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| Despite fight, jail won't split Bloods, Crips |
| By Star-Ledger |
| Published: 05/17/2004 |
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The Essex County (N.J.) jail will continue its new policy of integrating rival gang members despite the stabbing of an inmate and injuries to six others during a brawl last Sunday morning between the Bloods and the Crips, county officials said last week. The policy follows a model of the state Department of Corrections that pulls out "hard-core" gang members after they endanger or attempt to hurt other inmates, county Corrections Director Scott Faunce said. The model has spread from San Francisco to Memphis, where corrections officials decided that separating the gangs into their own cell blocks gave them too much power. In Essex County, officials made the same decision after five bloody incidents of gang infighting last year, including the beating death of 19-year-old Lamonte Gallemore in an initiation into the Crips. "We run the correctional facility and we can't be dictated by gang behavior," Faunce said. The county moved to integration when the 2,300-inmate facility opened on Doremus Avenue in Newark on March 27. Officials said integration would work since corrections officers could better monitor inmates in the $416 million, high-tech jail, in which there are more than 400 cameras and better supervision by corrections officers. But there is no definitive research on how effective any method is in controlling gangs in correctional facilities, according to the National Gang Crime Research Center in Chicago. From integration to segregation, there are advantages and disadvantages to all approaches, said George Knox, the center's director. Sunday's stabbing of 41-year-old Nathaniel Simmons, who is one of 10 Crips members charged with murder in Gallemore's death, "is not at all an uncommon response" to placing two rival gangs in the same cell block, Knox said. About 9 a.m. Sunday, about 15 inmates connected to the Crips and Bloods fought for six minutes before corrections officers locked down the 64-bed, multi-tiered cell block. Six makeshift weapons were recovered after the brawl, said Faunce, who would not elaborate on how the weapons were made. All 64 inmates in the cell block are now on 23-hour-a-day lockdown while internal affairs investigators try to find out what happened, he said. There have been no arrests. |
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