Ben was done, Diego reached into the bag
holding Charles’s belongings, fished out a packet of dried soup, and gave it
to Ben.308 Charles, seeing this, asked Ben to return his property. Ben
refused and, according to Charles, acted like Charles was in the wrong. In
response, Charles threatened Ben. What emerged, in other words, was that
Diego had given Ben something that was not his to give, and Ben, on
learning this, did not want to return his prize to its rightful owner. Charles
issued threats in reply, and Ben responded by coming upstairs to complain

305

Notice that to make this judgment, Bell had to have a sense of Andres’s character.
This individualized knowledge of the people in the unit is a key component of these officers’
ability to deal wisely with the issues that arise.
306
Ordinarily, movement outside the dorms requires a pass issued by an officer, which
prevents detainees from simply leaving the dorms when they choose. But there is a regular
schedule of classes for K6Gs, which are held in a room right across a narrow hallway from
the classification office. People wishing to attend class do not need a pass; they simply line
up when called and are escorted upstairs. Residents who want to speak to Bell and Lanni
often tag along in this way in order to get upstairs. As a result, at intervals throughout the
day, unit residents appear at the door wanting to put a question or present an issue to the two
officers.
307
The following account of this incident is drawn from Field Notes, July 9, 2007, at
A12–13.
308
The generally poor quality of the food that detainees receive at mealtimes means that
dried soups are a particularly popular canteen item and are often used as currency. See supra
notes 56–57. For example, several of my interviewees reported that the condoms distributed
weekly in the dorms by the Center for Health Justice are often traded for soups. The going
rate appeared to vary between one and two soups per condom.

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to Bell and Lanni.309 During the discussion with Lanni, Charles made clear
that the threat was an empty one, and that, as he explained, he had never
laid his hands on anyone and would never do so. In the end, Bell and Lanni
told Ben to return Charles’s soup and sent them both back to the dorms.310
This incident, like the Killa Hoe example, illustrates several aspects of
the managerial style of these two officers. First, they do not treat every
incident involving detainee misbehavior as demanding a forceful response.
Certainly, when the situation demands it, they will use force.311 But
whenever possible, they resolve issues through discussion and conversation.

309

See supra notes 231–233 (explaining that, unlike GP, where the strong premium on
seeming stoic means that few if any complaints regarding the behavior of fellow detainees
are lodged with officials, people in K6G do not hesitate to report others’ perceived bad
behavior).
310
Those familiar with the culture of prisons in general may view this as a disastrous
response, and were these detainees housed in GP, it may well have been. In a culture
governed by the hypermasculinity imperative, there is an enormous premium placed on not
being “disrespected.” This is because any show of disrespect that is not answered with force
can make a person look weak and tempt others to test him with ever more extreme shows of
disrespect, each of which would have to be answered accordingly if he wished to avoid being
considered a “punk.” See supra notes 194–197. Thus, any show of disrespect, however
minor, is treated very seriously and will frequently be met with violence. To outsiders, this
may seem extreme, but to the person on the receiving end of the disrespect, it is necessary,
since any other response might expose him to serious victimization.
Were an analogous incident between Ben, Charles, and Diego to have taken place in
GP, Charles would have had to respond to Ben’s refusal to return the property with a
credible threat of violence or risk being publicly exposed as a “punk.” Had Ben persisted in
his refusal, Charles would have had to follow through on that threat. For his part, Ben would
have had to stand his ground and be ready to fight rather than return the property even if he
knew himself to be in the wrong. To complicate matters further, the only possible scenario
on which the same facts—that is, involving the foot massage—could have occurred in GP
would have been if Ben had been Diego’s “punk” (i.e., the subordinate party in a protective
pairing with Diego as the stronger party protecting him from assault by others). And in such
a case, it would have been Diego, as Ben’s protector, who would have had to answer, either
with violence or the credible threat of it, Charles’s demand that his property be returned. But
either way, the equities that may seem to lie as to the proper disposition of Charles’s
property (i.e., that wrongfully appropriated property should be returned to its rightful owner,
perhaps with an apology) would be irrelevant to how the parties would respond to the
incident—or how anyone witnessing it would assess the situation.
In K6G, however, there is no hypermasculinity imperative. And although this
particular incident made its way to Bell and Lanni, many conflicts of this sort are daily
resolved among the unit residents themselves, often with the involvement of the house
mouse (the elected leader of the dorm) or one of the other authority figures in the unit. In
K6G, the equities govern in such cases. If Bell and Lanni hadn’t told Ben to return the soup,
others in the dorm would have done so.
311
Although I should say that the most I ever saw from these two officers was some
yelling, the physical separation of people fighting, and the forceful removal of a K6G
resident from the classroom.

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Second, as this approach implies, Bell and Lanni deal respectfully and
humanely with everyone with whom they come into contact, detainees
included. One might be tempted to dismiss the misappropriation of one
packet of dried soup as minor, and likewise dismiss Charles’s explanation
as insufficient to justify issuing a threat of physical violence, even one he
claimed to have no intention of carrying out. But these two officers
understood the significance of such an item to people in the dorms, and
acknowledged as legitimate Charles’s feeling of being wronged. Third and
finally, Bell and Lanni make an effort to know personally the people who
come through the unit—an effort that allows them to form judgments that,
being more individualized, have a greater chance of being fair and thus
respected by those involved.
One final incident illustrates the respectful approach these officers take
towards people in the unit. One Friday afternoon, one of the residents—call
him Ezra—came to the office and asked to be moved to protective custody.
When Bell asked why, Ezra showed his wristband and said, “This thing is
causing me a lot of trouble.”312 According to his wristband, Ezra was a
“288,” which meant that he was in on charges of child molestation.313 This
category of inmate is known to be at great risk of violent assault in GP and
as a result is typically held in protective custody. For identification
purposes within the institution, a “Y” is placed on the wristbands people
with 288s receive on admission to the Jail. Because the other detainees
know full well what a Y means, people in the Jail on a 288 are never housed
in general population.
K6Gs in the Jail on 288s are treated differently. The “special handle”
of K6G overrides a Y, which means that K6Gs charged with 288s are
housed in the K6G dorms with everyone else. This practice is followed, it
was explained to me, because in K6G, people are generally left alone to do
their time in peace, and this includes 288s. For some reason, Ezra was
being hassled in the K6G dorm, treatment he attributed to the Y on his
wristband. He was especially unhappy about this because, he insisted,
although he had once been in jail on a 288, his current charge was
something else altogether.
After hearing him out, Bell and Lanni looked up Ezra in the system
and learned that what he said was true; he had once been in Jail on a 288,
but this time he was not. Due to overcrowding, demand for single-person
protective custody cells always outstrips supply. The same is true of the
few cells on the administrative segregation row assigned to K6G. Bell was
312

The following account is drawn from Field Notes, July 6, 2007.
The term “288” refers to the provision of the California Penal Code under which the
crime appears. See CAL. PENAL CODE § 288 (West 2008) (lewd acts with a minor).
313

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therefore not willing to move Ezra to protective custody, but promised him
a new wristband. Ezra met this commitment with palpable relief, which
suggested that, although in GP a new wristband would not be enough to
protect a suspected 288 from abuse, Ezra himself appeared to regard the
change as sufficient to keep him safe in K6G.
To some, this incident may seem so minor as to be scarcely worth
repeating. Here is a detainee seemingly put at risk of harm through a
clerical error made by Jail staff at intake, and two Jail employees offering to
fix that error. Surely, one might reasonably think, this is the least that could
be expected under the circumstances. But, as those familiar with the culture
of carceral facilities will know, the “us” versus “them” mentality that often
defines relations between COs and the people in custody means that even
detainees in real danger can have trouble getting the attention of officers
willing to hear them out or take even simple steps to help them. Even valid
claims of official error may be dismissed outright by officers who share the
view—common among prison staff—that all prisoners are liars.314
314
Such refusals to take prisoners’ claims seriously can often result in serious harms to
prisoners. It is not uncommon for prison officials faced with Eighth Amendment claims of
failure to protect to assert that they did not actually know of the risk, even where the prisoner
directly reported the threat, because prisoners so often lie (and thus the officer receiving the
report did not believe it). Were such assertions of disbelief credited by a jury, they would
negate constitutional liability, since prison officials may not be held liable under the Eighth
Amendment for the failure to protect prisoners even from serious harms when they can show
that they did not actually know of the risk of harm. And if the officer genuinely disbelieved
the report, he would not have had actual knowledge of the risk. See MODEL PENAL CODE
§ 2.02(7) (“When knowledge of the existence of a particular fact is an element of the
offense, such knowledge is established if a person is aware of a high probability of its
existence, unless he actually believes that it does not exist.”); Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S.
825, 837 (1994). In cases where officers claim to have disbelieved prisoners’ assertions of
danger, it is a jury question whether the officer’s claims of disbelief were credible under the
circumstances. See, e.g., Estate of Carter v. City of Detroit, 408 F.3d 305, 310, 313 (6th Cir.
2005) (holding that where the defendant said he didn’t really believe the plaintiff was ill
despite her symptoms, the jury “would be entitled to discount that explanation”); Foelker v.
Outagamie Cnty., 394 F.3d 510, 513–14 (7th Cir. 2005) (holding a jury could find that
nurses who had observed the plaintiff’s condition and the fact that he had defecated in his
cell could be found to have known that he was going through drug withdrawal and to have
failed to respond appropriately, despite the claim of one defendant that he believed the
plaintiff was “playing the system”); Walker v. Benjamin, 293 F.3d 1030, 1039–40 (7th Cir.
2002) (holding that claims that a doctor and nurse withheld prescribed pain medication
because they thought the prisoner was malingering and trying to get high presented a jury
question of deliberate indifference); Hollenbaugh v. Maurer, 397 F. Supp. 2d 894, 904 (N.D.
Ohio 2005), aff’d, 221 F. App’x 409 (6th Cir. 2007) (holding defendants who said they
believed the prisoner who died of a heart attack was drunk and faking illness could be held
liable based on evidence that they heard his statements that he was not feeling well, had the
flu or food poisoning, was having chest pains, and wanted to go to the hospital); see also
Greeno v. Daley, 414 F.3d 645, 655 (7th Cir. 2005) (holding absence of “objective”
evidence of pain and suffering did not excuse refusal to treat it, since “self-reporting is often

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Unfortunately, in this culture, COs who treat detainees with basic decency
are often the exception rather than the rule. This is especially so when the
detainee in question is a 288, since in prison it is not uncommon for
correctional officers to absorb the norms of the inmate culture,315 including
the collective reviling of anyone charged with a sex crime involving a child.
Detainees in this category may thus find it even harder than other people to
find an officer willing to hear them out. Against this cultural backdrop, it is
unusual, to say the least, that Bell and Lanni did not hesitate to give Ezra a
hearing, took the time to investigate his claims, and acknowledged the
error.316 Yet it is consistent with what I saw of these officers throughout my
research. Not only do they treat detainees as fellow human beings, but their
interactions are entirely nonjudgmental—which is itself noteworthy, given
the frequent homophobia and transphobia that often inform interactions
between K6Gs and other custody officers in the Jail.317
the only indicator a doctor has of a patient’s condition”). I owe these citations to John
Boston.
315
See, e.g., Ian Lovett, California: Six Deputies Face Firing for Fight, N.Y. TIMES,
Mar. 24, 2011, at A20 (reporting that deputies “that used a ganglike hand gesture to signal
that they worked on the third floor at the [L.A. County] Men’s Central Jail” were fired after
retaliating against other deputies who had “heckled [them] about slow work in moving
inmates” by attacking the hecklers in the parking lot).
316
In this case, it must be acknowledged, the fix was not as quick as might have been
wished. Ezra had reached Bell and Lanni just as they were leaving for the weekend, and
rather than getting the new wristband right then, they told Ezra they would take care of it
first thing Monday morning. This delay surprised me. When Ezra first explained his
problem, he had said things like “I’m really going to hurt someone if you don’t move me.
I’m at the end of my rope. I don’t want a new charge [a statement implying that he might
resort to physical violence, which could earn him a further criminal charge]. But I’m really
going to hurt someone.” Yet Bell and Lanni were sending him right back to the dorms for
three more days. When I asked why, Bell said that he “knows this guy” and didn’t believe
he was going to hurt anyone.” He also “knew [Ezra] could handle himself and retain
control” for a few days. Although this confidence may seem insufficient given the high risk
of harm people in the Jail on 288s routinely face in L.A. County, Bell and Lanni explained
that in their experience, 288s are generally left alone in K6G. For this reason, they felt that
if Ezra was having problems it was likely for some other reason, and that their confidence
that he could handle himself led them to view the delay as not of great concern. Of course,
even if true, this answer might well be regarded as insufficient. Surely, it might be thought,
they should not have taken the chance. Was ensuring Ezra’s safety not worth delaying the
start of their weekend? These critiques are reasonable. In fairness, however, from what I
observed, Bell and Lanni routinely worked past the end of their shift dealing with problems
of various sorts. Every day, when they leave, there are innumerable things left undone, some
of which are certain to concern detainee safety. As much as one might wish it were
otherwise, perhaps the more appropriate objection would be to a system in which, when two
officers reasonably leave at the end of their shift, people like Ezra believe—very likely
rightly—that there is no one else left on duty who would help them. See supra note 312.
317
See supra note 108; Dolovich, supra note 1, at 67–69 (describing the verbal
harassment to which many custody officers in the Jail frequently subject K6G residents).

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It was obvious from both my formal interviews and other more
informal conversations with K6G residents that Bell and Lanni make a
significant positive difference to the custodial experience of people in the
unit. As one person explained:
Lanni and Bell, they’re pretty good about keeping mess down. If they see a potential
problem, they’ll delete it. They’ll figure some kind of way to get rid of it. And if they
318
can’t, they’ll just K-10 them . . . they’re pretty good about that. They listen . . . .
They just cool. They don’t look at you as gay, they look at you as human beings . . . .
Whatever situation come up, they don’t just jump to one side, they’ll hear both
319
sides.

Another subject put it more succinctly: “Thank God for Bell and Lanni.”320
There is, of course, only so much Bell and Lanni can do. They are
only two people. They only work the day shift. Their office is on a
different floor than the K6G dorms. They spend most of their day in the
office dealing with classification and programmatic issues and only
occasionally go down to the dorms. But between the two of them, they
have spent over forty years in K6G and, during that time, they have
become—and become known as—advocates for K6G within the system.
They regularly take issues and concerns regarding the unit to the Jail’s
command staff, and just as readily address problems with their peer
deputies, including credible allegations of abusive behavior. This practice
has not endeared them to their colleagues. That they do it anyway is a
testament to their commitment to the well-being of the people in the unit.
And this commitment is not lost on K6G’s residents, who know that if a
problem arises, Bell and Lanni will take it seriously and try to address it.
These officers thus provide the people in K6G a level of official protection
that both enhances residents’ feelings of personal security and reduces their
need for self-help.321
318

K10 is the Jail term for those detainees deemed too violent or dangerous to be housed
safely with others. K10s are kept in single cells and are locked down most of the time. In
those cases where someone in K6G seems sufficiently violent or dangerous, Bell and Lanni
will send them to K10, where they will be kept under high-security conditions and never let
out of their cells without an escort and shackles. In less extreme cases, Bell and Lanni will
house people who cause problems in the dorms in K6G’s own disciplinary wing.
319
Int. 140, at B8.
320
Int. 101, at A3.
321
The question thus arises: What will happen to K6G when Bell and Lanni retire, which
they are both scheduled to do in the fall of 2012? In the short term, any risk to K6G from
their retirement may be alleviated by plans currently in the works to rehire them both as
contractors and keep them in the unit longer. As a longer-term measure, Bell and Lanni have
been training a number of officers whom they hope will serve as their replacements. The
hope is that the attitude Bell and Lanni bring to the K6G enterprise will have been
sufficiently modeled for their replacements that those officers will adopt it themselves when
they assume full responsibility for the unit. Sheriff Baca has also come to recognize the

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3. Community Creation
The L.A. County Jail is enormous, housing as many as 19,000 people
at any one time,322 the vast majority of them men.323 Male detainees who
are classified to GP may be sent to any housing unit corresponding to their
security level (i.e., low, medium, or high) at any of seven facilities.324 The
sheer size of the system means that most people newly arrived in their
assigned housing units will know few if any individuals there. They will, in
other words, be locked up night and day in close quarters for extended
periods with strangers. This experience can be a scary one, especially given
the (deserved) reputation of the Jail for volatility and violence.325 In these
circumstances, convincing hypermasculine performance is an effective
means of self-protection, as is gang affiliation.326
By contrast, people classified to K6G have no need for these selfprotective measures to feel immediately safe on arrival in the dorms. K6G
is small, with an average of 350 to 400 people in three or four dorms327 at
any given time.328 Once classified to the unit, K6Gs are automatically
returned to it on subsequent stints in the Jail. Thus, unlike GPs, who upon
admission to the Jail could be sent anywhere in the system, K6Gs who land

value of what Bell and Lanni bring to the Jail and has begun deploying them to train
incoming deputies in more respectful and humane custodial attitudes. One hopes this
deployment will continue and will have a positive effect not only on K6G’s new
classification officers, but on officers throughout the Jail.
322
See supra note 1.
323
As of March 2010, there were 1,900 women in the Jail, housed in the Central
Regional Detention Facility (CRDF). See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 68 n.318.
324
The Jail system is made up of eight different facilities. One of these, CRDF, is
designated exclusively for women. The other seven house men.
325
See HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 9 (“Within the California penal system, Los Angeles
County Jail is held in high esteem for its capacity to induce terror.”); Notes from Juan
Haines, San Quentin State Prison, to author (Jan. 12, 2012) (“If you can make it through
L.A. County, you can make it anywhere.”).
326
Of course, as Craig Haney aptly notes, participation in this social system can come at
a serious cost—not only possible injury from fighting for the gang, but also additional prison
time should violence behind bars at the behest of the gang’s shot callers lead to further
criminal charges. As he puts it, “the strong undercurrent of fear and reminders of one’s own
vulnerability [that] abound” in men’s prisons and jails create “a high degree of urgency that
induces so many inmates to join [the gangs]” and “pressures strong enough to convince or
compel young men to bargain away years of their future freedom in exchange for the
guarantee of momentary safety.” Haney, supra note 14, at 136.
327
During the summer of 2007 when I conducted my research, K6G occupied only three
dorms.
328
There is also a pod in Twin Towers reserved for those K6Gs found to have serious
mental health issues, and a row of single cells elsewhere in the Jail for K6Gs who commit
serious disciplinary infractions.

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in the Jail know exactly where they will end up. There are always some
first-timers. But K6G’s extremely high recidivism rate means that most of
the people admitted to K6G will have been there before, likely more than
once.329 At the same time, as with the Jail in general, there is relatively
high turnover.330
The combination of these several factors—high
recidivism rate, high turnover, and automatic reassignment to K6G on
return bids in the Jail—means that when K6Gs come into the Jail, not only
are they not frightened or anxious as to what awaits them (since they know
exactly where they will end up), but chances are they will be met by many
familiar and even friendly faces when they get to the dorms. As a
consequence, K6G has, almost by accident, become a comfortable and even
welcoming community for many of its residents.
Prior to the start of my research, both observation and casual
conversations with residents suggested this community aspect of the unit. I
therefore decided to probe the issue in my interviews. Two questions
sought to determine the extent of the web of personal acquaintance that
binds people in the unit. The first asked: When you got to K6G [for the first
time], was there anyone you already knew?331 Of the twenty-four subjects
to respond to this question, fifteen answered in the affirmative.332 The
second question was directed at those who had been in K6G before, and
asked: Do you hang out with your fellow K6Gs on the outside? Of the
twenty-four subjects to answer this question, thirteen answered in the
affirmative.333
A further question asked interviewees to characterize their experience
of coming back to K6G on a return stint. Specifically, the inquiry was
framed as follows: Some people who have been in K6G more than once say
that coming back to K6G is like coming back to a summer camp or a
clubhouse, and others say it is just like any other jail. What do you
329

L.A. County has an overall annual recidivism rate (defined as anyone who is
readmitted to the Jail within three years of release) of somewhere around 65%. But Bell and
Lanni report that in K6G, the number is even higher, with a lifetime recidivism rate of 90%–
95%. For speculation as to the reasons for these elevated rates, see Dolovich, supra note 1,
at 30 n.166.
330
See Harawa et al., supra note 218, at 1073 (explaining that “[t]he average length of
Jail stay is 42–45 days, but ranges widely”).
331
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 102 q.49.
332
A follow-up question asked: If yes, how many people did you already know? Id. at
102 q.50. Respondents offered a number between one and ten, with most naming a number
less than five.
333
“[M]ost of us are with our friends up here anyway. . . . Like, I know about four dozen
people in these [K6G] tanks. They’ve all been to my house, we’ve had dinner with each
other.” Int. 75, at A15; see also Int. 50, at F10 (“A lot of these people seem to know each
other on the street . . . . And they’re like, ‘Oh, here’s so-and-so.’”).

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think?334 In response, a small minority took the view that “jail is jail.” As
one person put it, “it’s just coming to jail. I know half these people [but] I
don’t want to see them.”335 But the majority of respondents provided
answers suggesting a very different picture—and keep in mind that what is
being described here is a return to incarceration.


A lot of times when a person comes in, they’re off the streets . . . . Everybody
says “new fish.” Zoom, everybody is at the front door, who is it, who is it? Is
it somebody I know? And then when they walk in and some of them, they’re
336
all getting hugs like it’s a big old family reunion.



[S]ome people come back and they feel like it’s home, I mean . . . [i]t’s not
like any other jail. Why? Because any other jail they don’t have [K6Gs]. [In
other jails,] [t]hey do put us aside, you know what I mean, sometimes.
Sometimes they don’t. But in here, you come back to people that you know out
there in the streets, and it’s like coming back to your own people, to your own
337
family.



Some come in there and it’s like Christmas to them . . . . I’m not from here,
and I’ve noticed a lot of them come in here, they all know each other. They
know each other from being incarcerated so many times, and from going into
[K6G]. So, it’s like, hey, they come in and they all cry because they haven’t
338
seen each other in a long time, or they cry when they go home.



They say it’s a big slumber party. Like, some people will start crying when it’s
339
time to go.

The sense of K6G as a secure and welcoming community for many
unit residents came through in other ways in my interviews. One frequent
theme was that of “family.” In many cases, the word was used to capture a
general feeling of fellowship. As one person put it, “we try to be there . . .
for each other . . . [N]o matter if we hate each other in the street,340 but, in
334

See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 102 q.45.
Int. 131, at G1. Even this response, it bears noting, attests to the web of personal
acquaintance that connects the people in K6G. This subject may not have liked the people
he found waiting for him in K6G when he arrived, but he knew them. And however unhappy
he might have been to see them, because he knew them, he was less likely to fear what he
would find waiting for him than he would have had he been bound for GP.
336
Int. 123, at F2.
337
Int. 92, at B9.
338
Int. 93, at D6.
339
Int. 49, at E6. It is true that often, when people leave K6G, they are heading not to
freedom but to state prison, frequently with lengthy prison terms. Still, I have witnessed
some of these partings, and the emotion at leaving friends and loved ones is palpable.
340
There is a notable parallel here with the gang politics that govern in GP. In the
streets, it is not unusual for two sets (i.e., local chapters) of the same gang to be at war with
one another or for gangs of the same race to be sworn enemies. Perhaps the most widely
known example of this phenomenon is the Crips and the Bloods, two African-American
street gangs. However, the gang code at work in both the Jail and the California prison
335

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here, it’s just one big family.”341 Over the course of my research, however,
it became clear that the word was also being used to describe actual
groupings of residents organized into specific familial relationships.342
These groupings, apparently forged over years of mutual engagement in
custody, and even in some cases on the streets, could be quite extensive,
with mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, aunts and uncles, nieces,
nephews, and cousins. As some of my subjects explained:


So, sometimes we have a mother and a father figure. And then you have sisters
and brothers. Most of my sisters that I call my sisters or my brothers, we are
343
friends on the street.



