Talk about a Catch-22 situation.
Mentors in the Friend of a Friend program at the Maryland Correctional Training Center take on the responsibility of talking to other inmates in an effort to defuse violent situations and encourage peaceful resolutions to conflicts. Inevitably, this will involve talking to an inmate who's a gang member.
But, Dominique Stevenson says, at least one FOF mentor has told her that talking to gang members has gotten him "tagged" by prison officials as a gang member himself. That inmate, Stevenson said, told her he is now restricted from talking to the young inmates he was trying to help.
Stevenson works for the American Friends Service Committee, which helped start the FOF group with inmates at the now-defunct Maryland House of Correction. The AFSC provides training in conflict resolution and leadership development for group mentors, who then advise and counsel other inmates so they can be mentors.
The AFSC also works with a Friend of a Friend program at the Baltimore Pre-Release Unit for Women and started, only yesterday, Women of Wisdom, a program for female inmates 50 years of age and over at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women. The AFSC would like to revive a drama program at the Hagerstown facility that is on hiatus, but, Stevenson said, inmates who've been "tagged" as gang members won't be allowed to participate.
"This is really a shame," Stevenson wrote in an e-mail, "because these programs are designed with the intent of addressing the issues that the gangs present."
I'm sure honchos at the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services have their reasons for the policy, and some of them are probably good ones. But I have a question: how accurate is this "tagging" business? Is it possible prison officials might erroneously tag an inmate as a gang member?
"A lot of the men feel it's more arbitrary than anything," Stevenson said. The mentor tagged as a gang member, for example, told Stevenson he feels he may have been targeted because he reads black nationalist literature on a regular basis.
Frankly, I didn't know there were any bona fide black nationalists left, but Stevenson told me a story about Marshall "Eddie" Conway that left me scratching my head. Stevenson said Conway told her that three years ago, when he was at the House of Correction, prison officials ordered him to be photographed for a gang catalog. When Conway asked why, he was told it was because he was a member of the Black Panther Party.
