Court Opinion

ID: 9477253
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:18:26.156204+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:46.688180
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
No humane society allows its prisons to be run by organized thugs. The punishment authorized for crime does not include terror, extortion, beatings, rape, and murder. Yet the evidence in this case shows that officials at Pontiac tolerate gangs. Almost all prisoners belong to or “ride with” a gang. Riders get protection from rival gangs (and from their “benefactors”) in exchange for cigarettes, drugs, and services such as inflicting mayhem. The prisoners display gang insignia, the better to frighten enemies and alert friends. They paint their cells in gang colors and draw sheets across the cell doors. One witness testified that guards could not see inside half of the cells at Pontiac.
The prison officials told the court that although they tolerate gang “membership” they do not tolerate gang “activity”. Who do they think they are fooling? What elements of “membership” — as opposed to “activity” — take place behind those screens? What are prison gangs for, except to engage in forbidden “activity”? Surely the administrators of Pontiac do not believe that prison gangs meet every month to discuss The Critique of Pure Reason and debate how Stanley Tiger-man’s buildings differ from those of the Bauhaus school. Gangs affiliate for mutual support, but not the kind contemplated by the National Labor Relations Act.
The court’s opinion, which I join, strongly urges Pontiac to crack down on gangs. I hope those in charge of the prisons of Illinois will do all in their power to this end. Yet it is easier to be Polonius than to be Laertes. To cope with gangs, prisons must be able to inflict real punishments — sanctions going beyond mere presence in a maximum-security prison, for inmates suffer confinement and indignity whether they belong to gangs or not.
Thirty years ago a prisoner who wore forbidden insignia or sassed a guard could find himself on a chain gang. No more. He might have been thrown in the “hole” or put on bread and water for a month. No more. That would violate the current understanding of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. He might have had parole put off until doomsday, but the reduction of parole decisionmaking to a largely mechanical process — and the impending demise of parole under determinate sentencing schemes — make this less of a threat.
He might have been stripped of good time credits or put in punitive segregation. These options are open still, but they are less valuable for two reasons. First, they must be reserved for serious offenses; if prison officials treat all infractions alike, they will be unable to deter grave ones. If spitting at a guard and maiming him yield the same punishment, the prisoner might as well maim. The maximum sanction available as a practical matter for crimes (even murder) by long-term prisoners has been reduced to segregation and deprivation of privileges, see United States v. House, 808 F.2d 508 (7th Cir.1986); United States v. Fountain, 768 F.2d 790 (7th Cir.1985). The punishment realistically available for small offenses therefore is trivial. Second, prisoners have been given a bundle of procedural entitlements enforced by damages remedies. See Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 94 S.Ct. 2963, 41 L.Ed.2d 935 (1974); Culbert v. Young, 834 F.2d 624, 629-31, (7th Cir.1987); Davis v. Lane, *1279814 F.2d 397, 402 (7th Cir.1987); Caldwell v. Miller, 790 F.2d 589 (7th Cir.1986); Wells v. Franzen, 777 F.2d 1258 (7th Cir.1985). These entitlements make discipline costly for prison administrators. It is costly in time — the hours spent imposing discipline on a prisoner are hours unavailable for other pressing tasks — and in money, for a foul-up can lead to a substantial judgment. The government does not give the administrator a bonus if he does well, but it reduces his paltry wealth if he errs.1 No surprise if he responds by a combination of passivity and protective custody. The administrator even may have a constitutional obligation to arrange housing on the basis of membership in gangs. See Walsh v. Mellas, 837 F.2d 789 (7th Cir.1988), which sustains an award of $7,500 against a prison official who neglected to learn about the gang affiliation of a prisoner’s cellmate and take the steps necessary to keep members of one gang away from members of others (or from innocent bystanders). Prison officials must respond to such decisions by ensuring that members of the same gang share cells and activities. This both makes gangs legitimate in the eyes of inmates and complicates the task of undermining them. To take the very first step— preventing the adherents of an organization from fraternizing — is to risk monetary penalties.