[She’s] my gay jailhouse niece. So, the respect is there. I have a lot of . . .
sisters, nephews . . . I have three gay kids that I call my kids. . . . And they’re
very respectful where I am concerned . . . . [W]hen I come to jail, no matter
which one of the three dorms I go into, it’s at least five or more in there that
344
calls me Auntie.

system more broadly requires that any street enmities be put on hold while people are in
custody. This means that two people who on the outside may have readily killed one another
will fight on the same side in detention. All blacks, whatever their street gang affiliation, are
just Blacks in prison. All native-born Latinos in the Jail are Southsiders, whatever their
street gang affiliations. See Skarbek, supra note 119, at 704 (explaining that there are
“approximately 21,000 Sureño gang members composing 400 different gangs in Los
Angeles County”). This abandonment of outside enmities in favor of mutual allegiance
while in custody appears from the remarks of this interviewee to have been adapted for life
in K6G, to allow mutual support even among people who may dislike one another on the
outside.
341
Int. 92, at B6; see also Int. 111, at C11 (“[I]t’s just like one big happy family, except
. . . [the transgender prisoners] clash a little bit . . . . But other than that, I think that they’re
just like one big happy family.”); Int 102, at E4 (“[E]veryone gets along real good, cooking
and throwing spreads [buffets of pooled food bought from the canteen] together. It’s like
being on the streets with a family.”).
342
These familial arrangements, which Joycelyn Pollock calls “pseudofamilies,” are
reported to be a staple phenomenon in women’s prisons. JOYCELYN M. POLLOCK, WOMEN,
PRISON, & CRIME 138 (2d ed. 2002). As Pollock explains, in women’s prisons, these
relationships may or may not involve sex. “Most of the relationships are familial, including
parent–child, sibling–sibling, and even extended family relationships, such as grandparents,
aunts, and uncles. Each relationship is a reflection of the stereotypical one in society.
‘Fathers’ are authoritarian and guiding; ‘mothers’ are nurturing and comforting. Siblings
fight; parents control.” Id.; see also id. at 129 (“Instead of grouping in pseudopolitical
organizations such as gangs, clubs, and associations, women are more likely to group in
familial units, cliques, or dyads. Their allegiances are emotional and personal; their loyalty
is to a few rather than to the many.”).
343
Int. 48, at F9.
344
Int. 53, at B13.

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[I]n a dorm you have people that you call your family . . . we have pow-wows.
345
We cook together. We eat. You know, we all go to store.
When you go to
store you get food and bag of chips and soups and cookies and pastries and
stuff like that. So, we all sit, eat, and we just talk. Fall over the bed and lay on
the beds and just talk. And it reminds me of my family, because that’s how we
346
do.

By no means does everyone participate in these family groupings.347 Still,
their presence and overtly emotive framework signal to all present that, by
contrast with GP, mutual support in K6G is not contingent on
hypermasculine posturing.
The picture just painted of people in custody engaging in public
displays of emotion (as at the arrival of “new fish”), mutual concern, and
feelings of family or fellowship (expressed, for example, between members
of “jailhouse families”) indicates that we are very far from the enforced
stoicism and calm that reigns in the Jail’s GP. With its echoes of life in
women’s prisons,348 this account may appear to have nothing to do with the
culture of men’s prisons, and thus nothing to teach about how to make
prisons in general more humane. But this conclusion would be too hasty.
The key distinction here is between, on the one hand, conditions that allow
people in custody to feel safe and secure enough to relax and be themselves,
and, on the other hand, the particular way of life that emerges once those
feelings of safety take hold. It does seem highly unlikely that majorityheterosexual units would reproduce to any significant degree K6G’s
particular cultural norms and modes of interaction.349 The aim, however, is
not to make all housing units look just like K6G. It is instead to create
conditions in which people feel independently safe enough to be who they
are, and to pursue whatever interests and projects are most important to
them, without being forced to participate in pathological and destructive
behaviors or feeling compelled to force others to do so. In the end, what is
most important about K6G is not the specific ways of life that have
emerged in the unit, but the model K6G offers of a comparatively safe
carceral space where people feel able to do their time in relative peace.

345

In Jail parlance, the term “store” refers both to the commissary and the items bought
from the commissary. Thus people talk both about “store night,” which is when their
commissary items are delivered, and the “store” they have left over the next day.
346
Int. 41, at E9.
347
Indeed, at least one interview subject expressed an aversion to the people he sees
when he comes back to Jail. Int. 131, at G1. But a fair number do appear to affiliate with
others in this way. One of my subjects estimated that 30% of dorm residents are in
“families.” See Int. 41, at E11.
348
See supra note 342.
349
For further discussion of this issue, see infra Part III.C.4.

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The key point is this: thanks to a variety of structural features that
emerged from the implementation of the consent decree—the small size of
the unit, the high rates of turnover and recidivism, the automatic
reassignment to K6G for any new arrivals previously classified to the
unit—K6G has evolved into a place to which many people do not feel
afraid to go. This is at least in part because, when they arrive, they expect
to be greeted, not by a room full of hostile and threatening strangers, but by
people they recognize and maybe even know and like.350 In the absence of
any such fear, the gang politics and hypermasculine posturing that define
life in the rest of the Jail seem unnecessary and even absurd.
To be sure, the common identity shared by unit residents, who are all
either gay or trans (or, if they are not, are passing as such), helps to create a
default sense of community and mutual sympathy in K6G,351 even among
those without prior personal knowledge of, or connection to, others in the
dorms.352 But without the various structures just noted, which have made it
possible for the same people to come together repeatedly in the same living
quarters, that mutual affinity would have had no opportunity to grow into
the sense of community that currently exists. And of course, without the
confidence felt by K6Gs that anyone in the unit who behaves in a predatory
or abusive manner will be immediately removed, the resulting fear and
trauma likely would have impeded the emergence of any community
feeling, regardless of how much unit residents might have had in common.
At the same time, having been allowed to take root, the feeling of
community now found in K6G appears to have had a positive unexpected
effect: helping to reinforce the unit’s collective sense of security. How
might this welcome development have come about? The structural features
canvassed here, combined with the sense of shared identity, have further
fostered the interpersonal connections that counter the alienation people
often feel in custody. Because people in K6G do not feel it necessary to put
350

Of course, this feeling of security is only possible because K6Gs know that anyone in
the unit who behaved in a predatory fashion would be immediately removed, and thus that
the people who remain will pose no threat.
351
See, e.g., Int. 41, at F2 (“[K6G] is like another community.”). In Part III.C, I consider
in more depth the issue of sexual identity and the implications of this factor for the prospects
of replicating K6G’s comparative success beyond its present narrow context. And as will be
seen, even those benefits that appear to stem exclusively from a shared sexual identity
among unit residents turn out to offer generalizable lessons—in this case, the value of
identifying affinity groups and fostering common projects that might connect even
heterosexual-identified men in ways that displace the current modes of association.
352
To the extent that this sense of shared identity has reinforced the level of comfort
K6Gs feel with one another, it suggests the value of identifying a range of affinity groups
that may, if housed together, enjoy the same positive benefits. For further discussion of this
strategy, see infra Part V.B.

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on a front of toughness or invulnerability, they are able to form emotional
attachments and even families. They look out for one another, share their
belongings, and even nurse those who are sick.353 In these and other
ways,354 K6G residents are able “to feel connected and bonded, to
belong,”355 without paying the high price of gang membership. And as
these healthy, prosocial norms have arisen, they seem to have crowded out
the twisted notion, a constant undercurrent in GP, that displays of honest
mutual engagement should be met with victimization and abuse.
Again, these positive behavioral norms only emerged in the first place
because people in K6G felt safe enough to decide for themselves how they
wanted to behave in custody. But having emerged, these norms have in
turn fostered and reinforced positive humanizing dynamics in the unit. This
“virtuous circle” suggests a remarkable possibility for a custodial setting:
just as a carceral environment can at its worst generate a vicious circle, on
which fear begets the impulse to violence, which begets more fear and thus
more violence, so too may humane treatment—keeping people safe, making
them feel respected and affirmed as human beings, enabling them to remain
connected to their core sense of self and build positive connections with
others—beget mutually respectful and prosocial behavior. This prosocial
behavior can in turn reinforce collective feelings of relative security and
ease, thus enhancing the healthy and prosocial aspects of the unit. In other
words, the example of K6G suggests that features of life that emerge first as
the positive effects of humane and respectful treatment may themselves
become conduits through which an environment’s humane aspects develop
and deepen.356
353

One of my interview subjects recalled an experience when he was sick in the dorms.
As he recounted:
Everybody was concerned enough—[t]hey brought me soup, they helped me get
around. When I shit my bed, they changed it, they got me clean again. They sat with
me, they talked with me, all that, because I couldn’t get down to the doctor and I was
hacking up my lungs. Um, they got me antibiotics, they got me everything that they
could until I was better. And most of them I didn’t even know. I mean, acquaintance,
or I met them, hi, bye, but most of them [I] didn’t even know.
Int. 75, at A16; see also Int. 57, at A5 (“We look out after each other.”); Int 41, at F2 (“It’s
like another community. Like, that’s what K[6G] is.”); Int. 92, at B6 (“Say you have a
headache, say you feel bad or you feel sad, they’ll come in and comfort you and try to give
you some sort of relief. We try to be there for one [another].”).
354
See infra Part III.C.3.
355
Haney, supra note 14, at 136.
356
It is all the more remarkable that this chain reaction seems to have occurred in a unit
that in many respects is far from ideal: a decaying and decrepit physical plant, crowded and
unhygienic living conditions, a not inconsiderable number of one-on-one physical
altercations, etc. See supra Part II.B. That K6G, despite its relative humanity and safety as
compared with GP, is still a highly compromised living environment indicates that L.A.

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4. A Possible Fourth Factor: External Attention
There is one further factor suggested by my research that may also
contribute to K6G’s relatively relaxed atmosphere: the increased security
K6Gs feel knowing that outsiders, including community activists, advocacy
organizations (LGBT and otherwise), researchers, and even the media357 are
paying attention to what happens in the unit. Over the course of my
research in the unit, for example, Bell and Lanni conducted at least two
tours for advocacy organizations, including a Bay Area transgender rights
group. During these tours, visitors were brought to the officers’ booth
overlooking the dorms and were thus in full view of the residents. This
experience was nothing new for K6Gs, who are used to being observed
from that vantage point by interested outside parties. The exposure also
appeared to generate a feeling, even among those in the unit who resent the
invasion of privacy, that free-world people are invested in the well-being of
the people in K6G.
The outside attention K6G receives has meant that unit residents enjoy
a range of specially tailored services not available to people in the Jail’s GP,
which constitutes a benefit in itself.358 Perhaps even more significant, the
combination of the original consent decree, still in force, and the attention
K6G receives from outside organizations as well as the media359 has seemed
to ensure that the Jail’s command staff remains committed to K6G’s

County still has much more to do to ensure genuinely humane conditions even in K6G. It
also reveals that, although doing away with the need for hypermasculine posturing and gang
involvement is necessary for a humane environment, reforms achieving this crucial goal are
not sufficient. Those interested in what problems can remain even after these toxic features
of life in GP are eliminated might learn much from studying the pathologies that continue to
exist in K6G despite its relative humanity. For a catalogue of such problems, see supra Part
II.B.
357
See, e.g., James Ricci, Gay Jail Inmates Get Chance to Learn, L.A. TIMES, Apr. 7,
2004, at B1 (reporting on a graduation ceremony that took place in K6G and the success of
K6G’s educational and rehabilitative programming); Beth Shuster, Sheriff Approves
Handout of Condoms to Gay Inmates, L.A. TIMES, Nov. 30, 2001, at A38 (describing launch
of K6G’s condom-distribution program); Terry LeGrand, The Alternative: Behind Gay Bars
(L.A. Talk Radio broadcast Aug. 1, 2010) (talk radio program featuring Senior Deputy
Randy Bell and Deputy Bart Lanni); Lisa Baertlein, For L.A. AIDS Group Prison Health is
Public Health, REUTERS (April 23, 2007, 5:11 PM), http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/
04/23/us-prison-hiv-idUSN4M19957720070423 (describing K6G’s condom distribution
program, administered by the Center for Health Justice).
358
For example, staff from the Center for Health Justice distribute condoms in the dorms
once a week and also provide regular HIV prevention education and one-on-one counseling.
And the Tarzana Treatment Center, which offers transitional services to formerly
incarcerated people with HIV, conducts regular counseling and planning sessions for people
in the unit.
359
See supra note 357.

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success. As a result, when problems arise, some institutional attention and
resources will be devoted to their resolution.360
At least some of K6G’s residents appear to be aware of this outside
interest and involvement. And to some degree, this awareness has seemed
to foster a sense that people in the unit continue to matter and have not been
abandoned by the outside world. As one of my interview subjects put it:
[Not that] we’re so special, but it’s a lot of attention has been drawn away from us in
the world. You know what I’m saying? Outside world. So, we come here to have
people look at us like you guys are better than what you guys are doing on the streets,
then that’s like something that is—I don’t know, I can’t even put it into words. It’s
like—It mean a lot to me. I don’t know how every other K6G feel about it, but it
means a lot to me.361

I am unable to say to what extent this factor contributes to the overall sense
of security and well-being in the unit.362 But it seems reasonable to think
that such outside attention, to all appearances motivated by concern for the
particular populations K6G serves, would only reinforce this sense.
Taken together, the several factors just canvassed point to a striking
conclusion: getting between potential predators and their victims is only
part of what will keep people in custody safe. Equally important is an
institutional commitment to treating prisoners with respect, as people—
360
Likely as a consequence of this outside attention, Jail officials are also willing to
consider requests arising from the particular needs of K6G’s residents, which might
otherwise be dismissed as inappropriate for a men’s facility. For example, in the latter half
of 2009, Lanni worked with Commander Robert Olmstead and Captain Buddy Goldman to
get permission for trans women in K6G to have cosmetics in the dorms on the same terms as
detainees in the women’s facility. Lanni also worked with Dr. Keith Markley, supervising
psychiatrist at Men’s Central Mental Health Service, to ensure access to hormone therapy for
a number of the trans women in the unit. I consider the alacrity with which Chief Alex Yim
(then Acting Chief) agreed to grant me access to the Jail to conduct the research on which
this Article is based as further evidence of the Jail’s willingness to address the needs of K6G.
Other prison researchers have written of the lengthy delays that can attend official
consideration of requests for access to study prisoners, and the strong resistance to granting
access those making these requests can encounter. See, e.g., Kathleen Fox, Katheryn
Zambrana & Jodi Lane, Getting In (and Staying In) When Everyone Else Wants Out: 10
Lessons Learned from Conducting Research with Inmates, 22 J. CRIM. JUST. EDUC. 304
(2011); Chad R. Trulson, James W. Marquart & Janet L. Mullings, Breaking In: Gaining
Entry to Prisons and Other Hard-to-Access Criminal Justice Organizations, 15 J. CRIM.
JUST. EDUC. 451 (2004). By contrast, at our first meeting, Chief Yim readily agreed to
provide whatever access, assistance, and other support I needed to carry out this project.
Other researchers focusing on K6G have found Chief Yim similarly open. See, e.g., Harawa
et al., supra note 218. It may be that Chief Yim’s willingness stemmed in part from his
sense that K6G is a relative success and thus something in the Jail’s interests to publicize.
But this interpretation does not explain why he afforded me access to all parts of the facility
over the course of my research, not just to K6G.
361
Int. 41, at D2 (emphasis added).
362
This question seems ripe for further study.

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seeing them, and thus making them feel, not like inmates but like
individuals who “are better than what you guys are doing in the streets.”363
The explicit institutional acknowledgment that unit residents are
particularly vulnerable because of their sexual orientation or gender identity
in turn allows organizations outside the Jail to make connections with and
offer aid to members of these populations, thereby affirming people in the
unit as people who matter, regardless of their imprisonment. Bell and
Lanni deal with K6G’s residents this same way, thereby creating bonds of
trust and communication that in turn help to keep the unit safe. Indeed, the
Jail’s efforts to identify gay men and trans women in order to comply with
the consent decree have meant that the institution itself has had to engage
with K6G’s residents first and foremost as people in need of protection.
This enterprise has altered the dominant institutional framework for dealing
with the people in K6G; they are seen as potentially vulnerable people and
not merely as inmates. As a result, even those deputies inclined to be
aggressive and hostile toward detainees in the Jail—and those who are
deeply uncomfortable with the sexual identity of K6Gs—are obliged to
make sure that unit residents are safe when they are out of their dorms. In
this way, even otherwise hostile officers are enlisted in the project of
attending to the basic human need for physical safety of members of this
group.
It is impossible to know to what extent these aspects of the K6G
experience explain the relatively humane character of the unit. But the
foregoing account, together with a common sense understanding of what
humane conditions must involve, should be sufficient to indicate that
treating people with respect and affirming their status as more than just
inmates is a necessary part of the story.
5. Accidental Humanity?
The above sections identify several factors that have come together to
allow people in K6G to feel sufficiently safe and secure to forego the selfprotective mechanisms of hypermasculine posturing and gang affiliation.
The subtitle of this Article refers to “accidental humanity” because, as I
have suggested, this confluence of features emerged not by design, but
rather by a series of fortuities that together created the possibility of a more
humane alternative to life in the Jail’s GP units.
For some, however, this characterization may seem inapt, at least to
some extent. Certainly, it seems a happy accident that the two officers
assigned to K6G turned out to be so compassionate, broad-minded, and
committed to the safety and well-being of unit residents. Yes, these
363

See Int. 41, at D2; supra text accompanying note 361.

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qualities were likely the same ones that led Bell and Lanni to be selected for
this position and that led them to accept it—even knowing, as they surely
must have, that taking on the assignment would set them apart from their
peers and open them up to harassment by colleagues uncomfortable with
the populations K6G serves. But the fact that these men worked in the Jail
in the first place, the way they proved even more steely in their dedication
to the project than could have ever been expected, the depth of their
determination to make the carceral experience as safe and productive as
possible for the people in the unit—all this could not have been anticipated.
Considered in light of all the good Bell and Lanni have done over the past
three decades and how badly the experiment could have gone in different
hands, their longstanding presence in the classification office seems
fortunate in the extreme.364 And although it may seem obvious in retrospect
that a sense of community and a web of personal connection would arise in
a small unit housing people with high recidivism rates and a common
identity and life experience, there is no reason to think this result was even
contemplated at the time the unit was established, much less that it was a
motivating aim of the program. In this way, too, these humanizing effects
have been fortuitous—and the same might be said of any positive effects to
have emerged from the attention the unit has received from interested
outside parties.
However, as to the first factor—the institutional commitment to
keeping the people in K6G separate and apart from GP—the notion of
fortuity may be thought by some to be misplaced. The procedures that
govern the housing and movement of people in K6G did not emerge by
accident; to the contrary, they were established pursuant to a court order
mandating their implementation. That Jail officials continue to follow the
rules laid down in that judicial directive, it might be thought, is not a lucky
break, but simply their ongoing legal obligation.
This perspective reflects an appealing faith in the power of the law to
generate needed structural change. On this view, lawsuits are filed, liability
is found, courts order institutional reforms, and those reforms ensue—end
of story. But as Joel Handler observed more than thirty years ago,
structural injunctions are not self-executing.365 Institutional change does
not come easily, especially to complex bureaucracies, and even more so
where, as here, reform depends on “lower-level [behavioral] changes” that
“supervisors [can] even experience great difficulty” in implementing.366

364

Int. 101, at A13 (“Thank God for Bell and Lanni.”).
See JOEL F. HANDLER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM 24 (1978).
366
Id.; see also Scott Cummings, Litigation at Work: Defending Day Labor in Los
Angeles, 58 UCLA L. REV. 1617, 1622 (2011) (noting the “impediments to enforcement” of
365

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This may be especially so in the carceral context. The Supreme Court’s
landmark 2011 decision in Brown v. Plata367 came only after twenty years
of litigation and more than seventy federal court orders mandating
institutional reform failed to generate anything like constitutional
conditions in the California prison system’s medical and mental health
delivery systems.368
That the procedures ensuring a boundary between K6G and GP have
become such a seamless feature of life in the Jail is a tribute both to the
commitment of the Jail’s command staff to the safety of some of its most
vulnerable prisoners, and to the ongoing attention the ACLU of Southern
California continues to pay to conditions in the Jail. It does not take away
from this accomplishment to suggest that it could well have been otherwise,
that monitoring and compliance might have been less comprehensive and
less lasting than has been the case. Quite the opposite: it suggests that both
institutions—the Jail and the ACLU—deserve credit for their continued
commitment to the terms of the order and to the K6G program in general.
Even if the Jail’s compliance with the consent decree could not be
fairly thought fortuitous, it would still be accurate to regard life in K6G as
an instance of accidental humanity. K6G was originally conceived as a
space where its target populations could be free from rape and other forms
of sexual assault. No one could have predicted what actually emerged: a
unit free not only from sexual violence but from the whole edifice of gang
politics and hypermasculine performance that too often combine to make
life in the Jail’s GP a daily hell for so many people. The comparative
humanity of K6G stems from this broader difference, which is the happy
byproduct of a set of constitutive features that were as contingent as they
are welcome.
C. IDENTITY THEORIES: LOOKING TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
Thus far, the sexual identity369 of K6G’s residents has been kept as
much as possible on the sidelines so that the outsized salience of this factor
would not obscure the other consequential differences between the two
models. It would be folly to suggest that K6G’s unusual character has
nothing to do with the sexual identity of unit residents. To the contrary, this
court-driven institutional reform efforts, “including neglect and/or resistance by agencies
charged with implementing a legal right [and] the lack of resources for effective
implementation”).
367
131 S. Ct. 1910, 1923 (2011) (upholding an order by a three-judge panel of the Ninth
Circuit requiring the California prison system to reduce its prison population to 137.5% of
capacity).
368
Id. at 1930–31.
369
See supra note 15.

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factor appears to have shaped to a considerable degree the dominant
behavioral norms in the unit.370 But this, I have argued, is a second-order
influence, informing the norms that have been able to emerge once people
felt safe enough to relax and be themselves. What, however, of first-order
influence? In what follows, I explore four possible ways that the sexual
identity of K6G’s residents might be thought to explain as a first-order
matter the absence of gang politics and hypermasculine posturing in the
unit: (1) that K6G’s residents, gay men and trans women, are not capable of
hypermasculinity performance; (2) that the people in K6G simply prefer the
relatively safe and relaxed atmosphere of the unit and so choose not to play
the game that defines life in the Jail’s GP; (3) that, given the free access to
willing sexual partners K6Gs enjoy, they do not need to victimize others or
use force to mask their sexual desire for other men in order to fulfill their
own sexual needs; and finally, turning the first and second suggestions
around (4) that it is the men in GP who, because of their sexual orientation,
can’t or won’t conform to the norms of life in K6G.
As will be seen, these claims rest to some extent on stereotypical
characterizations, with the unfortunate effect of obscuring relevant
commonalities among all people in custody, regardless of sexual orientation
or gender identity. At the same time, as to each, more careful examination
of the underlying premises turns out to deepen in significant ways our
understanding of K6G’s relatively safe and humane character. More
significant still, pushing past the stereotypical thinking reveals how features
that may seem exclusively derived from the sexual identity of K6G’s
residents can be made to yield insights with broader application. To some
extent, K6G’s unusual character is a first-order product of unit residents’
sexual identity. But as I aim to show, even where the case for this view
seems strongest, it is still possible to derive valuable generalizable lessons
for making carceral conditions safer and more humane, not just for gay men
and trans women, but for all people in custody.
1. They Can’t
The question on the table is a simple one: how is it that K6G is free of
gang control and any hypermasculinity imperative?
One possible
explanation is that K6G’s residents, being gay or trans, are unable to
perform a hypermasculine identity and thus to conform to the dictates of the
gangs, which demand self-presentation as hard, tough, and potentially
violent. There are obvious flaws in this explanation. For one thing, as
Jeannie Suk rightly notes, heterosexuals have no monopoly on masculine

370

See supra Part II.B, Part III.B.3.

