Anyone who has followed the devastating violence in California’s prisons knows that gang rivalries trigger a lot of the bloodshed. So it stood to reason that if the authorities could get members to drop their gang affiliations, the carnage would decrease.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way for the 90,000 men and women locked up by the state of California. It turns out that many of the roughly one-third of those who drop out of traditional prison gangs eventually bond with new organizations — dubbed as “dropout” gangs — that mimic much of the retribution and criminality of their forerunners.
That’s a key takeaway from the extraordinary coverage my colleague Matthew Ormseth produced on prison gangs in California. Ormseth has been writing about the gangs for six years and become a leading authority on the subject.
Outside the California Institute for Men in Chino.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
In an exclusive this week, he writes about one particularly flamboyant and defiant exile from the old-line gang hierarchy. Maurice Vasquez, 51, wears designer eyeglasses, boasts of his willingness to stand up to entrenched powers and inspires something like veneration from fellow inmates.
Vasquez is locked up in Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County for 65 years to life for conspiring to commit murder. He’s said to be the leader of the Riders, which authorities describe as one of the fastest-growing and most dangerous of the so-called “dropout” gangs. They say the group is responsible for stabbings and contraband smuggling behind bars and for robberies, shootings and drug sales in Northern California.
The existence of the Riders and other groups feels like a sad irony given that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved in 1999 to create “Sensitive Needs Yards” to protect individuals not associated with…