Hispanic gangs known as the Norteños and Sureños jailed in separate units.

Worried about escalating gang violence behind bars, the state Department of Corrections last year began housing members of two rival Hispanic gangs known as the Norteños and Sureños in separate units.Corrections officials say the approach has helped reduce violence."We decided we would do something different for two reasons: to make the place safer for staff members and inmates and to just normalize the prison environment so people can participate in jobs [training] and all the other things people do so people don't re-offend," said Dan Pacholke, deputy director of the prisons division for the Department of Corrections (DOC).While known gang members make up 18 percent of the state's prison population of 18,000, they account for 43 percent of major violent incidents, said Chad Lewis, DOC spokesman. Several law-enforcement agencies in the state have focused on preventing gang violence and, as a result, more gang members are entering the prison system.The state's new approach starts at the reception facility in Shelton, Mason County, where male inmates enter the prison system. Corrections officers try to determine whether a new inmate has a gang affiliation. Some inmates identify themselves as members of a gang, and officials also look for signs such as tattoos.The DOC said the gang with the most members in state prison is the Crips with 2,385, followed by the Sureños with 1,773 and white supremacists with 1,389. Norteños and Sureños are responsible for most fights, the DOC said.According to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment, released by the National Gang Intelligence Center and the National Drug Intelligence Center, as members of individual Hispanic street gangs enter prison, they put aside former rivalries with other Hispanic street gangs and unite under the name Sureños or Norteños.

The original Mexican Mafia members, most of whom were from Southern California, considered Mexicans from the rural, agricultural areas of Northern California weak and viewed them with contempt. To distinguish themselves from them, members of the Mexican Mafia began to refer to the Hispanic gang members who worked for them as Sureños (Southerners). Inmates from Northern California became known as Norteños (Northerners) and are affiliated with the Nuestra Familia gang.

"There had been a pretty broad understanding that there were fight-on-sight orders between these two groups," Pacholke said. "The level of activity on assaults and fights was running really high, and rather than wait for something catastrophic to happen" the DOC decided to make changes.

Starting in the reception facility, corrections officers make sure members of opposite gangs are not kept in the same holding areas. That change has led to a dramatic decrease in violence, Pacholke said. Getting into a fight while in reception can often trail inmates through their prison terms and lead to retaliatory violence, he said.

The changes extend to the rest of the state. The state recently built several new units, each holding fewer than 100 inmates, at the maximum-security facility in Walla Walla. The units have their own attached dining area and outdoor recreation yard."In a typical prison, where there's one dining hall where multiple [inmate] units might come in, you might have 1,000 inmates eating in one dining hall, which really lends itself to any one inmate bumping into a lot of people," Pacholke said.The DOC is hosting a media tour of the Walla Walla prison today to highlight the program.Officials say violence in the state prison system fell by 200 incidents from 2007 to 2008, even as the prison population went up.
"If there's one violent act, there's likely to be two, and if there's two there's likely to be four because of conflict generated or internal need to pay back," Pacholke said. "The sooner we can intervene and prevent it, it's a multiplier. We might not stop [just] one fight. We might stop two, might stop four."