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performance.371 To the contrary, “the phenomenon of gay masculinity is
well known.”372 Even more to the point, every day in prisons and jails
around the country, gay men housed in GP units successfully conform their
behavior to the hypermasculinity imperative to the degree demanded by
their respective institutional environments. Indeed, for gay men in some
GP units, one effective way to protect themselves from being exposed as
homosexuals and thus becoming “fair game” for predators373 is to become
predators themselves, dominating weaker prisoners to ward off any
suggestions that they themselves are insufficiently masculine.374 And even
those gay men in GP who do not resort to victimizing others will be driven
to perform a hypermasculine identity as best they can to protect themselves
from exposure as gay. Certainly, being gay does not preclude gang
membership, as was evident from the (temporarily inactive) gang members
in K6G.375 Indeed, more than once during my research, I was treated to a
demonstration of just how easily some men—even those who, given the
choice, would prefer to perform something of a stereotypical gay identity—
can switch into hard-core gangster mode. In one such case, my informant
explained that if he was sent to the Jail’s GP and forced to assume a
gangster persona, it would be no different for him than life in the streets,
since as a member of a local “set” of a well-known national gang, he
perpetually performed this identity with his “homeboys” when he was
free.376 In this culture, everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, faces
371

See Jeannie Suk, Redistributing Rape, 48 AM. CRIM. L. REV. 111, 116 (2011).
Id.
373
As Stephen Donaldson explains:
There is no niche in the prisoner structure for a sexually reciprocal or masculineidentified gay man such as we see in our androphilic communities. In a rural jail or
minimum-security prison, he may succeed in fending off [the pressure to take the
passive sexual role], but in any other confinement environment, the entire institution
would be against him and he would have to survive repeated combat.
Donaldson, supra note 225, at 120.
374
Ironically, in such a case, this predatory inmate would be regarded as a “real man”
and thus by definition not homosexual, while his victim, having been forced to submit, will
be seen as emasculated and thus redefined as female “even where the victim’s clear sexual
preference is for heterosexual activity.” HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 87, at 70
(“[T]he crucial point is not that [the aggressor is] having sex with a man; instead it is that
they are the aggressor, as opposed to the victim—the person doing the penetration, as
opposed to the one being penetrated. Indeed, if they see anyone as gay, it is the victim.”).
375
In my interviews, I asked two related questions: Are there any gang members in
K6G? and Are there any gang politics in K6G? See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 106 qq.105–
06. My subjects unanimously answered the former question in the affirmative and the latter
in the negative.
376
For this individual, K6G was the only environment in which he felt free to act
consistently with his most authentic self. See Int. 71, at C6 (“If you’re a Southsider and
372

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pressure to perform an exaggerated version of the hegemonic masculine
ideal 377 to avoid the aspersions of weakness that can lead to victimization.
The success of many gay men at obscuring their sexual orientation
with hypermasculine performance in GP is evident from the fallout from an
event that occurred in the California prison system in the summer of 2007,
when the leadership of the Southsiders put out a “green light” on all gay
men in their ranks—meaning that any Southsider could attack gay members
of their own gang with impunity and even earn “stripes” for doing so.378
This move, apparently intended to purge the gang of potential “weak links”
in anticipation of an all-out “war” with the Blacks, had the effect of driving
many gay Southsiders—who for good reason wished to avoid requesting
protective custody379—even more firmly into the closet. That in many
cases it was not obvious which Southsiders were in fact gay indicates that
being gay in GP does not necessarily preclude successful hypermasculine
performance.
It is thus a mistake to imagine that only men who identify as
heterosexual can achieve successful hypermasculine performance in prison.
As for trans women, although those who present as women are unable to
conceal their gender identity through hypermasculine posturing, one of my
interview subjects made clear that at least some aspects of hypermasculinity
are available to members of this group. Despite her overt presentation as
female, this subject reported having relatively little trouble on the mainline
during her four prison terms. She attributed this success to her well-known
status as an ex-boxer and the extremely muscular physique she still
possessed.380

you’re gay, it’s really a hard thing. That’s why when I go [to prison], I act totally straight. I
don’t act gay at all . . . . I don’t act myself, I act . . . like I’m a heterosexual male.”). Jeannie
Suk nicely captures this phenomenon when she observes that prisoners in this culture are
“Butlerians,” after gender theorist Judith Butler, who “theoriz[es] gender as performative,
constituted through repeated acts.” See Suk, supra note 371, at 112 n.16 (citing JUDITH
BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE (1990)).
377
See Cooper, supra note 165, at 686 (defining “hegemonic masculinity”).
378
In addition, this “green light” allowed members of other gangs to attack gay
Southsiders without fear of retaliation by the gang.
379
People who request protective custody publicly signal their inability to protect
themselves on the mainline and thus their inherent weakness. For this reason, when a person
has once requested protective custody, he cannot go back to the general population, since,
being someone who will henceforth be perceived as weak, a return to GP would mean
exposure to certain victimization. In many cases, a person’s decision to “go PC” will also
follow him back into the streets, where he will be equally vulnerable to victimization on
account of his perceived weakness.
380
See Int. 53, at B9.

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Still, it seems fair to say that, for a not-insignificant number of K6Gs,
successful hypermasculine performance would be a hard thing to pull off.
My ex-boxer notwithstanding, most trans women are unable to secure the
status and respect—and thus the security—that accrues to men in GP who
can effectively manifest a hypermasculine identity. This is why, as Human
Rights Watch noted in its report on male rape in U.S. prisons, trans women
in custody “nearly always have an inmate ‘husband,’ someone powerful
enough in the inmate hierarchy to keep the other inmates away.”381 Nor
will all gay men be as adept at presenting a tough guy image as those of my
subjects who were able to switch their self-presentation instantly from “gay
boy” to “gangbanger.”382
The same, of course, is also true of GP, since any GP unit is also likely
to have a mix of people, all of whom lie along a spectrum as to their
capacity for hypermasculine performance, with some perfectly able, others
wholly unable, and others landing somewhere in the middle. Given that
gay men and trans women are known to be at heightened risk of
victimization in custody, it does seem likely that K6G houses a higher
proportion of people383 who are less able to successfully perform a
hypermasculine identity.384 Yet if K6G contains a disproportionate number

381

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 87, at 57.
Those able to exhibit this skill generally had a history of gang membership and
immersion in the gang culture, whether in custody or on the streets or both. This is likely
why first offenders and non-violent offenders tend to be at greater risk of victimization in
custody, since they are unfamiliar with “the game” and less skilled at playing it. See Man &
Cronan, supra note 29, at 169–71, 173–75. Imagining what life is like for those less able to
pass as hard and tough in GP helps to reveal the particular kind of hell that the carceral
experience promises the uninitiated—although, as Craig Haney makes clear in his powerful
essay on the origins of the hypermasculinity imperative, life in this environment can also be
hellish—albeit in different ways—even for those who are more adept at hypermasculine
performance. See Haney, supra note 14, at 124–37.
383
Again, for the reasons provided above, it is mistaken to imagine that no one in K6G is
able to do so. To the contrary, as I have discussed elsewhere, the nature of the unit’s
admissions criteria, which focus on sexual identity rather than one’s ability to handle oneself
on the mainline, makes the program very likely to be overinclusive as to its protective
purposes. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 39.
384
Moreover, given the stigma attached to being gay in prison and in the hypermasculine
culture of the gangs in particular, it may be that the gang members one finds in K6G are less
able to enforce the behavioral code of GP since they may have less “juice” within the gang
structure as a whole and thus may be—or believed to be—weaker than their straight
colleagues. This relative weakness, whether real or simply perceived, may thus undermine
from the get-go any efforts by gang members in K6G to rule the dorms. On the other hand,
even if there is something to this notion, given the gangs’ desire to enlarge their sphere of
influence, they may yet be inclined to stand up for their colleagues in K6G, notwithstanding
the averred homosexuality of the gang members in K6G. Were it indeed the case that gang
members in K6G suffer the equivalent of being cut loose or diminished in status and support
382

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of people likely to be victimized in GP, it also contains a sizable number of
people who could—and have—successfully engaged in hypermasculine
performance in GP. Those in this group know the game, can play the game,
and have experienced firsthand the way that failing to do so in certain
circumstances can put one at risk.
In short, what exists in K6G is best understood as a difference, not of
kind, but of degree. The question is whether the presence of a relatively
greater proportion of people who are less adept at hypermasculine
performance explains K6G’s relatively safe and humane character.
Perhaps, for example, there is a tipping point in the collective capacity to
perform hypermasculinity, beyond which a given custodial environment is
more likely to organize itself along the lines currently found in the Jail’s
GP. Or perhaps a sufficiently sizable minority of non-participants is
enough to shift the cultural norms in a healthier, more prosocial direction.
These possibilities certainly merit further consideration. It does,
however, seem hard to credit the notion that, absent other contributing
factors, the people in K6G—many of them repeat players with a long
history of confinement in the Jail, in state prison, or both—would put aside
all they know about how to survive in custody just because others in the
unit are weaker than they are. This is especially implausible since in the
usual case, the presence of weaker people in one’s housing unit is generally
not a reason to leave off hypermasculine posturing, but a welcome relief,
since it means that one may not have to work as hard to avoid becoming a
target. Even more to the point, to so conclude would require that we
dismiss as irrelevant the many external factors that have together helped
people in K6G feel independently safe and thus able to forgo
hypermasculine performance and gang involvement.
To put the point another way, the puzzle K6G presents is only
secondarily why those people who would have been likely targets in GP
feel so relatively safe in K6G. The primary question is why people
otherwise capable of passing in GP’s hypermasculine environment do not
feel compelled to behave in an aggressive or predatory manner toward
weaker people in the K6G dorms. And to resolve this puzzle, it cannot be
enough simply to point to the relative number of weaker people, since,
again, under other circumstances, this ratio would only make it easier for
people otherwise on the borderline to escape victimization. Other factors
must also be at work, factors that influence, not the ratio of those relatively
because of their sexual identity, and were this process to contribute appreciably to the
difference between K6G and GP, it would suggest that prison and jail administrators
committed to increasing the safety of their GP units should redouble their efforts to disrupt
coordinated gang activity. I am grateful to Justin Levitt for raising this fascinating issue,
which merits further inquiry.

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able to engage in successful hypermasculine performance versus those
relatively unable to do so, but what those men who could be aggressively
hypermasculine make of this ratio—whether they see the presence of
weaker men as a guarantee of their own safety or a matter of indifference.
And as has been seen, in K6G, a host of structural conditions only
contingently related to the sexual identity of unit residents have come
together to make those men otherwise able to successfully perform a
hypermasculine identity feel sufficiently safe and secure not to have to
bother doing so, however many potential victims may be in the vicinity.
Still, the relatively high population of otherwise vulnerable individuals
in K6G serves as a valuable reminder of the need to identify all prisoners
who, because of demeanor or personal characteristics, are unable to avoid
coming across as weak in the hypermasculine culture of GP. This
imperative informed the approach recommended pursuant to the Prison
Rape Elimination Act (PREA)385 by the National Prison Rape Elimination
Commission (the Commission) in its draft national standards submitted for
consideration to the United States Attorney General in June 2009 and
adopted by the United States Department of Justice in its final PREA
standards in 2012.386 Specifically, the Commission proposed that all
inmates be “screened during . . . the initial classification process, and at all
subsequent classification reviews to assess their risk of being sexually
abused by inmates.”387 The Commission provided, at “a minimum,” that
prison officials:
[Should] use the following criteria to screen male inmates for risk of victimization:
mental or physical disability, young age, slight build, first incarceration in prison or
jail, nonviolent history, prior convictions for sex offenses against an adult or child,

385

Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003, 42 U.S.C. §§ 15601–09 (2003).
Among other things, Congress directed the Commission to “carry out a comprehensive legal
and factual study of the penalogical [sic], physical, mental, medical, social, and economic
impacts of prison rape in the United States,” 42 U.S.C. § 15606(d)(1); hold public hearings
on these issues, 42 U.S.C. § 15606(g); and submit a report to the Attorney General and the
Secretary of Health and Human Services containing “recommended national standards for
enhancing the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of prison rape.” 42 U.S.C
§ 15606(e)(1). The Commission submitted its final report in June 2009. See NAT’L PRISON
RAPE ELIMINATION COMM’N REPORT 217 (June 2009) [hereinafter COMMISSION REPORT].
PREA also directed the Attorney General to promulgate a “final rule adopting national
standards for the detection, prevention, reduction, and punishment of prison rape.” 42 U.S.C.
§ 15607(a)(1). These final rules were officially issued in June 2012. See 28 C.F.R. Part 115
(2012) (National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape).
386
See 28 C.F.R. Part 115; see also 28 C.F.R. § 115.41 (screening for risk of
victimization and abusiveness); 28 C.F.R. § 115.42 (use of screening information).
387
See COMMISSION REPORT, supra note 385, at 217.

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sexual orientation of gay or bisexual, gender nonconformance (e.g., transgender or
intersex identity), [and] prior sexual victimization . . . .388

As has already been seen, a person’s risk of sexual abuse in custody is
inversely proportionate to his ability to successfully perform a
hypermasculine identity. The Commission’s proposal thus amounts to a
strategy for identifying those least able to bring off this performance and
keeping them away from those prisoners likely to be more effective in this
regard. The Commission’s findings indicate that the difficulty of measuring
up to the demands of the hypermasculine imperative is not unique to the
populations K6G serves. To the contrary, any number of people in
custody—many with the qualities identified in the Commission’s
recommendations as to screening—are likely to fall short in this regard. To
the extent that this inability puts a person at risk, it seems clear that the state
has an obligation to provide necessary protection, whatever a person’s
sexual orientation or gender identity.
2. They Don’t Want To
The evident appeal of K6G’s less pressured environment suggests a
second explanation hinging on the sexual identity of K6G’s residents for the
differences between GP and K6G: considering the relative ease of life in
K6G, with the room it creates for emotional expression, meaningful
interpersonal engagement, creativity, and even levity, unit residents would
simply prefer not to play the game. But this explanation, too, trades on
stereotypes. It suggests that gay men and trans women, being “soft,” would
prefer a space like K6G; whereas heterosexual men would prefer to live in a
context defined by hypermasculine performance. This way of construing
the matter is problematic in two related respects: (1) it frames the
undoubted preferences of people in K6G for a less pressured environment
as somehow a function of insufficient toughness, and (2) it frames a
preference for the culture of GP as the mark of a “real man.”
No doubt, there are men in custody who would choose the high-stakes,
high-pressure atmosphere of a hypermasculine culture over the relatively
relaxed and comfortable environment of K6G. For some people, most
notably those who are young and still immersed in the gang life on the
streets, that life, with its norms and values, is all they know. For those at
the top of the pecking order of their respective gang structures, the culture
of GP offers a direct and familiar path to status, power, and respect—

388
Id. The Commission also recommended that prison officials “use information from
the risk screening” in making decisions as to “housing, bed, work, education and program
assignments with the goal of keeping separate those inmates at high risk of being sexually
victimized from those at high risk of being sexually abusive.” Id.

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resources that would otherwise be unavailable to someone who has lived no
other life.389
But this disposition is the exception, not the rule. It flows not from a
heterosexual orientation, but from a highly circumscribed life experience
and a highly constrained set of options. Gay men as well as straight men
may come up under these circumstances. There is thus no reason to think
that only straight men would exhibit this tragic preference for a
hypermasculine culture and gang life.390 More importantly, the fact that,
given the choice, some men would prefer GP to K6G does not mean that
this is true of all or even most men in custody. To imagine otherwise is to
fundamentally misunderstand the experience of life in GP. Most of the men
who perform a hypermasculine identity in the Jail’s GP or in other GP units
where this imperative governs do so not by choice, but because they feel
they have no choice, given the awful consequences—including ongoing
harassment and abuse and even serial rape—of letting down their guard and
thereby seeming weak.391 Just because people play the game does not mean
they do so willingly. To the contrary, given the stakes of unsuccessful
hypermasculine performance in many men’s carceral facilities, it seems
more likely that, in most cases, participation in this “desperate and
dehumanized context”392 is driven far more by an understandable desire to
avoid victimization than by enthusiasm for what the culture demands.393

389
As someone with extensive experience in both GP and K6G explained it to me, for
some men in GP, living the gang life in the California prisons is preferable even to freedom,
since “on the streets, [they] are nobody,” and “get no respect,” whereas in prison, they have
power and enjoy the respect that comes of it. Telephone Interview with Cameron Saul, Case
Manager, Tarzana Treatment Ctr. (Oct. 27, 2011); see also Haney, supra note 14, at 133 (“In
the freeworld outside of jail and prison, many . . . men have long been structurally
marginalized and emasculated and will be again when they return to it, even though the
fearsomeness with which they display their masculinity in prison is designed to mask this
fact.”).
390
The hypermasculine culture of street gangs has much in common with the
hypermasculine environment of the men’s carceral institution, and it is dangerous in both
environments for men to be found to be (or even suspected of being) gay. Yet as my
interviews made clear, there are plenty of (inactive) gang members in K6G, which indicates
that being gay does not preclude the sort of life experience described in the text.
391
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 11–19 (describing the culture of hypermasculinity in
GP and the stakes of unsuccessful hypermasculine performance).
392
Haney, supra note 14, at 124.
393
As Haney recounts:
My experiences studying jail and prison environments over the last several decades
have taught me never to underestimate their potential to destructively transform and
psychically disfigure the persons who are kept inside them. I have seen many
frightened young men enter these places in terror only to eventually become fearsome
predators themselves.

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The steady stream of men who come through the K6G classification
office pretending to be gay is powerful evidence of the oppressiveness of
the Jail’s GP. Given the heightened risk of victimization in custody faced
by men perceived to be gay, the fact that some men are willing to “don the
light blue uniforms” of K6G in order to get away from GP, even
temporarily,394 indicates just how badly they want to escape the pressure of
life in GP and how much they are willing to risk to do so.395 This
phenomenon exposes the limits of the “personal preference” explanation for
K6G’s character. These men would plainly prefer to live free of the
hypermasculinity imperative. Yet once back in the Jail’s GP, they conform
to the same cultural demands they were so desperate to escape—in
company with many other men who no doubt feel the same way.
At this point, some readers may start considering how to calculate the
proportion of dissenters required to shift the dynamics of a hypermasculine
culture to one in which people would feel freer to relax and be
themselves.396 This is a crucial and potentially very fruitful inquiry, as is
clear from the fact that the GP culture I describe, although widespread,
varies in intensity among institutions.397 Yet any calculations of this sort
would have to reckon with the price of dissent or withdrawal in a climate in
which failing to conform to the dictates of the hypermasculinity imperative

Id. at 126.
394
Even those who succeed in getting classified to K6G will have to rejoin GP if they
wind up in state prison, where there is no corresponding K6G unit.
395
See Haney, supra note 14, at 141 (explaining that those men who falsely claim to be
gay to try to get access to K6G do so despite “risking long-term stigmatization and even
grave danger in their future incarcerations, hoping to don light blue uniforms that will
announce their stigmatized status to the rest of the jail,” all “in the hope of garnering an
added measure of safety and survive the experience just this one time”).
396
Frameworks for approaching this puzzle suggested by readers of earlier drafts include
game theory (and specifically the “stag hunt” game, see Robert van Rooij, Book Note, 85
STUDIA LOGICA 133, 133–36 (2007) (reviewing BRIAN SKYRMS, THE STAG HUNT AND THE
EVALUATION OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE (2003))), social network theory, social capital theory,
and social ecology. I thank Alex Stremitzer, Joe Doherty, and Daria Roithmayr for these
suggestions. My sense is that each of these frameworks has something interesting to offer
efforts to make sense of the dynamics I describe, and I hope others will be moved to
undertake such analyses. Whatever perspective one adopts, it will be impossible to
understand the persistence of GP’s culture of hypermasculinity without recognizing the deep
collective fear of nonconformity that exists among prisoners, and the relationship between
this fear and the institutional failure to ensure the physical safety and security of the people
in custody. My goal in this Article is to illuminate that connection, which, as I have sought
to show, must rely more on ethnography than on abstract theoretical frameworks, at least in
the first instance.
397
See supra note 30 (comparing the inmate culture of Vacaville State Prison in the early
1980s with the inmate culture of Folsom State Prison in the late 1980s).

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can expose one to serious ongoing victimization.398 In an environment
where the price of nonconformity may be abuse, humiliation, and physical
harm, the pressure to conform is considerable. As a consequence, we can
expect even people who would strongly prefer not to have to participate in
this culture to continue to do so unless they are fairly certain they can safely
abandon the posture.399
This is the reality of life in the general population of many men’s
prisons and jails. What drives behavior is not personal preference, but fear.
To the extent that the intensity of the hypermasculine imperative is
mitigated, it is because men feel to some extent safe where they are. To the
degree that they do not feel safe—that they are instead afraid—
hypermasculine posturing will be perceived as necessary. So long as this
fear persists, we can expect to see no change in culture. The central
distinguishing feature of K6G as compared with the Jail’s GP is thus not
that the gay men and trans women in K6G would prefer not to play the
game, but that in K6G, for a variety of reasons, people feel independently
safe from physical harm. They are not driven by fear, and so feel safe
leaving off the hypermasculine posturing.
At the same time, there is something to the notion that K6G is the way
it is at least in part because people in the dorms want it that way. The K6G
experience strongly suggests that people in custody will only willingly
abandon the self-protective mechanisms of hypermasculine performance
and gang involvement once they feel independently safe doing so. But it
also reveals the way a safe atmosphere, once established, can in turn foster
a collective determination to keep destructive patterns at bay. When, as
occasionally happens, new arrivals try to introduce gang norms, dorm
residents quickly indicate that in K6G those behaviors do not “fly.”400 In
other words, people in K6G cooperate to maintain a relatively healthy
carceral environment. This is K6G’s virtuous circle at work,401 reflecting
398
For example, a person who is perceived to be weak in the hypermasculine culture of
GP “might just have [their] store stolen, or be forced to do laundry or shine shoes,” or they
might be “stabbed to get [them] off the yard” to make way for a soldier perceived as more
reliable, or they might be forced by a more powerful prisoner “to go into [his] cell and be his
bitch.” Telephone Interview with Cameron Saul, Case Manager, Tarzana Treatment Ctr.
(Oct. 27, 2011).
399
I say “fairly certain” and not “absolutely certain” because there are always men
desperate or determined enough to break with the gang life that they will attempt withdrawal
even absent a guarantee of safety. In some cases, this effort will be made by someone in the
last stages of his sentence and anxious to get through the remainder of his time without
catching another criminal charge or a disciplinary report, either of which could delay his
release.
400
Int. 71, at A7; see also supra notes 153, 213.
401
See supra Part III.B.3.