The last thing a prison official wants to see is a gang leader flashing the warden’s (former) bankroll after an attempt at suppressing the organization. It is easier to let the wolves run the prison and pen the sheep than it is to break up' the wolf pack. The prison takes a “laid back” approach toward gangs despite the deadly consequences — deadly to prisoners, deadly even to guards. Lax discipline puts the guards in peril (who wants to face a knife-wielding prisoner?). Less than two weeks before the oral argument in this case, prisoners murdered one of the defendants, an assistant superintendent of Pontiac. It was a carefully planned assassination, apparently related to a struggle among gangs.2 Despite prison officials’ regard for their own lives, the forces that operate in the civil service system now govern prisons. Just as it is hard to fire rude clerks or discipline inept bureaucrats, and easy to let them be, so it is with prisoners.
Guards learn to let small things pass; prisoners learn to take advantage. When guards write disciplinary tickets for infractions less serious than battery, their superiors dismiss the charges or impose minuscule penalties. When they cannot control the prisoners or stop the vitriol from their lips, the guards’ esprit de corps slips away. John J. Dilulio, Jr., Prison Discipline and Prison Reform, 89 Public Interest 71 (1987). The prison becomes ungovernable through legitimate channels. Because power abhors a vacuum, another institution takes its place. Gangs organize in prisons of Illinois not because of sloth or racial discrimination, as the plaintiffs would have it, but because of these larger forces, which affect California, New York, and other urban states.3 The expert witnesses disagreed about whether things are worse in Illinois than in California, but no one *1280thinks that any large state has squelched prison gangs.
Everyone shares the humanitarian sentiments behind the rules giving prisoners entitlements to hearings and constraining the discretion of prison administrators. Power corrupts, and both inmates and society are the poorer if prison officials as well as gangs answer only to the law of the jungle. No one wants the opportunity to slake sadistic impulses to be part of the guards’ package of compensation, a substitute for the decent salaries we are unwilling to pay the keepers of society’s outcasts. All the same, you can't be a lion tamer without a whip and chair. Prisoners see as weakness what judges see as orderly procedure.
We must accept the fact that as procedural rules and awards of damages make prisoners safer from the guards, they expose prisoners to greater risk from their comrades. See Chapman v. Pickett, 801 F.2d 912, 922-23 (7th Cir.1986) (dissenting opinion), vacated, — U.S. —, 108 S.Ct. 54, 98 L.Ed.2d 19 (1987). The problem of prison governance is not far removed from the conundrum of political governance that Madison described in Federalist Paper No. 51: “[T]he great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” In prison as well as in free society, steps to curtail the powers of the government augment the dominion of the governed. The “governed” in prison are not virtuous republican yeomen. The crowd milling around the mess hall at Pontiac has little in common with the crowd in the lobby of the Lyric Opera of Chicago on opening night; it wasn’t good manners that got people invitations to a maximum-security prison. A legal system that both requires prison officials to suppress gangs and informs them that we shall transfer their wealth to the gangs if they act too firmly asks the impossible.

. Some states, including Illinois, indemnify their officials for damages arising from many constitutional torts, but indemnification is not assured.

. Chicago Tribune sec. 1, p. 1, col. 5 (Sept. 4, 1987). On other deaths at Pontiac, see, e.g., Walker v. Rowe, 791 F.2d 507 (7th Cir.1986).

. The district court held a seven-day trial and wrote a lengthy opinion. The court properly concludes that the judge’s finding of no discrimination is not clearly erroneous. This is an understatement. The complaint was risible. The plaintiffs are white; so are most of the administrators and guards. The idea that the administrators and guards tolerate gang activity in order to get the white prisoners' goats — that is, “because of’ rather than "in spite of' the plaintiffs’ race, Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 278-80, 99 S.Ct. 2282, 2295-96, 60 L.Ed.2d 870 (1979) — is silly and did not call for such an investment of time by the court and the administrators. Surely both had better things to do. Could anyone believe that if the races of the prisoners had been switched, with a white majority dominating a black minority, the staff of Pontiac would have treated the minority more favorably than it now treats plaintiffs? Unless that change would have improved the minority’s treatment, however, there is no “discrimination’’ within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.