top ramen. it s a delicacy. you can see the individuals here have a lot of personal property. well, the first thing that i do, i look this is just my personal observations and how i do my cell searches. i would take an overall view of their cell. it tells me a little bit about the individual. is there certain colors that are prevalent in the cell. it will tell me if he s some type of disruptive group, if he s a blood or crypt, just because of the colors. if he s a hispanic, if he s a northern hispanic or a southern hispanic. if i see swastikas in there, my clues tell me white supremacist. so that tells me a little about him. if it s unruly, unkept, is he a drug addict? so i take all of those things into account before i look, depending on what i m investigating. this was just a routine cell search. this time nothing suspicious was found. but that s not always the case. as you see here, we have a wide variety of weapons that have been discovered here at folsom. they go all the way
bulldogs they re not as organized as your other gangs. they don t have the leadership in their organization. their rule of thumb is, that majority rules. if there s issues on the yard they have to try to resolve, the bulldogs would get together and take a boat, if you will. and the majority rules to go with that, there s no set leader of bulldog. if a bulldog has a chance to attack a southern hispanic, it s on sight. if they can get away from staff during an escort, a door accidentally pops, anything. if there s another bulldog they re going to go at it, attack each other. we met robert galvan, a bulldog locked up in the shu, for numerous attacks on other inmates. bulldogs are at war right now with everybody. we don t get along with the north, we don t get along with the south, the blacks, whites.
it was almost to the point where, if an inmate came in, he almost had to join a gang just for protection. it was at that time that we realized that we need to do something to try to curb gang activity within our prison system before it led to a violent nature. captain darren smith is the head of the stg unit which has documented more than 150 different gangs inside the prison. we have our hispanic gangs, which basically fall under southern cal or southern hispanic or northern cal, northern hispanic. we have crips, and we have bloods, and then we have our white supremacists. the most active gang members at usp are segregated into one section of the prison, away from the general population. it s pretty amazing. you got a bunch of different people associated with gangs for one reason or another. and you stick them all together, some people do get along, some people don t. it has its ups and downs. rival gangs bring problems from the streets in here. that brings problems for ev
inmates to stay in their cells, every southern hispanic in the facility went to the yard. i was in this exact spot and i noticed over here, some people started stabbing each other and i looked around and all over the yard, there was fighting and stabbings going on. the southern hispanics had launched a calculated and brutal attack on the black inmate population. i have seen over 300 stabbings myself, easily. been in lots of incidents and this was, by far, the worst one i have ever, ever seen. the riot persisted through tear gas, through pepper spray and through all orders to stop. for over 30 minutes, the inmates continued to attack each other in a frenzy of fists and homemade knives. it looked like the movie braveheart the fight scene in braveheart but it was the real deal. eventually correctional officers made the decision to use deadly force. they started firing shots, so everybody that wasn t involved
actually fire that weapon and in the security housing unit there are no warning shots because we ve got all this concrete. the last injury i ve seen in shu was an inmate, southern hispanic, speared by a northern hispanic in the chest and within centimeters from his heart. and he was rushed out by ambulance to the hospital. most dangerous time for correctional officer is after someone related to a gang has been executed. we get rumbles that the gang investigators pick up and say so-and-so is executed, they ve sworn to get a peace officer. the mexican mafia is reputed to have a kid out on staff any time possible because in our big riot back in 2000, we shot and killed a southern hispanic, because he was attempting to kill somebody else. so more so than normal there are just a lot of tensions in prison at the moment. this place right here, if you