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the way that, once people feel safe enough to allow an alternative culture to
emerge, that alternative culture may in turn give rise to collective norms
that help to foster a more congenial environment. In K6G, these desirable
second-order effects would not have been possible without the background
conditions that have ensured the physical safety of unit residents. At the
same time, the K6G experience indicates the way that, under the right
conditions, people in custody can themselves contribute to a positive living
environment, which they can choose to work to maintain.
3. They Don’t Need To
There is yet a third possible explanation for the K6G difference
grounded in the sexual identity of K6G’s residents: that the people in K6G
eschew the hypermasculine culture of GP because they do not need what it
provides. This is a more promising direction, which recognizes that men
who conform to the dictates of GP’s prison culture do so not because they
prefer it but because they feel compelled. But what need is it that
hypermasculine performance fulfills?
In her provocative piece,
Redistributing Rape, Jeannie Suk considers one key distinction between
K6G and GP—the relative absence of rape in K6G—and looks to the sexual
identity of K6G’s residents to explain that difference. In particular, she
notes that people in K6G, unlike those in GP, have ready access to their
“objects of desire.”402 As she puts it, “because the[ir] objects of desire” are
present to them, people in K6G “are able to retain this core aspect of sexual
freedom” in a way that men in GP, “who sexually desire women, are
not.”403 Instead, “[f]or heterosexual prisoners, the basic expression of their
sexual orientation is an aspect of human experience that incarceration
inevitably denies in imposing a single-sex environment.”404 In order for
such men “to have sex in a way that may attempt to gratify their sexual
desire, some of them [must forcibly] turn some men into women.”405
The aspect of GP Suk identifies is an inevitable feature of a penal
system that segregates by gender. As Gresham Sykes famously observed,
lack of access to preferred sexual partners is one of the “pains of
imprisonment” most people suffer in custody.406 And it is certainly true
that, unlike many men in GP,407 people in K6G have ready access to their
402

See Suk, supra note 371, at 117.
Id.
404
Id.
405
Id.
406
See SYKES, supra note 164, at 70–72.
407
It can be assumed that in all GP units, there are men who are gay or bisexual, or who,
despite having had a heterosexual orientation before being incarcerated, have come over
403

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objects of desire.408 The question is what significance this fact has for the
comparatively safe and humane character of life in K6G and the absence in
the unit of any hypermasculine imperative or gang politics.
One possible implication is the one Suk suggests: rape is not an issue
in K6G because there are plenty of willing sexual partners for those who
want one. Sykes assumed this connection. In his 1958 study of a New
Jersey men’s maximum-security prison, he reported that those people he
called “habitual homosexuals,” i.e., “men who were homosexuals before
their arrival [in prison],”] were “only too apt to be victimized or raped by
aggressive prisoners who . . . turned to homosexuality as a temporary means
of relieving their frustration.”409 This explanation for the virtual absence of
rape in K6G was echoed by many people I spoke to in the unit. As one of
my interview subjects pithily put it, “[in K6G] we just don’t do that to each
other . . . [since] it’s too many people willing.”410
This account, which regards sexual deprivation as the primary driver
for rape in custody,411 has an intuitive logic. Sexual desire is a natural,
vital, and powerful human impulse; and it seems plausible that men who
had access to sexual outlets of their own choosing would be less likely to
force sexual contact on unwilling others. Taken alone, however, sexual
frustration seems an insufficient explanation for the role rape (or the threat
of rape) plays in the sexual culture of GP. For one thing, there are plenty of
men in the free world for whom frustrated sexual desire does not prompt
perpetually aggressive behavior, and the objects-of-desire account seems

years in custody to be sexually attracted to other men. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 26
n.150. It is thus to be expected that there are at least some—and perhaps many—men in
custody who do have access to their objects of desire despite living in a gender-segregated
environment.
408
The exceptions are those people who are not in fact gay but only pretended to be so in
order to get into the unit, and, at least in theory, trans women who are not sexually attracted
to men.
409
SYKES, supra note 164, at 71.
410
Int. 100, at E13. Or, as I frequently heard it put in informal conversation, “why take it
by force when there are so many people willing to give it up for free?”
411
Suk is hardly alone in this view. See, e.g., Craig T. Palmer et al., Is It Sex Yet?
Theoretical and Practical Implications of the Debate over Rapists’ Motives, 39 JURIMETRICS
J. 271, 271–72 (1999) (criticizing the claim that rape is “not sex” and arguing that “while
numerous motives may be involved in any given rape, sexual motivation is necessary and in
some cases sufficient for a rape to occur”) (cited in Alice Ristroph, Sexual Punishments, 15
COLUM. J. GENDER & L. 139, 139–40 n.3 (2006)). The sexual deprivation view contrasts
with the view, informed by feminist theorizing and frequently found in the prison literature,
that rape is an “expression of dominance and power that has little to do with desire,”
Ristroph, supra, at 139—more a play for “power gratification” than “sexual gratification.”
Gordon James Knowles, Male Prison Rape: A Search for Causation and Prevention, 38
HOW. J. CRIM. JUST. 267, 279 (1999).

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inadequate to explain why the same would not be true of men in custody.
This view also leaves unanswered the question of why even those men who
do have access in GP to their objects of desire—those who are gay,
bisexual, or “situational homosexuals”412—may force themselves sexually
upon weaker inmates rather than finding and engaging in consensual sex
with other willing participants. And perhaps most significantly, it fails to
account for any relationship between sexual violence in prison and the
culture of hypermasculine aggression more broadly, a culture that, as we
have seen, is traceable in part to efforts by men who are anxious about their
gender identity and humiliated by the prison experience to shore up their
self-image and gain status in the eyes of others. In an environment with
few if any healthy and prosocial avenues for the expression of one’s
masculinity, dominating weaker people (a.k.a. “punks,” the “contrast
figures” of hypermasculinity in prison413) can become a method of choice—
and fear of being “punked” may spur even people not otherwise prone to
violence to become preemptively hypermasculine themselves.
This domination of weaker people can take many forms. Men branded
as punks may find themselves harassed, publicly humiliated, or forced to
perform menial services for stronger inmates. At its most extreme, this
abuse will culminate in rape414 and even in “ownership” of victims
relabeled as female, whose subjugated status stands as public proof of the
victimizers’ power—balm for an ego humiliated by the conditions of their
incarceration on a daily basis.
Four benefits in particular appear to accrue from such hypermasculine
performance: (1) sexual satisfaction, at least for those men prepared to
“punk” or “turn out”—both euphemisms for rape—the weakest of their
fellow prisoners, thereby reframing them as “female” and thus as desirable
sexual partners;415 (2) proof of manhood; (3) safety from men looking for
412

See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 26 n.150 (explaining that “situational homosexuals”
are men who, although preferring women as sexual partners, will have sex with men while
incarcerated).
413
See Cooper, supra note 165, at 689.
414
See REBECCA TRAMMELL, ENFORCING THE CONVICT CODE: VIOLENCE AND PRISON
CULTURE 71–72 (2012). Trammel interviewed former California prisoners and reports that
all her interview subjects denied the presence of rape in the California prisons. See id. Yet
as Trammel delved further, she found that this denial had less to do with an absence of
forced or coerced sex in the prisons than with the fact that her subjects seemed to reframe
these incidents—even those preceded by extreme physical violence or threats of violence—
as not rape. See id. In their view, it appeared, anyone who “gives it up” to another man in
custody, however intense the physical pressure to do so, must be gay and therefore must
have wanted (or deserved) it. See id.
415
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 15–17 (explaining the relationship between this
process and the hypermasculine culture of GP); Rideau, supra note 8, at 75 (explaining that,

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weaker people to victimize; and (4) respect. The possibility under
consideration is that K6G is free from any hypermasculinity imperative
(and from the gang politics that come with it) because people in the unit
already enjoy or have no need for these goods and thus need not resort to
hypermasculine posturing to try to get them. This account is close to the
mark. The question then becomes: how is it that people in K6G can get
these benefits without hypermasculine performance, but men in the Jail’s
GP cannot? And to what extent is the reason grounded in the sexual
identity of unit residents? If sexual identity proves the whole of it, this
would certainly seem to negate the possibility of drawing generalizable
lessons from the K6G experience. As we will see, however, sexual identity
is not the whole of it. And it turns out that even where this factor does in
part explain the K6G difference, it is still possible to distill generalizable
insights from the reasons why.
Consider the first two benefits hypermasculine posturing provides men
in GP: sexual satisfaction and proof of manhood. As to sexual satisfaction,
as Suk points out, the sexual identity of K6G’s residents does mean that
people in the unit can access this good simply by being themselves.416 As
for proof of manhood, sexual identity also seems to explain why unit
residents have no need for hypermasculine performance, although the
reason is not, as might be thought, that people in the unit have no stake in
maintaining masculine self-images. As to at least some men in K6G, this
notion is surely incorrect; as has been seen, heterosexual men have no
monopoly on masculinity.417 It is undeniable that there are many people in
K6G, most notably the trans women and self-described “gay boys,” who
self-consciously perform more stereotypical female identities. Although for
these individuals, incarceration is certainly demeaning in a host of ways,
they are at least unlikely to feel the sting of incarceration as a threat to their
“manhood.”
But there are men in K6G who would experience
incarceration as such a threat, and who thus might well feel this sting—or at
least, they would if they were in GP. That they do not feel it in K6G is not
because they do not self-identify as male, but because by virtue of their
placement in K6G, they have available to them an obvious and powerful

in the Louisiana prison system, rape is generally referred to as “‘turning out,’ a nonsexual
description that reveals the nonsexual ritualistic nature of what is really an act of conquest
and emasculation, stripping the male victim of his status as a ‘man’ [and] redefines him as a
‘female’ in this perverse subculture”).
416
See Suk, supra note 371, at 117.
417
See id. at 116 (“The phenomenon of gay masculinity is well known.”); see also id.
(“The rising legal awareness of phenomena like domestic violence, sexual assault, and
sexual harassment among gay men would seem to bring gay masculinity within the ambit of
the reigning feminist theory of those forms of violence.”).

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mechanism through which to preserve and even affirm their gender identity:
relations, sexual or otherwise, with their objects of desire.
The open sexuality in K6G means that, as Suk puts it, people will be
able to satisfy their “sexual orientation within the confines of the prison
experience.”418 In particular, those men in K6G whose gender identity is in
part informed by being sexually dominant will be able to express that
identity through consensual sexual liaisons with other K6G residents who
prefer to take a sexually subordinate role. Indeed, the presence in K6G of
people with a range of gender identities means that even nonsexual
interactions will regularly affirm the masculinity of male-identified
residents of the unit. This is by contrast to GP, in which “prisoners [who]
have very little communication with women . . . feel as if they have lost
certain attributes of their masculine identity.”419
But even assuming that sexual identity explains the sexual fulfillment
and affirmation of gender identity enjoyed by people in K6G, the K6G
example still has crucial lessons to teach about humanizing carceral
conditions more broadly. Most obviously, K6G powerfully illustrates the
humanizing effects of sexual expression,420 both in terms of the sexual
satisfaction it affords and as a means for reinforcing and affirming gender
identity, i.e., the first two benefits of hypermasculine performance on our
list. Realistically, for a variety of reasons—most obviously, the need for
gender segregation in custody421 and the fact that, even assuming gender
418

Id. at 117.
Rachel Wyatt, Male Rape in U.S. Prisons: Are Conjugal Visits the Answer?, 37 CASE
W. RES. J. INT’L L. 579, 594 (2006). As Sykes observed:
Like most men, the inmate must search for his identity not simply within himself but
also in the picture of himself which he finds reflected in the eyes of others; and since
a significant half of his audience is denied him, the inmate’s self-image is in danger of
becoming half complete, fractured, a monochrome without the hues of reality.
SYKES, supra note 164, at 71–72 (quoted in Robertson, supra note 164, at 13).
420
See Brenda V. Smith, Rethinking Prison Sex: Self-Expression and Safety, 15 COLUM.
J. GENDER & L. 185 (2006).
421
Coed prisons were originally endorsed by proponents as a means to improve
rehabilitative opportunities for incarcerated women, who were generally afforded fewer such
options than their male counterparts. See, e.g., Dean Spade, Documenting Gender, 59
HASTINGS L.J. 731, 811 (2008) (“The motivation for these projects and the general push
toward ‘co-corrections’ in the 1970s was inequality between men’s and women’s prisons.”).
There were even some claims to the effect that in coed facilities, sexual assault decreased.
See, e.g., id. at 811 (“The results of the experiment [with co-corrections at DCI Fort Worth],
according to researchers, were successful. . . . Violence within the facility, especially among
men and including sexual assault, was significantly reduced.”). But by the late 1980s, the
general consensus was that this project had not been a success. See Stephen J. Schulhofer,
The Feminist Challenge in Criminal Law, 143 U. PA. L. REV. 2151, 2204–05 (1995).
Indeed, according to some, coed prisons had been “a disaster for women”; since women
419

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integration of some sort, the men would still greatly outnumber the
women422—the lack of access to women will continue to be among the
“pains of imprisonment” for most men in custody for the foreseeable
future.423 Still, the K6G example underscores the importance for all
prisoners of “conjugal visits” by spouses or lovers; of family visits that
allow people in custody extended time with children outside the limiting
and often oppressive environment of the visiting room; of weekend
furloughs; and of any other programs that afford the opportunity for people
to perform their preferred gender roles in a socially productive and
personally affirming way. These programs would allow for sexual release,
a valuable benefit in itself. More importantly still, “[m]aintaining healthy
bonds with their children and spouses helps [male] inmates reaffirm their
masculinity, and reduces their need to establish a manly self-image by
victimizing other inmates.”424
The second generalizable lesson to emerge from recognizing the
importance of the sexual satisfaction and secure gender identities K6Gs
enjoy is entwined with the third benefit hypermasculine performance
provides men in GP: physical safety. Assurance of physical protection, as
has been seen, is a vital component of humane carceral conditions: without
it, people may wind up living in constant fear of victimization, a
psychologically traumatizing experience even for those who are never
physically harmed. Without that assurance, there would be no open
sexuality in K6G. There is, in other words, a necessary connection between
the independent feelings of safety and security K6Gs enjoy and the sexual
fulfillment and affirmation of gender identity that access to their preferred
sexual partners provides. Simply being housed with their objects of desire
is not enough to ensure these latter benefits; people also have to feel safe
were “vastly outnumbered by the men at each site,” they wound up “neglected, even more
than before,” while “bear[ing] the brunt of tight security measures” as correctional officers
found it “much harder to restrict and supervise the movements of 500 men than to guard
closely forty or fifty women.” Id. at 2204.
422
Given the fact that the vast majority of people in custody are men, coed prisons would
not ensure broad access for all heterosexual men in prison to their objects of desire, since
even assuming all women in custody were also interested in sexual or otherwise intimate
liaisons, there would not, to put it crudely, be enough women to go around. See U.S. DEP’T
OF JUSTICE, JAIL INMATES AT MIDYEAR 2010—STATISTICAL TABLES, supra note 158, at 7
(reporting that as of midyear 2010, there were 649,284 adult men in jail as compared with
91,884 adult women); U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, PRISONERS IN 2010, supra note 158 (showing
that there were 943 men in state and federal prisons per 100,000 U.S. residents, as compared
with 67 women per 100,000 U.S. residents).
423
SYKES, supra note 164, at 71.
424
Wyatt, supra note 419, at 597; see also id. at 598 (“There is also evidence that prison
systems in other countries successfully use conjugal visits to lower rates of inmate sexual
assault.”).

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enough to act on their sexual desires. Even in GP, there will be many men
who are gay, bisexual, or situational homosexuals and who are thus, like
people in K6G, housed in proximity to their objects of desire. The
difference is that, in most cases, these men do not feel able to act openly on
their desires for fear of the consequences. Taking steps to ensure the safety
of all men in GP may thus make the “objects-of-desire” advantages K6Gs
enjoy available to at least some men in other units.
The relative safety that K6Gs enjoy, a benefit only contingently related
to the sexual identity of unit residents, is the main reason that people in the
unit feel no need for hypermasculine posturing or gang involvement. But
even assuming Suk is right that the pathologies found in GP arise to a large
degree because heterosexual-identified men in custody lack access to their
objects of desire, the K6G example is still instructive for the broader
humanizing project, since it offers a model for protecting vulnerable
prisoners from the pathological effects of this deprivation. In other words,
even absent any possibility of wholly resolving the problem of sexual
frustration in prison, the foregoing account of K6G at the very least offers
insight into how to keep safe those people at risk of being victimized as a
result.
Specifically, the K6G model suggests the wisdom of (1) identifying
and separating out likely victims from likely predators for housing
purposes;425 (2) maintaining a strict boundary between likely victims and
likely predators; (3) monitoring units in an ongoing way to identify
emergent predators; (4) automatically removing predatory individuals as
soon as they become known; (5) ensuring continuity of staffing as much as
possible to allow staff to get to know the people in their custody as
individuals; and (6) fostering a culture of respect toward people in custody
as a way of, among other things, creating channels of communication
between staff and prisoners that may help staff to identify threats and
resolve problems when they arise. Admittedly, to the extent that GP’s
worst aspects do stem from sexual deprivation, it may not be possible to
erase the threat of predation entirely, since even were all possible steps
taken to protect victims and deter predatory behavior, some men may still
be driven by their sexual needs to seek to “feminize” other prisoners, by
force if necessary, to transform them into desirable sexual partners.426 Still,

425

This is the approach recommended by the National Prison Rape Elimination
Commission, see supra Part III.C.1, and adopted by the U.S. Department of Justice in the
National PREA Standards. See 28 C.F.R. §§ 115.41–42 (2012).
426
I am grateful to Doug NeJaime for pushing me to recognize this point.

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deploying these strategies would surely mitigate whatever harm might
result from this situation427—an undeniably positive result.
There is, however, one final, urgent need that hypermasculine
posturing provides men in GP that bears consideration here, and that is
respect. For men in prison, the experience of incarceration does not only
“besiege” their masculinity, but it can also systematically demean and
humiliate them.428 Many men in custody have already been subjected—
often for their whole lives—to society’s indifference and scorn. They now
find themselves living under conditions that demean them still further on a
daily basis. For at least some of these men, hypermasculine performance
may be the only way they have to assure themselves (and others) that they
matter. The harder and more dangerous a person can seem, the more others
will be forced to pay heed. To be sure, any respect and status earned this
way will stem largely from fear. But for those with no other means to gain
others’ regard, a fear-based respect is better than no respect at all.429
On this score, too, K6Gs turn out to be less dependent on
hypermasculine performance to get what they need. And here again, the
reason why is only contingently related to the sexual identity of K6G’s
residents. Unfortunately, men in custody are often treated like “a breed

427

Recognizing the pathological effects of widespread sexual deprivation might also spur
broader efforts to address this issue, whether through expansion of conjugal visit programs
(which are currently available to relatively few people in custody) or even, where possible,
through broader use of alternatives to incarceration, to reduce the number of people who are
caught up in a fundamentally and unavoidably corrosive situation.
428
See Carolyn Newton, Gender Theory and Prison Sociology: Using Theories of
Masculinities to Interpret the Sociology of Prisons for Men, 33 HOW. J. CRIM. JUST. 193, 197
(1993) (quoted in Robertson, supra note 164, at 12).
429
Consider this excerpt from an interview conducted by criminologist Lonnie Athens,
with a boy in his mid-teens who had recently been convicted of armed robbery:
After I busted that dude’s head open, the principal kick me out of school for the rest
of the year. . . . Everybody, my people and close friends, thought I had gone too far
on the dude. . . .
But nobody in the school or around my neighborhood would fuck with me after that.
People said, “James is crazy. Don’t go heads up at the dude like that because he will
fuck you up.” Most people made sure that they gave me plenty of space and stayed
mellow around me. They paid me more respect and said “Hi” to me when I walk by.
People may have thought I went too far on that dude, but I later knew what I did was
right. It must’ve been right because nobody was giving me shit anymore.
The way people acted made me come alive. It swelled up my head.
RICHARD RHODES, WHY THEY KILL: THE DISCOVERIES OF A MAVERICK CRIMINOLOGIST 134
(1999) (quoting LONNIE ATHENS, THE CREATION OF DANGEROUS VIOLENT CRIMINALS 78–79
(1992)); id. at 135 (observing that people in the late stages of becoming a dangerous violent
criminal may find themselves “‘a welcome and desired companion among malevolent
groups for whom having violent repute is a social requirement’”) (quoting ATHENS, supra).

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apart, . . . the scum of the earth.”430 By contrast, in a variety of ways, the
people in K6G are made to feel like human beings who matter. The most
obvious way is through the explicit institutional commitment to keeping
people in K6G safe from physical harm—perhaps the ultimate form of
respect. But there are other features of K6G that are also affirmatively
humanizing in this sense. K6G is a place where the officers in charge of the
unit know everyone personally and are thus able to some extent to interact
with them as people and not just as “inmates.” As has been seen,431 Bell
and Lanni treat unit residents with an evenhandedness and lack of judgment
that allows people to be recognized for their own individual traits and
behaviors and not merely for their status as prisoners. In the incident
involving Ben and Charles,432 for example, Bell and Lanni gave both men a
hearing, and assessed the situation based on the equities and their personal
knowledge of Charles’s character. That they knew Charles to be a truthful,
nonthreatening person allowed them to put into context the threat he had
issued against Ben, and also affirmed Charles as a full moral subject, who,
although having done wrong (by threatening Ben), had earned the benefit of
the doubt by dint of his acknowledged personal virtues and generally good
conduct. As for Ben, although he did not get the result he sought, his
complaints were taken seriously and he was given reasons on the merits for
the ultimate disposition. As this example suggests, by contrast to how
people in custody are generally treated by correctional officers,433 people
interacting with Bell and Lanni are apt, regardless of the outcome, to come
away feeling respected and affirmed rather than angry or aggressive.434
In addition, thanks in large part to the commitment of the unit’s
supervising officers, the Jail has come to provide a range of services
tailored to the specific needs of K6G’s population, including condom
distribution, HIV counseling and prevention education, STD testing, and
even hormone therapy. Furthermore, and again thanks to Bell and Lanni,
people in the unit have access to a wide range of programs, including GED
classes, computer classes, drug treatment programs, and job skills training.
Not everyone in the unit participates in these classes and programs; indeed,
based on my observations, it appears that most do not. But the mere fact
that these options exist signals an institution concerned with the well-being
430
See, e.g., Dolovich, supra note 297, at 932–34 (2009) (quoting KELSEY KAUFFMAN,
PRISON OFFICERS AND THEIR WORLD 231 (1988)) (describing the way the culture of the
prison teaches prison officials to see prisoners).
431
See supra Part III.B.2.
432
See id.
433
See Dolovich, supra note 297, at 932–34.
434
For more on the commitment of these two officers to the well-being of people in
K6G, see supra Part III.B.2.

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of the people in the unit, and thus one that, at least to a degree, regards them
as more than just inmates. And it is not just the institution that affirms
K6G’s residents as worthy in this way. The high visibility of the unit
among outside organizations, media outlets, and even researchers also gives
unit residents a sense of being considered and attended to by people
concerned with their well-being.435
There is arguably even something respectful and affirming in the Jail’s
efforts to identify at intake which individuals are “homosexual”436 and
therefore belong in K6G. The notion that there might be something
humanity-affirming about an official inquiry into people’s sexual
orientation—for purposes of identity-based segregation, no less—is
admittedly counterintuitive.437 But K6G’s high recidivism rate means that,
at any given time, most people in the unit have been there before, likely
many times. This feature, combined with the fact that the benefits of K6G
are common knowledge among people familiar with the Jail, means that
most people who answer “yes” at intake to the question Are you
homosexual?438 (and indeed, many people who answer in the negative)
know full well that an affirmative answer offers the prize of classification to
K6G. In other words, most people who answer “yes” to this question at
intake are glad to be able to do so, and experience the inquiry as evidence of
the Jail’s commitment to making sure that they will be kept relatively safe
while in custody. Given how dehumanizing the carceral experience can be,
it would be a mistake to underestimate either the value of the peace of mind
this process affords, or the value of conveying to people in custody that the
institution is committed to their well-being. We should not, in other words,
overlook the humanizing power of simply acknowledging that people are
worthy of official protection.
Of course, one should not overstate the validation and respect enjoyed
by K6G’s residents. People in K6G are still incarcerated, and still treated in
many ways just like inmates. Indeed, in some ways they are treated even
worse than other people in the Jail, since their status as K6Gs—publicly
announced through their distinctive light blue uniforms—frequently
exposes them to verbal harassment when they are out of the dorms, both by

435

See supra Part III.B.4.
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 26 (explaining how K6G’s classification officers
interpret the requirement that people classified to K6G be “homosexual”); see also supra
text accompanying note 44.
437
For further discussion of this feature of K6G, and responses to objections that might
be raised to the program on this basis, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 54–87.
438
For detailed discussion of the Jail intake process of which this question forms a part,
see id. at 27–29.
436

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GPs and by homophobic deputies.439 But it nonetheless appears that,
despite the many demoralizing and even humiliating aspects of life in the
unit,440 K6G’s residents are made in various ways to feel that their safety
and well-being are issues of institutional concern. They thus have a sense
that they are regarded as people who matter, despite their being
incarcerated.
In this aspect of the K6G experience is a crucial lesson that is both
eminently generalizable and self-evidently valid: people in custody should
be treated as much as possible like human beings. Just as violence begets
violence and chronic insecurity begets behaviors that instill fear in others,
treating people with respect and consideration seems far more likely to
spark a virtuous circle, promoting behaviors that will further promote
humane, and humanizing, carceral conditions.
In sum, it seems accurate to say that people in K6G do not need to
resort to hypermasculine posturing to secure the goods it may provide men
in GP. It also appears that Suk’s objects-of-desire account, although only
part of the explanation, sheds some light on the factors—in particular,
sexual satisfaction and proof of manhood—that hypermasculine posturing
otherwise provides. It would, though, be premature to end the inquiry here,
because closer consideration of Suk’s insight as to the humanizing effects
of sexual fulfillment helps to identify yet another important piece of the
K6G story, which implicates not only the open sexuality seen in K6G but
several other behaviors as well. To get at this point requires considering
more closely the phenomenon of K6G’s virtuous circle.
As we have seen, thanks to a set of background conditions that have
fostered a collective sense of safety from physical harm, residents of K6G
have felt able to relax and be themselves. What has emerged from this
freedom to behave as they choose, with no one monitoring them for signs of
“weakness” or human vulnerability? Some people keep to themselves,
doing the sorts of things one also finds in the Jail’s GP; they read, sleep,
pray, write letters, play cards, watch TV, etc. More importantly for our
purposes, many others engage in a host of behaviors not generally seen in
GP. As Suk observes, residents have overt sexual liaisons with their objects
of desire.441 But they do other things as well: They express a range of
439

See id. at 57–58 (describing the verbal harassment to which K6Gs are often subjected
when they are outside their dorms, both by fellow prisoners and by deputies). For discussion
of the color-coded uniforms, and an explanation as to why, despite their obvious drawbacks,
it is in the best interests of people in the unit that their uniforms remain distinctive, see id. at
61–62.
440
See supra Part II.B (describing the many ways that life in K6G is as bad as life in
other parts of the jail).
441
See Suk, supra note 371, at 117.

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emotions, both positive and negative. They develop mutually supportive
relationships of all kinds. They engage in open displays of levity. And
they express themselves creatively in a number of ways— through singing,
dancing, and even fashion design and exhibition.442
From the objects-of-desire perspective, the only significant item on
this list is the open sexuality, and it is the possibility of genuine sexual
fulfillment alone that makes life in K6G so comparatively humane. But one
of the key benefits sexual satisfaction brings people in K6G is also provided
by these other essentially humane behaviors. Perhaps the most destructive
and dehumanizing aspect of life in the Jail’s GP—and in other GP units
where the hypermasculine imperative governs—is the way it can require
people to work hard to suppress, and in some cases even to destroy, the
most vulnerable and essential parts of themselves. By contrast, people in
K6G not only do not need to suppress (and thus alienate themselves from)
their core humanity; but they can engage in behaviors that allow them to
connect to, nourish, and even develop their own personal identities and
senses of self. They do this through sex and romantic relationships, yes, but
they also do it through other forms of personal expression and interpersonal
connection. When people in the unit laugh, sing, or dance, and even when
they complain, argue, or express unhappiness or irritation or jealousy, they
are being human, manifesting natural human reactions that connect them to
their authentic selves.443 Life in K6G, like life in the Jail more generally,
offers few socially productive channels for self-development.444 Yet in the
free space it creates for open emotional expression and honest interpersonal
engagement, K6G allows unit residents the ability—all too rare in
custody—to remember and to realize who they are. This may be K6G’s
most humane feature,445 affording unit residents a sense of psychic ease and
442

See infra note 528 (describing fashion shows in K6G).
This is not to celebrate those who indulge every impulse to complain, to argue, or to
pick fights with others in the unit. But these are normal human behaviors, and it is through
dealing with the costs of violating collective norms of mutual respect—as happens when
people in K6G treat others badly and are criticized for it by others in the dorms—that one
grows as a moral subject. These interactions are relatively rare in GP, where the reigning
moral code is very different than that which governs in the free world. But this is the stuff of
real life—learning through interactions with others how one should behave in the world.
And this is as it should be in a community of human beings who must learn to get along with
one another.
444
Bell and Lanni do their best to provide stimulating and challenging programming for
the K6Gs. But even they cannot overcome the fact that available opportunities for people in
the unit—most of whom rarely leave the dorms—are necessarily deeply diminished.
445
Perhaps the key moment in this humanizing process is when people realize that in
K6G they can relax and be themselves. To readers unfamiliar with prison life, this
permission may seem unremarkable, but for men in custody, it is impossible to overstate its
significance. Even in carceral environments in which men have managed to carve out
443

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the potential for self-development, while men in the Jail’s GP experience
psychic disease and an alienation from self generated by the demands of
hypermasculine performance.446 Although the humanizing aspects of life in
K6G could not arise without a background sense of safety, once they do
arise, they may well help to strengthen both the inclination and the ability
of residents to reject the dehumanizing demands of the GP culture.
If there is something to this account, it suggests the value of creating
channels for men in GP to (re)connect to their core selves and, for those
who need it, of providing a way to develop a sense of themselves as
something other than tough guy or gang member. It is possible that some of
the specific humanizing behaviors already seen in K6G might also be seen
in GP; assuming they felt safe to do so, men in GP might well build
mutually supportive personal relationships and openly express a range of
natural human emotions. Indeed, this already occurs in some men’s
facilities around the country, especially in prisons where residents stay for
extended periods.447 But it seems unlikely that even under conditions of
safety, we would see heterosexual-identified men in GP developing
intimate relationships or engaging in emotional expression to the same
degree as in K6G. And realistically, given that GP units will generally be
majority heterosexual, sexually fulfilling relationships are unlikely to
provide humanizing effects to the same degree in GP units as in K6G.
Fortunately, however, other possibilities exist for personal expression
and healthy self-development for men in custody, which, once pursued,
may help people resist and even escape altogether the toxic hypermasculine
culture. One such possibility is genuinely challenging and meaningful
programming. I presented an early draft of this paper at San Quentin to a
group of prisoners—mostly lifers—enrolled in college-level classes through
Patten University in Oakland.448 Most members of the group had spent
relatively safe spaces for the expression of natural instincts and behaviors, these spaces must
be carefully cultivated and constantly monitored; further, they are a striking contrast with the
baseline expectation that men in custody must wear a mask.
446
“Wearing a mask” is arguably the most common strategy for coping with the
rigors of imprisonment. . . . But equally . . . the presentation of a heavily managed
“front” is impossible to sustain for prolonged periods inside prison. Indeed, it is
arguable that the facility to discard the mask and “be oneself” is not only desirable but
is absolutely necessary if a prisoner is to “get through” their sentence with their selfesteem reasonably [intact].
See Jewkes, supra note 21, at 53.
447
See supra note 210.
448
See PRISON UNIV. PROJECT, http://www.prisonuniversityproject.org/index.html (last
visited Nov. 26, 2012). According to its website, “[t]he mission of the Prison University
Project is to provide excellent higher education programs to people incarcerated at San
Quentin State Prison; to create a replicable model for such programs; and to stimulate public

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many years at other California prisons and recognized my description of GP
from those other experiences. They insisted, however, that my portrait did
not accurately describe San Quentin’s GP. When pressed, they offered a
number of explanations for the differences, including the low security levels
of people in San Quentin’s GP449 and the high proportion of lifers,450 who
tend to be more mature,451 less interested in playing the game, and largely
respected by the younger prisoners.452 But the reason they emphasized was
that San Quentin is a “programming prison,” in which a large proportion of
prisoners are enrolled in educational programs.453 As students, these men
awareness and meaningful dialogue about higher education and criminal justice in
California.” Id. I thank Jody Lewen for the invitation to present this work to her students,
and workshop participants for their warm reception and illuminating feedback.
449
San Quentin houses three different populations, including the state’s death row
(housing over 700 people), an administrative segregation unit of 330 or so, a reception center
holding approximately 600 people and a general population of around 2,200. See E-mail
from Samuel Robinson, Lieutenant, Cal. Dep’t of Corr. & Rehab., to author (Nov. 15, 2012,
6:54 PM EST). The people in San Quentin’s GP are almost exclusively Level 2s, i.e.,
medium-security prisoners. See id. On the current population of San Quentin’s death row,
see CAL. DEP’T OF CORR. AND REHAB. DIV. OF ADULT OPERATIONS, DEATH ROW TRACKING
SYSTEM CONDEMNED INMATE SUMMARY LIST (2012).
450
Of 2,100 men in San Quentin’s GP, approximately 1,000 are lifers. See E-mail from
Samuel Robinson, Lieutenant, Cal. Dep’t of Corr. & Rehab., to author (Nov. 15, 2012, 6:54
PM EST). One further factor that was not mentioned, but which may explain some of San
Quentin’s relatively humane character, is the continued influence of the vision Jeanne
Woodford brought to the facility during the five years (1999–2004) when she was warden.
In that position, Woodford was known for her humane approach and commitment to
rehabilitative programming. Among other things, over her time there, Woodford “created
programs at San Quentin by relying almost entirely on nonprofit agencies and about 3,000
volunteers a month—a number unsurpassed in any other U.S. prison.” David Sheff, The
Good Jailer, N.Y. TIMES, March 14, 2004, at A44.
451
See, e.g., Ashley Nellis, Throwing Away the Key: The Expansion of Life Without
Parole Sentences in the United States, 23 FED. SENT’G REP. 27, 29 (2010) (noting that lifers
tend to mature in custody and are “frequently lauded by correctional administrators as easy
to manage”).
452
There was a further, revealing reason given: that, being a northern prison, San
Quentin has no Southsiders, who, I was told, tend to be the most aggressive in their
enforcement of the gang code and most dedicated to the use of violence to impose their will.
The students explained that just a few Southsiders on a yard can be enough to reintroduce the
violent GP code. When I asked why a majority committed to rejecting that code could not
make clear to a small minority that their gangbanging was not welcome, they just laughed
and said that that would not work, and that they would be forced to meet violence with
violence. This exchange suggested that the role of the Southsider culture in particular in
promoting the gang politics of the California prisons would be a fruitful object of study, and
might shed light on what sounded from the San Quentin students like a tragic race to the
bottom. It also makes the collective determination in K6G to keep out any gang politics
even more noteworthy.
453
In 2011, 330 people out of a total GP of approximately 2,200 were enrolled in on-site
college-level courses at San Quentin through the Prison University Project, see PRISON UNIV.

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have a different and more productive focus, one that allows for personal
growth and development—a much more appealing prospect than the
destructive gang culture that reigns at other California prisons. And
perhaps even more importantly, from what I saw, being in school has given
the students at San Quentin a sense of self-respect and self-worth—effective
antidotes against the need to pump oneself up with hypermasculine
posturing.
The San Quentin experience affirms that carceral facilities vary in
terms of the extent of gang control and the grip of the hypermasculine
imperative. Certainly, structural factors have played a role in making San
Quentin’s GP a relatively safe and relaxed place: the lower the security
level and the higher the proportion of lifers, the less appeal gang politics
and hypermasculine posturing are likely to have.454 But San Quentin also
suggests that providing opportunities for individual self-development—and
for cultivating a solid foundation of self-esteem455—may enable individuals
to see the hypermasculine imperative for the destructive force it is and to
disengage from gang culture as much as the environment allows.
Another programming strategy emerging in facilities around the
country also suggests that helping people in custody to express and develop
a healthy self-regard may counter prison’s dehumanizing effects. In
Florida, California, Illinois, and elsewhere, prison systems are creating
veterans’ units, housing men who served in the military prior to their
incarceration.456 For many people in this group, their military service is the
period in their lives of which they are most proud. Being in a dedicated
veterans’ unit allows them to reconnect to the feelings of self-respect
generated by this experience and gives them a more positive and productive
focus for their time in custody.457 Housing veterans together also helps to
PROJECT, supra note 448, with “another much larger number . . . enrolled in distance
learning college programs,” see E-mail from Jody Lewen, Executive Director, Prison Univ.
Project/Patten Univ. at San Quentin State Prison, to author (Nov. 15, 2012, 7:00 PM EST)—
in other words, a considerable proportion of the prison’s general population.
454
But see supra note 132 (suggesting that even a few determined gangbangers could
shift the relatively easy San Quentin culture towards the more rigid and oppressive model of
the more “active” prisons).
455
See Jewkes, supra note 21, at 53 (observing that, in prison, “the facility to discard the
mask and ‘be oneself’ is not only desirable but is absolutely necessary if a prisoner is to ‘get
through’ their sentence with their self-esteem reasonably [intact]”).
456
See Lizette Alvarez, In Florida, Using Military Discipline to Help Veterans in Prison,
N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 12, 2011, at A14. The L.A. County Jail also has such a unit.
457
See id. (“‘It’s re-instilling some of the values I once had that I hope to have again,’
said Mr. White, 58, who served from 1974 to 1978 as a Marine gunnery sergeant. He has
been in prison since 1996 for robbery. The dorm and its rituals ‘are bringing up these old
memories, of being an upstanding citizen.’”).

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forge a sense of connection and shared identity much like that found in
K6G, and encourages mutual respect and tolerance instead of hostility and
friction.458 Perhaps most notably, in such environments, men report that
they feel no need to be constantly on their guard.459 Although most
prisoners are not vets, the success of this model ought to prompt officials to
look for other potential points of commonality among prisoners that might
allow for the fostering of self-respect and mutual connection and the
development of other positive aspects of prisoners’ personal identities.
These examples represent possible avenues for the humanization of
carceral conditions. They also suggest that helping people in custody to
grow as people and to cultivate self-respect might help to counter
incarceration’s most dehumanizing effects. Indeed, for those with positive
self-images—as, for example, students, veterans, skilled tradesmen,
husbands,460 or fathers—hypermasculine posturing by fellow prisoners may
well seem not only unnecessary but affirmatively absurd, a lot of foolish
bluster. In K6G, people certainly appear to regard hypermasculine
performance this way. As we have seen, this view stems in large part from
the fact that people in K6G feel safe and thus have no need to engage in
such destructive behavior. But it may also be because, in K6G, people do
not depend for their sense of self-worth on instilling fear in others. Instead,
people in the unit have other prosocial channels available for developing
healthy and grounded senses of self—sexual relationships, openly
supportive friendships, emotional expression, etc.
These channels,
moreover, are only open in the first place because of the way the institution
relates to the people in K6G, i.e., as people and not merely as inmates. This
institutional posture of respect also seems likely to reinforce prosocial
norms and to dispose the people in K6G to reject the dominant GP culture.
Being forced to engage in hypermasculine posturing creates its own
vicious circle; by severing people from a sense of their own humanity and
forcing them into behaviors more likely to prompt self-loathing than self458
See id. (“The men’s ties to the military foster the kind of camaraderie that rarely
exists outside the dorm. It is not perfect, but even on the worst days, it is civil, which is why
everybody is careful with the rules. . . . The fact that many of the officers who watch over
the men are military veterans too contributes to the esprit de corps.”).
459
Alvarez quotes to this effect one man in Florida’s veterans’ unit, “who served as a
sergeant and a machinist in the Army for 20 years” and “wound up in prison in 2002 after he
killed three people in a trucking crash.” As he put it, “[t]here is no more stress in here. . . .
Generally, we all get along very well. We help each other out. . . . There is honesty,
responsibility. It’s like you have teamwork.” See id.
460
See, e.g., HARTMAN, supra note 30, at 72–75 (describing how the possibility of being
closer to the woman he loved, and who eventually became his wife, inspired him to leave
behind the thug life he had found in Folsom prison and to pursue a psychologically healthier
path).

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respect, it makes them even more dependent on the status and (fear-based)
respect that successful hypermasculine performance can generate. The
K6G experience, by contrast, suggests a crucial connection between being
treated as human, the ability to feel and act human, and the refusal to adopt
behavioral codes that only dehumanize both self and other. This may be the
most important lesson K6G has to teach, and it has no necessary connection
to the sexual orientation or gender identity of the people in the unit.
4. They Can’t and Won’t Redux
To this point, the arguments based on sexual identity have focused on
the particular characteristics of the people in K6G. There is, however, one
final form of the argument, which rests on the sexual identity of those in
GP. On this version, the claim is not that, by virtue of their sexual
orientation and gender identity, those in K6G could not conform their
behavior to the demands of the Jail’s GP. It is that, given the heterosexual
identity of most men in GP—forged in many cases over years in
hypermasculine environments both in custody and on the streets461—it is
impossible to imagine that the culture of K6G could ever be generalized
beyond its current boundaries.
It is certainly true that many aspects of life in K6G seem to be
products of the particular sexual identity of its residents: the open emotional
expression; the kissing, hugging, dancing, and singing; the overt
engagement in consensual sex; the fashion shows, the wedding, the
footrubs. One must, of course, be mindful of the danger of trading in
stereotypes. To suggest a connection between these behaviors and the
sexual identity of K6G’s residents is not to say that heterosexual men could
not also do these things. To the contrary, it is reasonable to think that at
least some men in a standard GP unit might well openly express emotion,
sing, and dance if they felt like it; freely have sex with others in the unit; or
even give someone else a footrub, if they felt they could do so without
putting themselves at risk.462
But having spent many hours observing life in the K6G dorms, I feel
safe in saying that many aspects of life in K6G would not likely be seen in a
dorm full of heterosexual-identified men, even men who over the course of
their lives have willingly had sex with other men in custody.463 To a great

461

See supra notes 185, 191, 196 (discussing Anderson’s “code of the streets”).
Indeed, to some extent, these behaviors are already present in GP. The difference is
that in GP, engaging in them openly invites aspersions of weakness and thus possible
victimization.
463
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 26 n.151 (discussing the concept of “situational
homosexuality”).
462

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extent, the daily life of K6G is shaped by the presence of trans women,
who, although typically comprising no more than twenty percent of K6G’s
population, tend as a general matter to be more vocal and performative than
other residents and thus to have an outsized influence on the character of
the unit. There are also many self-identified “gay boys,” who selfconsciously adopt what can best be described as stereotypically gay
behaviors and mannerisms (flamboyance, a swaying walk, particular speech
patterns,464 etc.).465 These residents too have a palpable influence on the
tenor of daily life in K6G.
464

See, e.g., Int. 92, at B7 (performing an imaginary dialogue between two people
reuniting in K6G, in which participants greet each other with “[o]h my God, girl. I haven’t
seen you for a long time, bitch.”).
465
As these descriptions suggest, K6G has turned out to be an environment that is more
accepting of nonconformist gender performance than even society in general. Despite an
increased level of public acceptance of male homosexuality, many if not most of the people
K6G serves will have experienced marginalization and possibly rejection by mainstream
society. Most notably, many people in the dorms, especially among the trans women and the
older gay men, report having been rejected by their families. For many of these individuals,
K6G provides a level of tolerance and even acceptance of their personal gender identities
that they have enjoyed nowhere else. Everyone in the unit has male genitalia; this is the
basis on which incoming detainees are classified to male housing. See Dolovich, supra note
1, at 3 n.7. But see Prison Rape Elimination Act National Standards, 28 C.F.R. § 115.42(c)
(2012) (“In deciding whether to assign a transgender or intersex inmate to a facility for male
or female inmates, and in making other housing and programming assignments, the agency
shall consider on a case-by-case basis whether a placement would ensure the inmate’s health
and safety, and whether the placement would present management or security problems.”).
But on any given day, one can see people in K6G performing a broad range of gender
identities. There are men who could readily pass as straight. There are those known in the
dorm as “gay boys,” who present in the manner described in the text. And there are many
people who to varying degrees present as women. Not everyone is kind towards those
whose efforts in the latter direction are relatively unsuccessful. See, e.g., Int. 140, at B4
(“[Y]ou got some ugly-ass men that try to be women. And they look like they should be
playing for the Lakers or they should be playing for the Rams or something, a football team
or something. They got big-ass feet, they got big-ass ears with five o-clock shadows. And
they walk around and say, I’m a lady. You can’t be.”). Nor are all dorm residents
personally accepting of this gender performance. As one of my trans interviewees
explained, many gay men in the dorms:
[D]on’t agree with our lifestyle. They’re trying to tell us that we’re still men and it’s
offensive for them to call me a man, especially when I went through the process
within my transition to get my identification changed to female, to change my life
over to—everything in my life is completely changed over to female, except the fact
that I still have a penis. That’s why I’m here.
Int. 111, at C3. But the general attitude is one of laissez-faire, which means that K6G is a
remarkably safe space for gender experimentation that in GP would almost certainly invite
abuse and victimization. What came through in my interviews and over hours of observation
of life in the dorms was that in K6G, a wide range of gender expression was permitted and
even supported, so that those wishing to cross the line from male to female did not put
themselves at risk by doing so. I did get some hint of a collective disciplining of the gender

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It would, however, be a mistake to regard K6G’s distinctive character
as an indication that residents’ sexual identity explains its relative
humanity. It seems fair to assume that a unit filled with heterosexual men
free to behave as they choose would look very different than K6G. But this
likely difference is not the reason for K6G’s relative freedom. It merely
reaffirms the fact that, left to their own devices, different kinds of people
will create different kinds of environments. To take just one example, the
frequent sexual liaisons among many K6G residents—for whom multiple
partners over short periods is not unusual—is simply one particular form of
life that has emerged in K6G in the space freed up by the absence of gang
politics and the imperative of hypermasculine performance in which few
other positive or productive channels for self-expression exist.466 In other
words, those aspects of life in the K6G dorms that appear to derive from the
sexual identity of its residents are best understood not as the cause of
K6G’s relatively humane environment, but rather the effects of that
environment. They are what has been able to develop in an otherwise
constrained atmosphere in which people feel safe enough to be themselves.
It is impossible to know in advance what forms of life might
materialize in a given GP unit freed from the strictures of hypermasculinity
and gang involvement, in which men felt able to drop their masks and be
themselves. Ideally, as with K6G, we would see some positive and
healthful behaviors that would in turn become conduits for reinforcing the
unit’s safe and humane character. Indeed, this phenomenon of emerging
healthful behavior is already seen in San Quentin’s GP units and in
veterans’ units around the country, to name just two examples. It is also
possible that the only difference would be an easing of pressure and a
measure of freedom from the fear and anxiety that attend life in many
men’s general population units. Even this would be a notable improvement.
Admittedly, much would have to change in terms of the public perception
line during one of my final interviews, when the subject reported feeling intense pressure in
the dorms to choose one gender identity and stick to it. For further discussion of this
account, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 45, n.222. But the fact remains that, to a remarkable
degree, K6G has become for many of its residents a welcoming community, where they feel
at home and reasonably comfortable being themselves in the dorms—in some cases, even
more comfortable than they feel in the free world.
466
It would be a mistake to draw any conclusions from this feature of K6G about the
inherently promiscuous nature of gay men or trans women. Despite the relative advantages
the unit offers, K6Gs exist in a context with very few meaningful options. As with other
detainees in the Jail, the people in K6G still have relatively scant opportunities for selfexpression or personal growth. Their access to productive activities is extremely limited,
and indeed, many people scarcely leave the dorms at all while in the Jail. It should therefore
be no wonder if, given these highly limited options, people turn to sex as an outlet and as a
way to connect with others, remember who they are, relieve stress, feel good, forget
themselves, or just pass the time.

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of prisons and prison conditions before a collective commitment to ensuring
even prisoners’ basic safety might reasonably be expected to emerge. Still,
it is important not to let defeatist thinking occlude our sense of what might
yet be possible. The K6G experience strongly suggests that an institutional
commitment to safe and humane carceral conditions may offer a pathway
for the mitigation, if not the elimination, of some of the worst pathologies
that incarceration yields. This possibility merits the serious consideration
of those committed to humane incarceration, regardless of whether any
other unit will ever, as a daily matter, look quite like K6G.
IV. “THEY’VE GOT IT TOO GOOD”: THE LAW-AND-ORDER OBJECTION
The foregoing parts of this Article have painted a picture of two very
different models of the custodial environment found inside the L.A. County
Jail. Given the differences described, the obvious question is how the K6G
model might be generalized beyond its present narrow confines. This
inquiry informs the final part of this Article. But first, it is necessary to
respond to an objection that the foregoing account may well invite: that any
efforts to make the prison environment less like the Jail’s GP and more like
K6G would be inappropriate, and may even defeat the whole purpose of
incarceration. Some observers, in other words, may well hold the view that
the purpose of imprisonment is punishment467 and that an environment free
from the stresses, deprivations, and terrors often found in GP units will
simply be too pleasant to serve that purpose.
A version of what may be called the “law-and-order” objection was
not infrequently voiced by custodial staff during my field work at the Jail.
At its heart was the notion that the K6Gs “have it too good”—or, as I often
heard it put, that K6Gs “have too much fun.” It bears keeping in mind here
that the people housed in K6G are still in Jail, having been deprived of their
liberty by the state. Moreover, conditions in K6G, as in Men’s Central as a
whole, are crowded, chaotic, unhygienic, and generally extremely
unpleasant.468 Movement is highly circumscribed, and unless people have
court dates, they almost never get outside for the duration of their
confinement. K6Gs are also regularly subjected to verbal abuse from GP
inmates whose paths they cross and even from custodial staff.469 It is,
however, nonetheless true that, in many ways, life in K6G is much better
than life in GP.

467

See, e.g., CAL. PENAL CODE § 1170(a)(1) (2004) (“The Legislature finds and declares
that the purpose of imprisonment for crime is punishment.”).
468
See supra note 466 and accompanying text.
469
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 57–58.

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But do K6Gs have it “too good?” It is tempting to rebut this notion,
which seems to rest on an implicit commitment to harsh punishment for
criminal offenders, with the observation that many of K6G’s residents are
pretrial detainees and thus have not yet been convicted of any crime. But
this dodge will not suffice. For one thing, a good portion of people in the
Jail at any given time are sentenced offenders, who are either awaiting
transfer to state prison or serving out their sentences in the Jail.470
Furthermore, my argument throughout has been that, to the extent that K6G
provides more humane custodial conditions than are typically found in GP,
the lessons it teaches ought to be generalized, not only to other units in the
L.A. County Jail, but also to as many other custodial facilities as possible—
including prisons, where everyone in custody is serving time as punishment
for criminal activity. The question then becomes: are there any legitimate
grounds for condemning the K6G model as insufficiently punitive? The
stakes are significant, since an affirmative answer to this inquiry would not
only derail efforts to apply the lessons of this model to other carceral
environments, but could even justify an assault on K6G itself.
Fortunately, this question is appropriately answered in the negative.
The notion that the K6G model is illegitimate because residents “have it too
good” implicitly suggests that the standard hypermasculinity model is itself
legitimate. But this way of regarding the matter has it backwards, since
there are strong grounds for thinking it is the standard model that is
illegitimate. There are limits on what the state may legitimately do to its
citizens in liberal democratic societies, even as punishment for crimes.471
For example, the state may not, as criminal punishment, leave an offender
to starve or waste away for want of food or potable water; nor may it fail to
provide prisoners with necessary medical care, so that, for example, a
broken bone remains unset, a gaping wound unstitched, or obvious physical
distress ignored. Nor, in the same way, may the state force prisoners to live
in constant fear of violent assaults in a climate in which such assaults are
470

For example, on March 30, 2012, 7,253 people out of a total count of 17,215 were
fully sentenced. See SECURITY LEVEL—SENTENCE STATUS SUMMARY ALL CUSTODY
FACILITIES (NOT IRC OR LCMC) (Mar. 30, 2012) (on file with the author). By June of 2012,
the number of sentenced offenders housed in the Jail had increased by almost 1,000 people,
to 8,182 people. See SECURITY LEVEL—SENTENCE STATUS SUMMARY ALL CUSTODY
FACILITIES (NOT IRC OR LCMC) (June 6, 2012) (on file with the author) (reporting that, of
the 18,428 people in the Jail on June 6, 2012, 8,182 were fully sentenced offenders). The
reason for the increase was the influx of “non-non-non” (nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual)
offenders, who ordinarily would have been sent to state prison, but who, under the
“Realignment” of AB 109, will now serve their time in county jail. CNTY. OF L.A. CMTY.
CORR., supra note 1.
471
The remainder of this paragraph and the six that follow draw on Dolovich, supra note
297, at 914–16.

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commonplace, since this would inflict a form of physical and psychological
suffering akin to torture. It is plainly cruel to punish criminal offenders
with the strap,472 with rape,473 or with any other form of brutal corporal
treatment.474 And for the same reason, the state may not legitimately place
incarcerated offenders in a position of ongoing vulnerability to assault by
predatory prisoners,475 thus creating conditions that would amount to the
same thing.476
These limits on the state’s power to punish are not simply moral
constraints. The prohibition on what amounts to the infliction of gratuitous
suffering is also a basic constitutional principle, incorporated directly into
the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment,”
which has been rightly read to prohibit the “unnecessary and wanton
infliction of pain.”477 And when prisoners are deprived of basic needs such
that they suffer serious physical or psychological trauma, it is irrelevant
whether the state affirmatively inflicted the deprivation as an explicit part of
the punishment or merely caused the deprivation by a failure to take
protective measures. Where there is a duty to protect, an omission is as
culpable as an affirmative act.478
As a doctrinal matter, prison conditions violate the Eighth Amendment
when they subject people in custody to a substantial risk of serious harm of
which prison officials are aware and yet disregard.479 And, as Justice
472
See Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571, 579 (8th Cir. 1968) (finding that the use of the
strap “runs afoul of the Eighth Amendment; that the strap’s use . . . offends contemporary
concepts of decency and human dignity and precepts of civilization which we profess to
possess”).
473
See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 834 (1994) (explaining that rape is “not part of
the penalty” imposed on incarcerated offenders as punishment for their crimes (internal
quotation omitted)).
474
See Wilkinson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130, 136 (1879) (“It is safe to affirm that punishments
of torture . . . and all others in the same line of unnecessary cruelty, are forbidden by [the
Eighth] Amendment.”).
475
See JAMES GILLIGAN, VIOLENCE 166 (1996) (arguing that “[prison] authorities tacitly
and knowingly tolerate” sexual violence by some prisoners against others “so that the rapists
in this situation are acting as the vicarious enforcers of a form of punishment that the legal
system does not itself enforce formally or directly”).
476
Indeed, allowing the danger to passively exist may be even worse, as it creates on the
part of the victim a constant expectation and terror of assault that ultimately may be even
more psychologically damaging than if the same treatment were administered by the state at
a specified time and place.
477
Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U.S. 97, 103 (1976) (quoting Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153,
173 (1976) (plurality opinion)).
478
See MODEL PENAL CODE § 2.01(3) (1962) (providing criteria for omission liability).
479
See Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825, 837 (1994) (holding that prison officials are
“liable under the Eighth Amendment for denying an inmate humane conditions of

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Blackmun pointed out in his concurrence in Hudson v. McMillian, such
harm may be psychological as well as physical, since “[i]t is not hard to
imagine inflictions of psychological harm . . . that might prove to be cruel
and unusual punishment.”480 It is thus arguable that, both morally and
constitutionally, the model of imprisonment the standard GP unit embodies
is illegitimate. In the worst iterations of this environment, people may find
themselves living with constant stress and fear under an ever-present threat
of physical violence and sexual victimization.481 They can never relax,
never let down their guard. That so many men would pretend to be gay,
especially in an environment well known as dangerous to homosexuals, in
order to escape the regime awaiting them in the Jail’s GP gives some
indication of how oppressive and harmful this experience can be.
The patent inhumanity of prison conditions on the hypermasculinity
model indicates the misguided nature of the law-and-order critique of K6G.
To some, however, the foregoing may seem to have missed a key point:
Offenders are sent to prison because they have committed a crime, perhaps
a very serious one. And if while in prison they experience serious physical
or psychological pain, it is not because the state is cruel but because
prisoners deserve it. To be cruel, the infliction of harm must be not only
severe but also “unjustified or excessive.”482 On this view, if prisoners
suffer serious harm, it may be unpleasant, but, being justified by the offense
of conviction, it cannot be cruel—and thus is neither morally nor
constitutionally problematic.
There are, however, two problems with this objection, one practical
and one normative. First, as a practical matter, when people in custody are
subjected to the physically and psychologically damaging conditions of the
hypermasculinity model, the extent of the burden will generally be

confinement” when they “know[ ] of and disregard[ ] an excessive risk to inmate health or
safety”); see also Brown v. Plata, 131 S. Ct. 1910, 1926 n.3 (2011) (reaffirming that
prisoners can recover under the Eighth Amendment when they face prison conditions posing
“a substantial risk of serious harm,” as when “systemwide deficiencies [exist] in the
provision of medical and mental health care”).
480
Hudson v. McMillian, 503 U.S. 1, 16 (1992) (Blackmun, J., concurring) (citing in
support of the proposition the case of Wisniewski v. Kennard, 901 F.2d 1276, 1277 (5th Cir.
1990), in which “[a] guard plac[ed] a revolver in [an] inmate’s mouth and threaten[ed] to
blow [the] prisoner’s head off”).
481
See Haney, supra note 14, at 129 (“Over the years, countless prisoners have told
[him] that they can ‘feel’ the threat of rape ‘in the air’ around them, or have heard
frightening accounts of it having taken place, even if they have not seen it themselves or
been directly victimized.”).
482
John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 106 ETHICS 834, 838 (1996). As Kekes puts it
in his study of cruelty, “The victim does not deserve the pain, or that much of it, and there is
no morally acceptable reason for its infliction.” Id.

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unrelated to the offense of conviction.483 To suggest that this treatment is
deserved on account of the victim’s prior crime presumes that the harm
inflicted bears some relationship to that prior offense, so that someone who
committed a heinous murder is subject to greater trauma, and thus greater
harm than, say, an identity thief. But this is not the case; instead, the harms
suffered in custody are inflicted across the board, with no necessary
correlation to victims’ offenses of conviction.484 Moreover, the notion that
men in custody deserve to suffer the effects of the hypermasculinity model
does not square with the fact that these effects are the product not of
deliberate and calibrated state action, but of a general failure on the part of
the state to alleviate incarceration’s worst effects. It is thus implausible to
regard the infliction of these harms as prompted by the crime that justified
the original sentence.
Second, as a normative matter, when prisoners are incarcerated as
punishment, it is the length of the prison term that is supposed to reflect
society’s collective judgment as to the seriousness of the crime and thus the
degree of the offender’s blameworthiness. Although this assertion may
seem to beg the question, it in fact reflects a critical difference between
private judgments of moral desert and the necessarily constrained
expressions of societal condemnation embodied in the state’s decision to
incarcerate. The deliberate infliction of corporal harm was long ago
rejected in the United States as a legitimate form of punishment.485
Although the death penalty persists, the decision to incarcerate rather than
to execute reflects an affirmative choice not to destroy the offender but
merely to banish him or her from society for the specified term. In a given
case, the choice to banish and not to destroy may fail to satisfy those private
483
See, e.g., Farmer, 511 U.S. at 825 (considering the Eighth Amendment claim of a
plaintiff who was raped and beaten while serving a twenty-year sentence for credit-card
fraud).
484
If a prisoner’s offense does have any bearing on the extent of the harm suffered in a
hypermasculine environment, it is likely to have the opposite effect to that imagined by this
objection, since it is typically the prisoners who have committed the most violent crimes
who command the most respect on the inside—by fellow prisoners and correctional officers
alike—and are thus least likely to be victimized.
485
Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130, 135–36 (1878) (“Difficulty would attend the effort to
define with exactness the extent of the constitutional provision which provides that cruel and
unusual punishments shall not be inflicted; but it is safe to affirm that punishments of torture
. . . are forbidden by that amendment to the Constitution.”); see also Furman v. Georgia, 408
U.S. 238, 272 (1972) (Brennan, J., concurring) (quoting O’Neil v. Vermont, 144 U.S. 323,
339 (1892) (Field, J., dissenting)) (explaining that the Eighth Amendment has been held to
prohibit “the barbaric punishments condemned by history, ‘punishments which inflict
torture, such as the rack, the thumbscrew, the iron boot, the stretching of limbs and the
like’”); Jackson v. Bishop, 404 F.2d 571, 579 (8th Cir. 1968) (discussing the
unconstitutionality of the strap).

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citizens who feel the offender merited greater suffering than the state has
determined to inflict. But the use of incarceration as punishment represents
a collective commitment to constrain the nature of the harm to be inflicted,
notwithstanding that the target may deserve worse.
One might prefer another system in which, say, prison sentences
would specify not just the duration of the confinement but also the nature of
the conditions under which the offender would be kept, calibrated to the
degree of the perceived wrongfulness of the offense. Were our system to
operate this way, a separate inquiry into the cruelty and thus the
constitutionality of the punishments thereby authorized would be
necessary.486 But this is not the system we have. In our system, when an
offender sentenced to prison time is subjected to serious physical or
psychological harm, that harm is by definition unjustified, since whatever
price she may be required to pay for her crime has already been fixed by the
state in terms of a more legitimate currency—the time to be served.
The above-canvassed arguments emphasize the state’s moral and
constitutional obligations to those it incarcerates and the limits of a
retributive theory of prison conditions. Taken together, they strongly
suggest that it is the standard hypermasculinity model of incarceration and
not K6G that ought to be reconsidered and abandoned. Still, there remain
two concerns with the K6G model that bear consideration, each of which
appeared to some extent to motivate the complaints about the unit that
deputies voiced to me during my time in the Jail. The first concerns the
open sexuality in the K6G dorms. As has been noted, there is a
considerable amount of consensual sex in K6G. The range of such
interactions is much like that on the outside. Mutually attracted consenting
parties have sex. People form relationships, cheat, break up. Those without
the resources for “store”487 will exchange sex for goods488 or to pay off a
debt.
From a policy perspective, the implications of this situation are mixed.
On the one hand, the ready availability of willing sexual partners and the
absence of any pressure to pretend ambivalence about sex with other men
makes for an atmosphere that is far more emotionally healthy and
physically safe than is generally the case behind bars. On the other hand,
there are costs to such open promiscuity. For one thing, HIV rates are
486
The problem with such a system, of course, would be that, to the extent that the
prescribed conditions would affirmatively call for the deliberate infliction of serious physical
or psychological harm, it would be authorizing treatment arguably amounting to torture, thus
violating the prohibition on cruel punishment.
487
“Store” is Jail slang for anything bought from the commissary.
488
See supra note 230 (discussing prostitution in K6G, although noting that there is no
pimping).

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extremely high in the dorm, far higher than in GP.489 Some K6G residents
reported finding it unpleasant to be exposed to the sexual lives of others.
The openness about love and sex feeds jealousy and tension that often
motivate physical altercations. And as was pointed out to me frequently by
custody officers, it is a felony in California to have sex in prison. Signs to
this effect are prominently displayed in each K6G dorm, but the law goes
entirely unenforced. Many officers find it particularly galling that below
the signs attesting to the illegality of sex in prison are metal boxes into
which K6Gs deposit the condoms distributed to them each week after they
have been used.
These officers have a point. As agents of law enforcement, they are
sworn to uphold the law, and they dedicate their working lives to
identifying lawbreakers and bringing them to justice, even at the risk of
harm to themselves. It is thus understandable that they would resent this
apparent official nonchalance as to widespread illegality—under their
noses, no less. The answer, however, is not to ban condom distribution,
which would only deprive those who want to protect themselves from HIV
or other STDs from the ability to do so.490 Given, moreover, the utter
impossibility of actually enforcing any prohibition on consensual sex, not to
mention the bizarre unwillingness implied by such a ban to acknowledge
the basic human need for sexual expression and sexual release,491 the far
more appropriate course would be a repeal of the ban. This move would
remedy the hypocrisy that so galls the officers and would also allow an
489

As to the rates of HIV, steps are being taken to address the issue: HIV education is
available to any resident who wants it, and condoms are distributed weekly through a
process designed to remind the sexually active of the risks of unprotected sex. But it is clear
that more needs to be done. A number of my respondents, particularly the older ones,
lamented that many of the young people seem not to know or care about the risk of HIV
transmission from unprotected sex. This alone is a strong argument for a review of the
educational programs in place in K6G and for efforts to understand and counter the casual
attitude toward infection that has reportedly taken hold in the dorms. Still, the Jail can only
do so much. For those who, like many of the unit’s “frequent fliers,” live on the street and
hustle for a living, the fear of HIV may be insufficiently immediate to have much impact on
behavior. And the casual attitude towards infection that many respondents describe is
consistent with the same attitude in many young people and even society in general, which
seems to have arisen from the availability of pharmaceuticals that help many people who are
HIV-positive stave off the onset of AIDS. In recent years, AIDS educators and activists
have grown concerned that the existence of antiretrovirals and the fact that HIV infection is
no longer a death sentence for many in the United States may have led a younger generation
of gay men to cease fearing infection and thus to engage more readily in unsafe sex and
other risky behaviors.
490
Indeed, this distribution should be stepped up, since at present, residents are only
entitled to one condom a week, leaving some of the more sexually active residents without
sufficient means to engage in safe sex.
491
See Smith, supra note 420, at 185.

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open discussion of how best to channel the normal, healthy sexual instincts
not only of the people in K6G, but of all people in custody.492
The second concern motivating some officers’ condemnation of K6G
was that the relative comfort, ease, and even enjoyment that await repeat
offenders on their return to K6G may defeat the essential deterrent purpose
of incarceration. The worry here, in other words, is that far from
representing a punishment that one would strive to avoid, the conditions in
K6G are so good that they incentivize K6Gs to commit crimes just to go
there. To get at this issue, in my interviews, I asked two questions: Do you
think anyone commits a crime just so they can go to K6G?493 and Is K6G
better than the outside world for some people?494 The answers were
extremely consistent495 and to some extent confirmed the worry, strongly
suggesting that some people may well commit crimes just so they can get to
K6G.
However, respondents unanimously affirmed that no serious crimes
are committed in efforts to get back to the unit. This makes sense.
Convictions for serious felonies would lead offenders directly to state
prison, with only a temporary stopover in K6G. And even were there an
analogous unit in the California prison system, the prospect of a multi-year
stay in prison, even in a unit like K6G, would be unlikely to hold any allure
even for those who would prefer K6G to GP while in custody. Instead,
what seem to appeal to those K6Gs who seek arrest are the immediate,
short-term benefits of admission to the Jail. Although I have no
quantitative data in this regard, my interviews suggested that the specific
motivations of those angling for a bid in K6G fall into what may appear at
first to be two distinct categories. First, as with the misdemeanant in O.
Henry’s memorable story, The Cop and the Anthem, many people who have
been in K6G live on the streets and will occasionally need a respite from

492
Some might argue that this course would not really answer the officers’ objection,
which is likely motivated not by an aversion to official hypocrisy, but to discomfort with the
idea of consensual sex between men. This may be. But it was the apparent hypocrisy of an
institution that insists on the illegality of sex while distributing condoms that most frequently
grounded the objection as it was put to me. And whatever actually lay behind the
articulation of this objection, the strategy suggested here does seem the best way to address
the concern as expressed.
493
Dolovich, supra note 1, at 102 q.37.
494
Id. at q.38.
495
Of the 32 people asked the first question, 20 (or 62.5%), answered in the affirmative,
4 allowed the possibility (“perhaps,” “possibly,” “maybe,” “probably”), and 2 said they did
not know. Only 6 answered the first question in the negative. Of the 29 people asked the
second question, 23 (70.3%) answered in the affirmative, 1 allowed the possibility
(“probably”), and 1 did not know. Only 4 answered the second question in the negative.

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the relentless demands of that hard life.496 A bid in the Jail brings access to
showers, a bed, three meals a day, and the opportunity to rest weary bones.
Jail admittance also brings medical attention, which can include simple first
aid as well as medication for chronic conditions, which for a homeless
person will otherwise be out of reach.497 As my subjects explained:


[T]here’s a few people in [K6G] that are homeless, you know, they live on the
streets. And . . . here you get fed . . . three times a day. . . . [Y]ou got a little
bit of hygiene, whatever, once in a while. . . . You get uniforms. I think for
498
certain people it’s better . . . for them than being on the streets.



[T]hey have showers in here and they have hot meals, like I said, and that
they’re well taken care of in here, like say medications. If they’re having kind
of problems out there going to see the doctor, because of whatever illness they
have, but there’s something stopping them, which is drugs. Right here they’ll
499
get the medications and they feel more better.



[K6G] is better [than the outside world] for people that don’t have homes and
don’t have nowhere like they don’t have a family . . . . If I was homeless I
would come here. I would do something to make me come here just so that I
500
know I’m safe and I’m going to live for a long time.



A lot of people come in tore up . . . . I mean skinny, sucked up, tore up, beards,
hair all nappy and stuff and crazy. And then they’re here for a couple of weeks
501
and you start seeing them get better and better and healthier and healthier.

The prospect jail offers of having one’s basic needs met, even briefly,
may appeal to any number of homeless people, K6Gs or not. However, the
major downsides of the Jail’s GP—the danger, the tension, the prospect of
violence and abuse—are strong disincentives to affirmatively seeking arrest
and confinement for people who might otherwise be desperate enough for
the minimal benefits jail promises.502 Those destined for K6G, however,
know where they are going when they get arrested and know too that their
time in the Jail will be free from the worst aspects of life in GP. Thus,
depending on their circumstances, the deprivations of life on the streets may
well drive them to seek the benefits of at least temporary incarceration.

496

O. Henry, The Cop and the Anthem, in THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF AND OTHER O.
HENRY STORIES FOR BOYS 143 (Franklin K. Mathiews ed., 1918).
497
In IRC, one can often see men with the gaunt, wasted look of homeless people, sitting
with bandaged feet, after an initial medical exam revealed the sores and infections of the feet
to which people are prone when they live on the streets.
498
Int. 45, at B6.
499
Int. 92, at B8.
500
Int. 55, at 19.
501
Int. 123, at F1.
502
However, research into this issue may disprove this somewhat optimistic prediction.

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Second, there are allegedly some K6Gs who will get themselves
arrested in order to follow a lover back to the unit.503 Although no
respondents admitted to doing such a thing themselves, several ascribed this
behavior to others. As one explained, “I’ve heard stories where these two
people were lovers, or were together on the streets. One of them gets
arrested, winds up in jail, then the other one would do something to get
arrested to be back with that person.”504
503

Another explained:
Some [K6Gs] do [commit crimes to get back to the unit], because either their family,
or street family, is in there, or a boyfriend is in there. . . . And they say, “Well, I’m
going to go out here and get high, . . . and if I get caught I know my boyfriend is in
[there].”
Int. 101, at A9.
504
Int. 123, at E10. There is also a third motive suggested by my interviews for people
trying to get into the Jail, which is independent of conditions in K6G. That is, some of my
respondents suggested that people will sometimes be paid to be “mules”: i.e., to get
themselves arrested in order to bring contraband into the jail. Every person is strip-searched
on admission to the jail. See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 27 (describing the Jail’s intake
process). But I am told that people determined to sneak contraband of a relatively small size
into the Jail will often find the rectal cavity to suffice. As one person put it:
[T]here are people who come back to jail because they’re paid . . . [t]o bring in drugs,
tobacco, lighters, cell phones, whatever. And the person on the street pays them to be
a mule, bring stuff in on a weak ass charge and they come up to the dorms, distribute
what they need to distribute, and then . . . they go.
Int. 75, at A16–17. I asked one of my respondents to explain how this might happen. He
gave me an example of someone who was “put on Prop 36,” meaning he was a first- or
second-time drug offender given the diversionary option approved by California voters as
Proposition 36 in the 2004 election cycle. According to this interviewee, people who have
been found to violate the terms of their Prop 36 sentence will often be sent to the Jail for a
week or so, and are routinely given several chances before a violation leads to removal from
the Prop 36 program and a ticket to criminal court. See Int. 103, at D9 (reporting that he
personally “violated [his Prop 36 agreement] four times,” and was sent to the Jail for a week
and then released). Our exchange went like this:
Who would pay them to come to K6G?
I would pay them. It depends on what I wanted.
Okay, so, give me an example. . . .
Say . . . you’re on Prop 36, and you’re getting ready to leave. I tell you, “You know
what? How would you like to make $1,000 in one week?” “I’d like to make $1,000
in one week.” “Okay, well, I have a job for you to do. As soon as you get out, I need
you to go to this address. I’ll call you when you get there. You have to be there at
five o’clock, though.” “Okay.” “So, you get there, I explain everything to you on the
phone. This is what’s going to happen. I need you to bring such and such and such
and such back inside jail. Bam, here’s $500. Whoever I call, give them $500. Give
them $500 and whatever it is that I need him to bring in.” He goes outside, gets
caught drinking, violates his Prop 36, and he comes up. I get what I want. When he
gets out, he gets his other $500.
Int. 103, at D9–10.

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At first glance, these two motivations seem distinct. And for some
readers, perhaps the second in particular will seem reason enough to
condemn a unit in which gay men or trans women know they need only to
commit a crime to find some measure of comfort in the company of their
loved ones. Whatever else jail may be, it should not be a reward for law
breaking. But delving further into the issue reveals a closer relationship
between these two groups of instrumental misdemeanants than may at first
appear. Indeed, in many cases, the major difference may be the labeling.505
Those in the first group are homeless, with all that this label currently
connotes. Those in the second group are hustlers, prostitutes, and addicts
who get by on the money they can bring in day-to-day. If it is only
members of the second group who might be inclined to commit crimes to
join a lover in K6G, in both cases, the alternative to jail is living on the
streets and facing another day just trying to survive.
At any given time in K6G, there is a critical mass of people, many of
them relatively young, who know each other from Santa Monica Boulevard,
the Hollywood strip, or other red-light districts in L.A. County. These
individuals can spend years cycling in and out of K6G on charges of
prostitution, small-time drug offenses, and vagrancy. Out in the streets,
they may support each other, pool their earnings, and, when lucky, spend
the night together in a day-rate motel. These are people who have nothing
to lose from another stint in the county jail, and who, as one resident of
K6G explained, “have no family support” and are “out there selling their
bodies for $40 so they can have a room that night.”506 The people they live
with day to day, with whom they eke out a bare existence on the street, are
their family. If this is your life and your daily companions are arrested, it
may well be more appealing to get arrested yourself and join them on the
inside than to try to make it out on the streets alone.507

Again, this motivation is less relevant for our purposes, since it presumably also
extends to people in GP—although perhaps this scheme is more easily accomplished in
K6G, as people classified to K6G know that they will be sent directly to that unit on
admission to the Jail. By contrast, GPs could be sent anywhere, which may complicate the
delivery of the contraband to its intended recipient. Still, the gang control of the inmate
population means that such complexities are likely easily overcome, at least in some cases.
505
There are some exceptions. For example, Lanni reports hearing a different
explanation for this phenomenon from one recent K6G resident: this person got himself
arrested on a minor charge because his lover at the time was about to be transferred from the
Jail to state prison, and he wanted to say goodbye. Personal Communication with Bart
Lanni, Deputy Sheriff, L.A. Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t (Apr. 17, 2012).
506
Int. 47, at C4.
507
Rather than being “out there selling their bodies” for a room, they “can instead come
to [K6G] and get a roof over their head.” Id.

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Ultimately, what may most distinguish the first group from the second
is their age and the spirit to keep trying. Eventually, for most of the
population under discussion, those in the second group will invariably join
the first. As one respondent eloquently explained:
[S]ome people don’t have homes. They’re homeless. They’re doing what they’ve got
to do whether it involves prostituting or stealing or selling themselves short or
whatever. And especially out there on the Boulevard, you know, always leads to
violence and it always leads to low self-esteem and people belittling themselves and
they don’t realize it until they’re like some 30 or 40-year-old washed up drag queen
and they finally realize it. You know what I mean? . . . Most of them get HIV or they
get some kind of illness. And then where are they at? . . . So for some, sure. Come in
508
here and they have a bed, three meals, a shower. All their friends are here.

That K6G is sufficiently alluring that some people might prefer it to
being free may for some readers be proof enough that the unit’s residents
“have it too good.” But given the profile of those for whom this may be
true, it seems that what most merits condemnation is not the bearable
conditions of K6G but the fact that, for some portion of society, life is so
desperate and the means for basic survival so elusive that it is preferable to
accept the label of convicted criminal offender and surrender one’s liberty
to life in a high-security carceral facility, simply to secure the absolute bare
minimum to make it one more day. If K6G appeals for the protection and
community it offers some gay men and trans women, this appeal is a
measure of the general hopelessness of life for many people living on the
margins of society and the particular hardships faced by some members of
certain sexual minorities.
Many gay men in K6G, especially the older ones, were long ago
rejected by their families and left to fend for themselves. This experience
may be a generational one, as several younger gay men in the unit reported
enjoying the support of their families. But the growing acceptance of
homosexuality from which younger gay men have benefited is not yet the
norm for transgenders. In the Jail, trans women of all ages told the same
story of being disowned and abandoned by their birth families because of
their transgender status. K6G testifies to the hard truths of life for trans
women—especially those with minimal education, for whom prostitution
offers the most readily available employment prospect. K6G guarantees all
sexual minorities protection from violence and abuse while they are
incarcerated. If it also generates as an unanticipated byproduct a small
measure of relative comfort for a group so routinely abused by society at
large that incarceration is preferable to freedom, then this effect, although
no cause for self-congratulation, should at least be viewed with equanimity.

508

Int. 131, at F15.

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There may well be heterosexual homeless men who regard a stint in
the Jail as a way to have basic needs met, and who might, like O’Henry’s
vagrant, look to get arrested even to wind up in GP. But there is no
question that the relatively relaxed environment of K6G explains the
readiness of some gay men or trans women to seek another bid in the Jail.509
Still, this fact alone is insufficient to condemn the K6G model. For one
thing, the circumstances of such efforts are highly circumscribed, and say
more about what might be thought of as the social services function of the
American criminal justice system than they do about the affirmative
desirability of life in K6G. This system does not exist in a vacuum, and if
things get hard enough in the free world for society’s most vulnerable and
marginalized members, it should be no wonder if the most desperate among
them seek out the only remaining source of help. Moreover, as has been
seen, there are limits—both moral and constitutional—on what the state
may do to convicted offenders as punishment. Unless there is some way
besides changing K6G to look more like GP to make the threat of jail
sufficiently effective to deter even the most desperate individuals from
looking to get back inside, the state will have to look outside the penal
system for ways to make sure that no one is driven to commit a crime just
to get his basic needs met.
V. TOWARD INCREASED HUMANITY IN PRISON: LESSONS FROM THE L.A.
COUNTY JAIL
The K6G experience suggests that current conditions on the mainline
are not inevitable, and that alternatives exist. Cultural change can be hard
to achieve, and the culture of the prison is no exception. As noted, the
intensity of the hypermasculinity imperative varies among men’s carceral
institutions. But even still, too many aspects of this culture shape the
experience of too many men in custody. We would therefore be remiss if
we did not try to distill the possible lessons suggested by the K6G
509
I asked my interviewees the following question: Do you think that people who have
been in K6G would be less likely to commit a crime if they knew they had to go into GP and
not back to K6G? See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 102 q.42. Of those respondents who
answered this question, two-thirds (11/17) answered in the affirmative, i.e., that K6Gs
otherwise motivated to get back into the Jail would be less inclined to try it if they knew they
would have to go to mainline. In the words of one respondent:
[I]f they had to go on main line, I don’t think that they would be as comfortable with
it. They wouldn’t make this place, like “Oh, well, I’m going to get arrested today,”
because some people come to [K6G], you know, some people fall in love and come
back because they know that the person that they’re with wouldn’t go home for
another three months, so they may do a three-month crime like breaking a bottle in a
grocery store or something.
Int. 119, at A8.

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experience for facilities elsewhere, and to identify potential strategies for
reform. What follows are initial efforts in this direction.
A. LESSONS
1. Many of the worst pathologies seen in men’s prisons and jails might
well be mitigated or even eliminated if the people in custody felt
independently safe and secure. This is perhaps the single most important
lesson of K6G. K6G demonstrates the value of creating a climate in which
people do not feel that their own safety depends on successfully performing
a hypermasculine identity. There is no magic bullet that can transform a
prison environment from one governed by the hypermasculinity imperative
into one like K6G. But one thing is clear: hypermasculine performance and
gang affiliation offer scared people in dangerous environments ways to
protect themselves from harm. It is thus not reasonable to expect
individuals in this situation to abandon either strategy unless they feel it is
safe to do so. To the extent that the hypermasculinity imperative lies at the
root of much of the inhumanity of life in contemporary men’s prisons and
jails—and my sense is that it does so to a very great extent—the single
greatest priority on the part of prison administrators and others with an
interest in making life in prison as humane as possible must be that of
ensuring conditions under which people in custody feel safe from physical
harm.
2. The “gladiator school” environment510 found in many men’s prisons
and jails is to a considerable degree a product not of the inherently violent
nature of the people locked inside but of the system itself. It may be
comforting for people on the outside to blame the prisoners themselves for
the worst aspects of their confinement: the violence, the danger, the fear.
Those living in these environments must be animals—or worse, monsters—
or why else would they be behaving this way?511 As the foregoing
demonstrates, however, the notion that prisons are sites of predation and
abuse because prisoners are inherently violent lets the institutions
themselves off the hook too easily.512 If it were true that prisoners make the
prisons, K6G should look more like other dorms in the Jail. It is not as if
the residents of K6G are unfamiliar with the hypermasculine posturing and
510

See PARSELL, supra note 29, at 62.
See Dolovich, supra note 158, at 288–91 (exploring the way the ideological
conception of criminals as monsters both justifies and reinforces the arguably inhumane
treatment imposed on people in prison).
512
See Dolovich, supra note 221, at 240–41 (“American-style incarceration, through the
conditions it inflicts, produces the very conduct society claims to abhor, and thereby
guarantees a steady supply of offenders whose incarceration the public will continue to
demand.”).
511

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other consequent pathologies that are endemic in the Jail’s GP. To the
contrary, many people in the unit have lived by that destructive code in
other custodial situations, sometimes for years. Nor may K6G’s relatively
safe and humane character be explained exclusively by the sexual identity
of its residents: as has been seen, many gay men can manifest when
necessary the violence, belligerence, and insensitivity to others that the
hypermasculinity imperative demands. People in K6G are able to abandon
that behavioral code while in the unit only because they are confident that
doing so will not put them in danger. This confidence arises from several
key features of the particular institutional framework that created K6G and
has been sustained over time: the procedures that have together ensured
relatively impermeable boundaries around the unit; the commitment of
Officers Bell and Lanni to the well-being of unit residents and the trust and
open communication this commitment has inspired; and the emergence in
K6G of a community of people sufficiently interconnected to allow for an
appreciable level of mutual trust. In short, K6G strongly suggests that the
prison makes the prisoners and not the other way around.513
3. Classification is an ongoing process, requiring continuous
monitoring to ensure the removal of potential predators from housing units.
The people in K6G know that anyone who threatens violence against others
will be removed from the unit and placed in administrative segregation.
The willingness of unit residents to report such malefactors facilitates this
process and enhances feelings of personal security and safety in the
dorms.514 Other jurisdictions are implementing policies to achieve a similar
effect. In San Francisco County, for example, jail policy is to house people
in smaller units with others of like size and strength and to reshuffle
housing assignments should any residents emerge as victims or victimizers.
To facilitate this method, classification officers in San Francisco can spend
up to forty-five minutes interviewing each new admit, to determine not only
whether he might be vulnerable or predatory, but also his relative strength
and where he might fall in the pecking order of the unit to which he is
assigned (i.e., might he emerge as a victim in a standard GP unit? a predator

513
There are obvious parallels here to Thomas Hobbes’ central insight in his classic
work, Leviathan: “[D]uring the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in
awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man,
against every man.” THOMAS HOBBES, LEVIATHAN 62 (E.P. Dutton & Co. 1914) (1651).
514
This is a further aspect of K6G’s virtuous circle: the readiness of K6Gs—for whom
there is no premium on seeming hard and tough—to voice complaints about their treatment
means that Jail officials are likely to hear about abuse in the unit, which only further
reinforces the feelings of safety among people who might otherwise hesitate to report any
victimization out of fear of being “disciplined” for doing so.

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in a unit of vulnerable inmates?).515 Classification officers then keep tabs
on units, reassigning people where necessary. San Francisco’s more closely
calibrated approach is enabled both by its relatively small population—in
recent years, its annual admissions rate has been between 30,000 and
37,000,516 as compared with L.A. County’s 166,000517—and by the modern
podular design of its new facility, which allows for smaller and more
readily monitored housing units. The positive value of San Francisco’s
approach is on display in K6G, which shows that ongoing attention to unit
dynamics arising after the initial classification can promote safety, even in a
facility with old-style dormitory housing, and even in a mega-jail like
Men’s Central.
4. Continuity of supervision may increase trust between officers and
the people in custody, thus promoting a safer and more secure environment
for all. In corrections circles, it is well recognized that “direct supervision”
increases the safety and security of housing units. In contrast to the
external surveillance of the “panopticon” model famously promoted by
Jeremy Bentham, direct supervision places correctional officers inside the
cell blocks and dormitories along with the residents. This strategy has
obvious benefits. For one thing, it gives officers access to all corners of the
unit, eliminating the phenomenon of blind spots, which in most facilities
exist whenever officers remain stationed in an overlook booth.518 Equally
valuable, direct supervision allows extended personal interaction between
officers and unit residents, giving all parties the chance to know one another
as people. In units that operate on a direct supervision model, violence and
disorder tend to drop. This approach, moreover, works best when there is
continuity among the staff. Frequent rotation of staff between units has its
advantages; it gives officers experience throughout a facility and limits the
possibility of corruption by officers, who may develop close relationships
with prisoners involved in illegal activities only to be gradually enlisted in
criminal schemes. But frequent rotation also disrupts the forging of bonds
of trust and familiarity between officers and residents—bonds that, when
present, can contribute to a positive and orderly atmosphere.
Direct supervision, however, is resource-intensive. This model
requires that correctional officers be unarmed, since weapons can easily
change hands. And today’s fiscal realities have resulted in a generally high
515

Interview with Jan Dempsey, Undersheriff, S.F. Sheriff’s Dep’t, in S.F., Cal. (May
29, 2008).
516
E-mail from Joan Scannell, Sgt., S.F. Sheriff’s Dep’t, to author (May 9, 2011, 9:15
AM PST) (on file with the author).
517
See supra note 2.
518
Such blind spots effectively function as free zones in which prisoners can perpetuate
any abuses as long as they remain out of the officers’ sightlines.

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prisoner-to-officer ratio, which makes it difficult to implement direct
supervision. The reason is simple: as both residents and officers will attest,
however calm a unit may seem, things can explode in an instant, and no
officer wants to be alone, unarmed, and surrounded by 150 prisoners when
something snaps. For this reason, like many overcrowded facilities
nationwide, L.A. County keeps its supervising officers in the booths
overlooking the units.519 Deputies rarely enter the dorms, except to
supervise the distribution of food and clothing exchange and to conduct
count.520 Officers and unit residents thus remain strangers to one another.
Even Bell and Lanni, who have generally positive relationships with
K6G’s residents, rarely go into the dorms. They spend most of their days
upstairs in the office and the classroom, dealing with classification and
programmatic issues. Although residents often seek them out to resolve
conflicts, there is inevitably much that goes on in the dorms of which they
remain unaware. Yet despite this constraint, these officers have managed in
other ways to get to know a great many of the people who come through
K6G, and vice versa.521 They have thus built up a reservoir of mutual trust
that they regularly draw on to improve the lives of unit residents while
keeping disorder to a minimum.
This mutual understanding and respect can only come from regular
interpersonal interactions over the long term, which will arise most readily
from a policy of direct supervision with minimal rotation of officers
between positions. Ideally, every detainee in the jail would live in a unit
under the supervision of officers committed to creating humane conditions
of confinement. It would also benefit K6G if a policy of direct supervision
were implemented in that unit, provided the officers tapped to work inside
the dorms were disposed to treat unit residents with respect. But somewhat
counterintuitively, the K6G experience—in which two officers who rarely
go to the dorms have nonetheless been able to build the bonds of trust and
personal respect with unit residents—reinforces the value of a direct
supervision model of policing in prisons, and of any other strategies that
allow for the development of mutual and respectful personal connections
between officers and the people in custody.
519

In Men’s Central, the Jail has even built transparent “tubes” inside some of the cell
blocks that allow officers to walk the line while remaining beyond the reach of the men in
the cells. Although this strategy may keep officers safe from “throwing” (a.k.a. “gassing”)
and other unwelcome assaults, visibility is much more restricted in the tubes, increasing the
blind spots problem and greatly limiting the effectiveness of the rounds.
520
Twice a week, detainees in the Jail are issued new shorts, shirts, pants, and overshirts,
as well as fresh sheets for their bunks. This exchange is done in the dorms by inmate trusties
with officers looking on.
521
See supra III.B.3.

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5. Given a meaningful alternative, men in custody may reject the
behavioral code that defines the hypermasculinity model. No doubt, many
men in prisons—especially young men who have known no other life—will
unfortunately welcome the chance to continue their gang activity in
custody. But many others will not, and, given the chance, would readily
leave behind the stress, fear, and danger that accompany a carceral culture
of hypermasculinity and gang politics. The daily parade of men who
pretend to be gay to try to get into K6G is proof positive of this claim. The
key to this willing abandonment is a credible promise of personal security.
As Craig Haney importantly reminds us, “[g]angs only flourish in a jail or
prison society where there is a strong undercurrent of fear and reminders of
one’s own vulnerability.”522 The same may be said of the hypermasculine
posturing that keeps the gangs’ soldiers in line and promotes victimization
of the weak. People who believe that letting down their guard will put them
at risk will keep the mask firmly in place. But K6G, by providing safety
without the need for posturing, allows K6G’s residents to choose for
themselves how to behave, and in the majority of cases, the masks come
down. The K6G experience suggests that, given the opportunity, many
other men in custody would make the same choice—a suggestion
reinforced by the experience of San Quentin’s GP and the veterans’ units
described earlier.
6. Men in custodial environments free of the hypermasculinity
imperative may collectively cooperate to prevent its (re)emergence.
Residents of K6G are well aware of the advantages of a unit free from the
gang politics that govern the rest of the Jail. They are, moreover,
determined to retain them. Efforts to introduce gang politics into the unit
are met with immediate hostility and a clear message that such behavior is
unwelcome.523 Even behaviors that merely indicate sympathy with the gang
culture—such as when people “start throwing up those gang signs or where
they’re from”524—are not tolerated in K6G. The absence in K6G of both
gang politics and the hypermasculinity imperative was only made possible
in the first instance because institutional forces came together to assure
people in the unit that they could safely reject the demands of that
destructive model. But my research also indicates that many of K6G’s
residents have forged a collective commitment to keeping it that way. It is
hard to know to what extent these efforts explain the continued absence of
gang politics. At the very least, they surely serve to acculturate new
arrivals to K6G’s anti-gang norms, thereby teaching those people
522
523
524

See Haney, supra note 14, at 136.
See supra note 153.
Int. 131, at F4.

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unfamiliar with K6G that it is safe to leave off the tough-guy posturing that
would be required of them in the Jail’s GP. The evident willingness of unit
residents to play this simultaneously educative and (non-violent)
disciplinary role suggests that administrators seeking to break the hold of
the hypermasculinity model of prison life may want to consider ways to
enlist the assistance of those men who stand both to benefit from the
success of the effort and to pay the price of its failure.
7. The availability of alternative means of self-expression and identity
formation may in turn undercut the appeal of hypermasculine performance
and gang activity. K6G teaches that, in a carceral environment where
people are not punished for being themselves or pursuing their own
interests, they will engage in healthy and natural forms of selfexpression.525 Certainly, the avenues for self-expression in K6G are highly
constrained by the conditions of confinement.526 Still, as has been seen,
unit residents are free to engage in a number of expressive pursuits not
typically available to people in GP. Although many residents prefer to keep
to themselves, many others take advantage of this freedom to forge
interpersonal bonds of friendship, kinship,527 and even love. They have sex.
They sing and dance. Some even find creative outlets in designing clothes
made from county-issue uniforms and bedding, and organizing fashion
shows.528
That dorm residents value their access to increased avenues for selfexpression came through clearly in my interviews. This relative freedom is
a big part of the unit’s appeal, and its enjoyment seems to bolster the
collective determination to reject any efforts to introduce GP norms into
K6G. To see why this might be, consider K6G’s fashion designers.

525
Admittedly, not all these forms are necessarily positive or desirable. In K6G, for
example, the freedom to act on feelings of anger, instability, frustration, resentment, etc.
means that there is more frequent one-on-one fighting in K6G than in GP. But the apparent
calm of GP does not indicate the absence of those negative emotions. It only means that
people are working extremely hard to suppress them, an effort that is certain to be
psychologically, emotionally, and even physically costly. Ideally, there would be fewer
fights in K6G. But the way to achieve that goal is to reduce crowding, improve facilities,
and provide alternative means for people to engage in meaningful and productive endeavors,
not to create a climate in which people swallow ordinary human reactions they are too afraid
to express.
526
See supra Part II.B (describing the many unpleasant and demoralizing features of life
in K6G).
527
See supra note 342.
528
See Int. 41, at E2 (“They get done up . . . and just walk around with, you know,
dresses that they had made. Nice dresses, but I mean they like they came off a rack.”); Int.
53, at B7 (“It’s a lot of horse playing in there, lot of fun, you know, things going on. We
have fashion shows and all that stuff, you know.”).

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Members of this group are only able freely and openly to indulge their
interest in (and in some cases I observed, considerable talent for) creative
design because they wound up in a unit free from the hypermasculinity
imperative and its pathologies. But equally, having found this outlet, these
designers and their models have no need for the identity, purpose, or sense
of belonging gang membership can confer. They have found their own
identity, set their own priorities, and forged their own community. Gang
culture has nothing to offer them, and indeed would be extremely costly for
them. Not only would it require that they pay the usual price of
hypermasculine performance—emotional repression, fear of a misstep, the
willingness to use violence, the risk of further criminal charges, etc.—but
any public display of their genuine personal interest in fashion would very
likely expose them to victimization.529 The members of this K6G
subculture thus have much to gain from continued freedom from the
hypermasculinity imperative and much to lose from its resurgence. They
may therefore be expected to resist any efforts to reintroduce it into the unit.
The same is true of many others in K6G who, despite the relatively
limited number of meaningful pursuits available to residents of the unit,
have found meaning and identity in other ways. This is K6G’s virtuous
circle at work, in which an absence of any hypermasculinity imperative has
created space for individual pursuits that, being highly valued by residents,
may in turn reinforce the collective rejection of that imperative. One can
only imagine how much stronger the resistance would be among people
who enjoyed access to a wide range of productive pursuits, allowing
manifestation of a broad set of interests. Among corrections professionals,
it is well known that people in custody with access to college courses, arts
and crafts lessons and supplies, theater arts, vocational training, and
meaningful and challenging work of all kinds—as writers, journalists,
librarians, paralegals, electricians, teachers, gardeners, etc.—are much less
inclined to participate in hypermasculine performance or to embrace the
values and norms of gang life. It is, moreover, well known that in prison,
men with privileges on the line will be better behaved than men who have
nothing left to lose. This is the principle of honor yards, where men who
have proved their ability to live safely with others enjoy more privileges
than other prisoners, thus creating even greater incentives to good behavior.
The experience of K6G suggests there may yet be another turn of the wheel,
in that creating avenues for self-expression and identity formation may in
529

That is, unless they accepted a subordinate role in protective pairing with a “Daddy”
who permitted such pursuits. See Donaldson, supra note 225. In some cases, such overt
displays of “femininity” may even be demanded by the more powerful party in a protective
pairing, who may want their subordinates to self-present as much like women as possible.
See, e.g., RIDEAU, supra note 8 (describing this phenomenon).

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the right environment encourage a collective refusal to participate in
hypermasculine performance.
8. For people in custody to express a full range of human emotions is
both healthy and normal. The people housed in K6G feel relatively safe
and thus able to relax and be themselves. As a consequence, they feel free
to express a range of human emotions and engage in a host of behaviors not
often seen in men’s carceral facilities. Although many unit residents
choose to keep to themselves, it is also not unusual—as has already been
noted—to see people in K6G laughing, singing, dancing, hugging, and even
walking around displaying clothes they have personally designed. That
prisoners could create such a climate in the bowels of Men’s Central Jail
should not in itself be cause for wonder. People behind bars are still
people, and it is only human to try to be human, to make the best of a bad
situation, and to form bonds of fellowship with others in the same
predicament.530 The example of K6G suggests that it is the general absence
of any levity in the Jail’s general population, the absence of any show of
emotion or display of productive joint enterprise, which should surprise and
disturb.531 If, as this Article has argued, it is the pressure to seem hard and
tough—to conform with the hypermasculine ideal—that too often keeps GP
units in men’s carceral facilities so controlled and subdued, then perhaps
K6G and not GP should set our expectations as to normal and appropriate
behavior in prison.
B. STRATEGIES
One final question remains: assuming prison officials commit to the
project of applying the lessons of K6G to their own facilities, what specific
strategies ought they to adopt? Certainly, prisons are complex institutions,
and what works in one context may not work in another. That said, there
are some strategies suggested by the K6G experience that seem likely at

530

One respondent used the term “happiness” to describe life in K6G. When asked why,
he said:
[S]eeing the other gays . . . enjoying [themselves]. . . . It’s not no threats towards no
one else. Everyone have their ups and downs, but you work through it. Every day
and every night, somebody always comes by, tapping on your bed, smile, it’s going to
be all right. You know? And that’s what makes me feel good.
Int. 102, at E2. Another respondent, who had used the word “lovable” to describe K6G,
explained that:
[E]very time you come back,—I know that I’m going to either be in a holding cell
with somebody I know and I can just cut up and relax with. . . . In GP you have to be
more . . . by yourself, and you can’t hug your homeboys.
Int. 101, at A7.
531
See supra part III.B.3.

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least to mitigate the worst aspects of those GP units where the
hypermasculinity imperative governs.
A number of these strategies have already been identified,532 and
include:
(1) identifying and separating out likely victims from likely predators
for housing purposes;533
(2) maintaining a strict boundary between likely victims and likely
predators;
(3) monitoring units in an ongoing way to identify emergent predators;
(4) automatically removing predatory individuals as soon as they
become known;
(5) ensuring continuity of staffing as much as possible, to allow staff
to get to know the people in their custody as individuals;534 and
(6) fostering a culture of respect toward people in custody as a way of,
among other things, creating channels of communication between staff and
prisoners to identify threats and resolve problems when they arise, and to
counter the demeaning effects of incarceration generally.
These strategies are first and foremost about safety—about creating a
culture in which people feel independently safe and secure and thus feel
able to resist the hypermasculinity imperative and let down their guard.
They are also likely to mitigate in positive ways the degrading aspects of
the carceral experience in general. This end is not only tied to the
possibility of increased safety, but is itself crucial to the humanizing
project, and ought to motivate a further, broad-based strategy:
(7) bringing about institutional change at all levels to ensure that
people in custody are treated with the respect and consideration due all
human beings just by virtue of their humanity.

532

See supra Part III.C.3.
See supra note 425.
534
This particular aim might, in part, be achieved through a strategy that would also
leverage the advantage of K6G’s small size and the sense of community fostered by the
automatic reclassification to the unit of repeat players. That is, jails in particular—which
tend to have high turnover—could assign people in the system to specific units to which they
would always return on subsequent bids. Assuming a relatively stable assignment of officers
to each unit, this approach would both make possible ongoing relationships between staff
and detainees and eliminate the fear that typically attends arrival in jail on the part of people
who do not know where they are going. (An apt analogy is the “house” system in place at
Hogwarts, the school in the Harry Potter book series.) Of course, this system would only
make a positive difference if pursued in conjunction with the other listed strategies. If a unit
is not safe and predator-free, it will still be a scary place, even for those who know where
they are headed, and if officers are not committed to respectful treatment, continuity of
staffing will not necessarily enhance a unit’s humanity.
533

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But the example of K6G suggests that, for conditions to be
affirmatively humanizing, channels should also be established through
which people can remain connected to who they are, engage in meaningful
self-development, and thereby foster a positive self-image. These latter
effects may be partly achieved by adopting the seven strategies just listed,
which would simultaneously demonstrate respect for the people in custody
and free them up to relax and be themselves. In addition, however, the
K6G experience suggests two further strategies for affirmatively
humanizing prison conditions:
(8) carving off groups of people whose common identities or interests
might provide a basis for mutual affinity, and housing them separately from
GP; and
(9) providing as many people as possible with the means to remain
connected to who they are and to learn and grow as people.
Once the background precondition of safety is established, these
remaining suggestions may trigger the sort of virtuous circle seen in K6G.
Although the first of the two has the potential for yielding positive effects in
particular cases, it also raises complicated questions that indicate the need
for careful handling if this approach is to be pursued. By contrast, the
second of the two carries few, if any, risks and indeed, represents an
approach that, although having fallen off in an era of mass incarceration,
budget cuts and “penal harm,”535 is well recognized to reduce the “pains of
imprisonment” and enhance post-custody success.536
As to the carving off of possible affinity groups and housing them
separately from GP, the question is which groups ought to be separated out
in this way. One obvious such group is veterans. As we have seen, the
strategy of housing vets separately from GP has already been implemented
with positive results in many jurisdictions. Ideally, the officers assigned to
such units would also have military backgrounds, as a common formative
experience might allow relations between officers and prisoners to
transcend the stark “us” versus “them” dynamic that too often prevails in
custody. Such profound shared experience might also form the basis for
genuine mutual respect—a key ingredient in humanizing carceral
conditions.
Another possible group that might be carved off for separate housing
is men who are committed fathers to their children or who wish to be. Not
only is the identity of “father” humanizing in itself, but it could also provide
the basis for healthier and more respectful interactions among men who
535
TODD CLEAR, HARM IN AMERICAN PENOLOGY: OFFENDERS, VICTIMS,
COMMUNITIES, at xiii–xiv (1994) (coining the term “penal harm”).
536
See SYKES, supra note 164, at 70–72.

AND

THEIR

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know themselves to share a common motivation and a crucial life
experience. Such a unit might also benefit from being staffed by officers
who are themselves devoted fathers. As an added advantage, bringing such
men together would also facilitate programming oriented towards
enhancing parenting skills and family connections more generally.
Equally promising and with the potential for much broader reach are
programming dorms of a more general sort, housing people with a
demonstrated commitment to educational or other prosocial pursuits
(scholastic, artistic, vocational, etc.). Such dorms already exist in many
facilities, often operating as “honor” units, in which people with a greater
range of privileges have an incentive to behave well.537
A further possibility, though one that would require careful design
and attention, is to house people of faith in a separate unit. Were this
possibility pursued, ongoing monitoring would be necessary to avert any
proselytizing or sectarianism, either of which might prompt aggressive
responses. Still, there may be facilities where this strategy might yield a
comparatively safe and humane environment, and thus might be worth
trying, notwithstanding the risks.
As this last example indicates, however, the “affinity group” strategy
is not risk-free. For one thing, separating out from GP those groups of
people most likely to help foster a healthy, prosocial environment—say,
people of faith or people pursuing their education—may strip the general
population of its potentially most positive influences.538 More importantly,
537
Even the experience of being invited by the institution to identify one’s personal
interests in order to find a congenial housing assignment could have the sort of humanizing
effect that, I have suggested, arises from the initial IRC inquiry that aims to identify those
people who belong in K6G. See supra Part III.C.3. An institution that asks if one is (most)
interested in higher education, cultivating a trade, remaining connected to one’s family,
engaging in creative arts, etc., is already relating to people in detention in a more respectful,
humanizing way. I am grateful to Kathy Trisolini for this point.
538
This concern is analogous to one arising in the public school context, where, some
have argued, placing “gifted” children in separate classrooms, although enhancing the
educational experiences of the students chosen for this treatment, risks putting downward
pressure on the quality of the educational experience of those students left behind. See, e.g.,
David N. Figlio & Marianne E. Page, School Choice and the Distributional Effects of Ability
Tracking: Does Separation Increase Equality? 28 (Nat’l Bureau of Econ. Research,
Working Paper No. 8055, 2000) (“The current trend away from ability tracking results
largely from the perception that tracking is harmful to low-ability students. . . . [However,]
our estimates provide no evidence that tracking harms low ability students.”); see also
Sharon Dolovich, State Punishment and Private Prisons, 55 DUKE L.J. 437, 505–07 (2005)
(noting that private prison providers tend to take “the cream of the crop,” which leaves the
relatively more violent and otherwise difficult prisoner populations in public hands). Of
course, depending on the context, not creating a specialized unit may simply leave everyone
worse off. And where, as in K6G, the cost of failing to segregate leaves vulnerable people
unprotected, segregation seems self-evidently appropriate. The issue raised in the text only

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depending on the group tagged for separate housing, this strategy raises all
the concerns that attend any program of state-sponsored segregation on the
basis of membership in a suspect class. Even a nonsectarian faith-based
unit, for example, might reasonably raise valid fears of discrimination if,
say, officers were inclined to favor those prisoners who shared their
personal beliefs. It could also invite discrimination against nonbelievers,
especially if, as anticipated, a unit for people of faith turned out to be
comparatively safe and humane.539
The K6G unit itself already triggers concerns over state-sponsored
identity-based segregation. Although the history of race discrimination in
the United States has left a legacy of suspicion as to segregation by race in
particular, this suspicion is arguably appropriate as to the segregation of any
minority group that has been subjected to discrimination and collective
animus. In the case of sexual minorities, this concern is only magnified in
the carceral setting, where correctional officers too can feel compelled to
perform a hypermasculine identity that takes gay men as a key contrast
figure.
What does this concern mean for jurisdictions persuaded by K6G’s
relatively humane environment and wishing to reproduce it with their own
gay and trans populations? In a companion piece to this Article, I explore
at length the reasons why, given the potential dangers of an official policy
of identifying and segregating sexual minorities, we might reasonably
hesitate to endorse the broader adoption of K6G despite its comparative
success in L.A. County.540 In other words, perhaps ironically, efforts to
implement the lessons of K6G for humanizing prison conditions in general
ought not in most cases to involve the reproduction of K6G elsewhere.
Certainly, it would be a mistake for L.A. County to dismantle a program
widely acknowledged as a success.541 A K6G-style segregation unit for gay
men and trans women should also remain an available tool in the toolkit of
bears consideration where the candidate groups for “affinity” housing are not necessarily
likely victims but may simply benefit from a dedicated living space.
539
On the constitutional, empirical, and other normative issues raised by faith-based
prisons in general, see Alexander Volokh, Do Faith-Based Prisons Work? 63 ALA. L. REV.
43 (2011); Alexander Volokh, The Constitutional Possibilities of Prison Vouchers, 72 OHIO
ST. L.J. 983 (2011).
540
See Dolovich, supra note 1, at 54–87.
541
As I have explained elsewhere, see id. at 78–79, prisons are complex institutions that
can be very difficult to manage. Programs succeed or fail for all kinds of reasons particular
to a given institution, reasons that may be entirely independent of the theoretical wisdom of
the program design. To dismantle a relatively successful program in the hope of improving
on what already exists could wind up leaving everyone worse off. And if the consequence
for policymakers would be professional disappointment or perhaps wounded pride, the effect
on the prisoners could be unspeakable harm. In my view, that is not a risk worth taking.

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prison administrators who conclude that it is the best way for their
institution to keep safe members of these vulnerable groups.542 At the same
time, however, my own view is that prison officials looking for ways to
protect vulnerable people in custody would be better advised to follow the
recommendation of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and
seek to identify and house together all likely victims without trying to
distinguish among them based on sexual orientation or gender identity.543
This mixed view—a presumption against segregation on the basis of sexual
orientation or gender identity, with an exception for those jurisdictions
where affirmative grounds exist for implementing such a program—has
largely been incorporated into the National PREA standards adopted in
2012 by the United States Department of Justice.544 I continue to subscribe
542

Although K6G itself may seem to invite an Equal Protection challenge, the unit in its
current form would and should survive any challenge on Equal Protection grounds. See id.
at 82–87.
543
COMMISSION REPORT, supra note 387, at 217. This recommendation has now been
officially adopted by the U.S. Department of Justice in its National PREA Standards. See 28
C.F.R. §§ 115.41–42 (2012).
544
See 28 C.F.R. §§ 115.41–42. The relevant standard largely prohibits segregation on
the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, but retains an exception where “such
placement is in a dedicated facility, unit, or wing established in connection with a consent
degree, legal settlement, or legal judgment for the purpose of protecting such inmates.” Id.
at § 115.42(g). This means that, in jurisdictions where LGBT advocates conclude that such a
unit is necessary to protect those they represent, those advocates may seek the establishment
of such a unit through the courts. Crafting the exception in this way was intended to ensure
that custody units segregating on the basis of sexual identity are only established when there
is sufficient community support for the enterprise, thus avoiding instances in which, whether
from ignorance or animus, prison officials house sexual minorities separately under
conditions that only make them more vulnerable—as happened, for example, in 2009, when
authorities at Fluvanna Correctional Institution in Virginia removed women from the general
population who identified as or were perceived to be lesbian or otherwise gender
nonconforming and housed them together in what became known as the “butch ward,” where
they were subject to ongoing harassment by staff along with other punitive conditions. In
that case, rather than being protected by segregation (as occurs in K6G), targeted women
were placed at risk of abuse. Fluvanna Women’s Prison Segregated Lesbians, Others, THE
DAILY PROGRESS (June 11, 2009), http://www2.dailyprogress.com/news/cdp-news-local/
/jun/11/fluvanna_womens_prison _segregated_lesbians_others-ar-84002/. At the same time,
the PREA exception leaves open the possibility that other K6G-style units might be adopted
elsewhere, assuming sufficient community approval and support.
This exception, as the comments to the rule acknowledge, was “designed to encompass
the Los Angeles County Jail.” See National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to
Prison Rape, 77 Fed. Reg. 37,153 (June 20, 2012). The language of § 115.42(g) was
originally crafted collaboratively by Jody Marksamer, Harper Jean Tobin, and myself. We
proposed it independently in two sets of comments filed with the Department of Justice
during its notice and comment period in 2011—one by me alone and one by the consortium
of LGBT advocacy groups on whose behalf Marksamer and Tobin were working. See
Sharon Dolovich, Comments on National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to

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to it, although the present analysis reveals both the potentially humanizing
benefits of the K6G approach and the fact that, although not without its
risks, it has a considerable upside potential. These positive features of the
K6G approach make clear that the negative presumption against segregated
housing for sexual minorities, although arguably still on balance the wiser
course,545 is itself not cost-free.
What about race? Given how plainly salient racial difference is in
many carceral facilities and how hard prisoners can work to prevent racial
mixing, perhaps dividing people up into housing units based on race might
generate a K6G-like atmosphere in which shared identity and affinity would
prompt mutual toleration and even a sense of community–—however
unpalatable this prospect may seem.546
Fortunately, however, the
experience of K6G strongly suggests that, rather than a necessary feature of
life in custody, the deep racial animus that defines life in the Jail’s GP—and
in many other men’s prisons and jails around the country547—is only an
artifact of a hypermasculine culture in which racially stratified gangs
demand fealty to a set of racist norms. In K6G, where people feel safe
enough to resist the gangs, prisoner-enforced racial segregation disappears.
Although there are some K6G residents who, likely from long experience in

Prison Rape, submitted pursuant to Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (Jan. 24, 2011) (on file
with the author); Protecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Gender
Nonconforming People from Sexual Abuse and Harassment in Correctional Settings,
Comments Submitted in Response to Docket No. OAG-131; AG Order No. 3244-2011,
National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape (Apr. 4, 2011)
(comments submitted collectively by the National Center for Transgender Equality, the
National Center for Lesbian Rights, the ACLU, the National Juvenile Defender Center, the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, The Equity Project, Lambda Legal Education and Defense Fund,
and the Transgender Law Center).
545
For an extended argument supporting this position, see Dolovich, supra note 1, at 54–
87.
546
If the premise of this line of thinking—that there can be no safety in prison without
racial segregation—were accurate, such a program could presumably satisfy strict scrutiny
and thus pose no constitutional problem. Despite strong precedent establishing a minimal
standard of review for prisoners’ constitutional claims, see Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 89
(1987) (holding that regulations burdening prisoners’ constitutional rights will be upheld so
long as they “are reasonably related to legitimate penological interests”), the Supreme Court
has held that racial segregation of prisoners must be subject to strict scrutiny. Johnson v.
California, 543 U.S. 499, 515 (2005). For an argument that, although K6G certainly
involves state-sponsored identity-based segregation, it does not run afoul of Johnson, see
Dolovich, supra note 1, at 82–87.
547
See, e.g., MATTHEW PARKER, LARCENY IN MY BLOOD: A MEMOIR OF HEROIN,
HANDCUFFS, AND HIGHER EDUCATION (2012) (referring repeatedly to the race politics that
governed life in the several Arizona jails and prisons where the author did time, which as
described bear a strong resemblance to the race politics found in the L.A. County Jail and the
California prisons).

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the California prison system, are made obviously uneasy by the racial
mixing in K6G’s dorms, most people seem entirely comfortable with the
unit’s overt racial integration.
Certainly, the racial politics of the prison world are context-specific
and complex, as is the question of how racial integration is likely to affect a
given prison environment.548 Ascertaining what is needed to ensure
comparatively safe and humane racially integrated housing units can in no
way be accomplished by a single study of K6G. At the very least, however,
K6G suggests that, even in extremely racially stratified facilities, racial
segregation may not be necessary to the attainment of relatively safe and
humane conditions549—a finding that, at a minimum, cautions against
assuming the need to segregate prisoners by race.
In sum, the first humanizing strategy suggested by K6G—carving off
affinity groups into segregated housing—raises some challenges for those
prison officials who choose to pursue it, although equally, depending on the
groups selected for this treatment, this strategy may also offer the potential
for genuine improvement in the custodial experience. By contrast, the
second strategy suggested by K6G—providing all people in custody,
wherever they are housed, with the means to pursue their own interests and
thus to grow and develop as people—should be relatively straightforward to
implement. The San Quentin example reveals the way a culture of learning
can spread even in an environment not typically hospitable to positive,
prosocial behaviors. Certainly, other pieces of the puzzle must also be in
place; most obviously, people must feel safe enough to engage in activities
that might otherwise mark them as targets. But once this background
condition is met, there are likely to be considerable benefits to providing
prisoners access to meaningful and challenging educational programs,
programs in the arts (theater, music, creative writing, etc.), vocational
training, or any other pursuits that would allow people in custody
opportunities for self-development and for cultivating a healthy self-respect.
Equally beneficial and humanizing are programs that would allow prisoners
to maintain and develop meaningful connections with people in the free
world, whether family, friends, or other people with common interests.550
548

For a comprehensive discussion of race politics and the effects of racial integration in
the Texas prison system, see TRULSON & MARQUART, supra note 136.
549
Of course, any jurisdiction that concluded otherwise would have to show that the
circumstances that tell in favor of racial segregation were compelling enough to survive
strict scrutiny. See Johnson, 543 U.S. at 515.
550
See CRAIG HANEY, REFORMING PUNISHMENT: PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITS TO THE PAINS OF
IMPRISONMENT 309 (2006) (“[P]rograms that involve prisoners in meaningful activity and
reduce the psychological barriers between prison and the outside world—for example, ones
that facilitate and encourage visitation and the maintenance of family ties—can actually

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Not only would these pursuits help people to feel more human, but
assuming broad enough reach, they may also trigger a virtuous circle,
making people who benefit from these opportunities more inclined to treat
others with respect and to reject the destructive behavioral norms often
dominant in GP.
K6G teaches that, for prison conditions to be made safer and more
humane, institutions have to commit to protecting people from
victimization and to providing them with meaningful channels for personal
expression and self-development. There is nothing surprising here. To the
contrary, it is a truism that if prison conditions are to be safer and more
humane, prisons must commit to protecting people from harm and treating
them like human beings. Society, however, may have reached the point
where the deep pathologies that have emerged over years of skyrocketing
prison populations and the societal embrace of “penal harm” as the
dominant approach to punishment551 have blinded us to the most obvious
pathways to meaningful reform. If so, considering the example of K6G
offers a much needed corrective.
Yet the K6G example does more than illustrate the need for safety and
for humane treatment. It also reveals the way these obligations are
mutually reinforcing. Treating people with respect helps keep people safe,
and keeping people safe helps them feel more like human beings and frees
them up to act like it. Again, these observations may (and should) seem
mundane. That they are positively radical when compared with much
contemporary penal practice552 gives some indication of how normalized
harmful carceral conditions have become. K6G strongly suggests that it is
the prisons that make the prisoners and not the other way around. And if
this is true, it suggests a further implication, almost shocking in its
inversion of the conventional wisdom: that far from being monsters who
deserve what they get, in too many cases, the people we incarcerate are
instead the victims of a system that refuses to recognize those in custody as
change the prison environment in ways that reduce the harmful alienation that often occurs
there.”). For a description of one such “over the wall program,” see Marc Howard, Lessons
in Integrity with San Quentin State Prison’s Tennis Team, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED (June 16,
2011),
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/tennis/06/16/san.quentin.prison/index.html
(“[W]ithin the confines of a tennis court, these men are learning to play inside the lines. And
tennis may be giving some of them the hope of finding a new direction in their lives.”).
551
See supra note 535.
552
See Sharon Dolovich, Creating the Permanent Prisoner, in LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE:
AMERICA’S NEW DEATH PENALTY? 96, 105–18 (Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. & Austin Sarat, eds.,
2012) (tracing the way key components of existing penal practice compromise the ability of
former prisoners to successfully reintegrate and combine to keep even those people who
manage to avoid reoffending on the social and economic margins of society); supra text
accompanying note 221.

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fellow human beings, as capable of being traumatized and brutalized as
anybody else.
VI. CONCLUSION
This Article has described two models of inmate culture in men’s
carceral facilities. The first, present to a greater or lesser extent in many
men’s prisons and jails across the country, is what I have called the
hypermasculinity model. In this model, men desperate to avoid being seen
as weak do their best to appear hard and implacable, and may even resort to
victimizing others in a preemptive effort to avoid being victimized
themselves. In such a climate, gang membership offers the promise of
security and belonging, and thus, where the hypermasculinity imperative
governs, gangs tend to increase in size and power. The second model of
inmate culture is that found in K6G, a small and unconventional unit in the
L.A. County Jail, which houses gay men and trans women. In K6G, there is
no hypermasculinity imperative, nor are there any gang politics. Unit
residents feel free to express emotions, to develop meaningful interpersonal
relationships, to relax, and to be themselves.
K6G is still jail, and there is much about life in the unit that is deeply
unpleasant and even dangerous. Still, K6G is widely seen as preferable to
the Jail’s GP as a place to do one’s time in L.A. County. In K6G, sexual
assault is relatively rare and collective violence (a.k.a. rioting) virtually
never occurs. The absence of gang politics and of any need to perform a
hypermasculine identity relieves residents of the pressure to adhere to the
rigid and irrational behavioral code that governs life in the Jail’s GP. And
perhaps more importantly, it frees them from the constant scrutiny of others
looking for signs of weakness and vulnerability. As a consequence, people
in K6G are able to let down their guard. For these and other reasons,
people in K6G far prefer placement in that unit to life in GP. And the daily
parade of men coming into the Jail who pretend to be gay in order to gain
access to K6G provides strong evidence that many men housed elsewhere
in the Jail feel the same way.
It is tempting to think that K6G’s distinctive environment, namely its
freedom from any hypermasculinity imperative or gang politics, is a
function of the sexual identity of its residents. And it is certainly true that
the particular character of life in K6G has been shaped by the preferences
and inclinations of the people in the unit. But in order for those people to
create the internal culture of K6G, they first had to feel able to shed the
hypermasculine posturing that for many unit residents was a way of life
during previous custodial terms in the Jail or state prison. The particular
behaviors and norms of life that have emerged in K6G, some of which may
well be traceable to the sexual identity of its residents, are thus best

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understood not as the cause of the freedom K6Gs enjoy from the gang
politics and hypermasculinity imperative that govern life elsewhere in the
Jail, but its effects.
The primary cause of the freedom K6G residents enjoy, I have argued,
is something more basic than the sexual identity of unit residents. By
contrast with men in the Jail’s GP, the people in K6G feel independently
safe from physical or sexual violence. They therefore feel confident that,
while in K6G, they need not take the self-protective yet ultimately
destructive steps to which men in GP feel compelled to resort in the absence
of any surety of external protection.
That the success of the K6G model does not primarily turn on the
sexual identity of its residents is something to celebrate. It offers the
possibility that this success may be generalized beyond its current narrow
context for the benefit of all people in custody, whatever their sexual
orientation or gender identity. Realistically, under current circumstances—
most notably the overcrowding, understaffing, and resource limitations that
plague many prisons and jails nationwide—it is possible that many
institutions may feel unable to widely implement the strategies K6G
suggests for how to keep people in custody safe. Nor will all correctional
officers exhibit the wisdom and humanity of K6G’s long-time supervising
officers. Still, the K6G experience offers several lessons for those
committed to making carceral conditions as safe and humane as possible
and suggests a number of strategies that prison administrators committed to
reproducing K6G’s success might pursue. This Article canvasses several of
these lessons and strategies in the hope that, despite the obstacles to their
implementation, they may nonetheless guide sorely needed penal reform.
Some may argue that it is the K6G model and not the hypermasculinity
model of GP that should be abandoned. After all, the purpose of
incarceration is punishment, and the relative ease of life in K6G may seem
“too good” for people in custody. This Article rejects this claim, and argues
that this notion has it exactly backwards. There are both moral and
constitutional limits on what the state may do to the people it has
incarcerated, and the fear, trauma, stress, and danger that men in the worst
GP units can live with on a daily basis strongly suggest that the conditions
imposed by that model far exceed those limits. The question that most
urgently bears our attention is thus not whether the people in K6G “have it
too good,” but what steps prison and jail officials around the country can
take to make their GP units more like K6G.

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