1964, San Quentin State Prison, California. The state has just ordered the desegregation of its prison system. For decades, California’s prisons had housed black and white inmates in separate facilities, separate yards, separate cells. Now, by order of the state, they are being integrated. Black inmates and white inmates are being placed in the same yards, the same cell blocks, the same dining halls for the first time.
And in the volatile, resource-scarce, hyper-masculine environment of a California maximum-security prison, where every interaction is freighted with the threat of violence, and every group of men that organizes itself does so for protection and for power, the response to integration is predictable. The men organize along racial lines.
A group of white inmates at San Quentin, many of them Irish bikers, who had been calling themselves the Diamond Tooth Gang, form a new organization. They call it the Aryan Brotherhood. Their ideology draws from Nazi symbolism, white supremacy, and the specific racial hatred that integration is forcing into direct contact with black inmates who have their own history of violence and organizing.
Their motto, borrowed from the structure of the organization’s membership requirements, is blood in, blood out. You enter the brotherhood by committing an act of violence, typically killing a black inmate or law enforcement officer. You leave only through your own death. Two years later, in 1966, a black inmate at San Quentin named George Jackson helps found a rival organization.
He calls it the Black Gorilla Family. Jackson is not just a street criminal looking for protection. He is a Marxist, a revolutionary, a man who has been reading Mao and Lenin and Frantz Fanon in his cell, and who has concluded that the prison is not just a place where black men are housed, but a tool of white supremacist political control that must be resisted through organized political and physical force.
The BGF’s founding ideology is explicitly revolutionary. Its stated aims include the overthrow of the United States government and the destruction of the prison system as an institution. Two gangs, two ideologies, one prison, founded two years apart by men who understood themselves to be at war not just with each other, but with the entire social order that had put them both in the same institution.
The war between them has been running for over 60 years. It has produced more deaths inside California’s prison system than any other single conflict. It has generated race riots that injured hundreds of inmates and dozens of guards. It has spread from San Quentin to Folsom to Pelican Bay to Corcoran and to every major California correctional facility in between.
It has influenced street violence in the communities surrounding those prisons and has produced some of the most significant federal RICO prosecutions in the history of American organized crime. It has never ended and this is the story of why. San Quentin State Prison in the early 1960s was, by any honest account, a pressure cooker that the California Department of Corrections had been building toward an explosion for years.
The prison was overcrowded, its facilities were deteriorating, its population was growing as California’s post-war boom brought new residents into the state, and as the criminal justice apparatus built to manage that growth increasingly processed black and Latino men at rates that exceeded their proportion of the general population.
The racial dynamics of the facility before desegregation were already violent with informal territorial arrangements and protection rackets organized along racial and ethnic lines within the segregated cell blocks. Desegregation did not create racial conflict in California’s prisons. It removed the administrative barriers that had been containing it.
The Aryan Brotherhood’s founders drew from a specific tradition of white working-class criminal culture in California that combined the motorcycle gang world, which was itself heavily racialized in the post-war period, with the white supremacist ideology that had been circulating through prisons since at least the 1950s.
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The original membership was largely Irish and working-class white men who had been incarcerated for robbery, assault, drug charges, and similar offenses and who found in the gang both the protection of a unified white block and the criminal organization that could run the economy of a prison unit. Their Nazi symbolism, the swastika tattoos, the Heil Hitler salutes, was less a coherent political program than a visual declaration of racial war, a signal to every other inmate that these men would not be crossed without catastrophic consequences.
The blood in, blood out membership requirement is the organizational feature that most distinguishes the Aryan Brotherhood from less structured white prison gangs. Requiring a new member to kill someone as the price of entry means that every member is, from the moment of joining, a murderer who has committed an act that makes any future cooperation with law enforcement essentially impossible.
It also means that the organization has continuous leverage over every member. Leaving would require either dying or becoming a target for execution as a traitor. The structure creates a closed system of mutual blackmail in which every member’s freedom depends on the silence and loyalty of every other member. This is organizational engineering of a specific and sophisticated kind, built not by business school graduates, but by men who had spent years inside a system where the physics of coercion are as familiar as the physics of
gravity. The Aryan Brotherhood is believed to make up less than 1/10 of 1% of the US prison population. It has been responsible for up to 18% of all murders in the federal prison system. That ratio, the disproportion between the size and its body count, is a number that law enforcement officials invoke most frequently when trying to convey what the Aryan Brotherhood actually is.
It is not a large organization. It is an extraordinarily lethal one. George Jackson arrived at San Quentin having already served time for robbery in California Youth Authority facilities. He was 19 years old when he entered the adult prison system in 1961. He had been sentenced to one year to life for a $70 gas station robbery, which in California, under the indeterminate sentencing system then in effect, meant that the parole board could and did keep him incarcerated indefinitely based on his conduct in prison rather
than any specific crime. Jackson spent the next 11 years in California prisons, 10 of them in solitary confinement. What happened to George Jackson’s mind in those 10 years of solitary confinement is one of the most significant and most disturbing stories in the history of American incarceration. He read voraciously.
He corresponded with scholars, lawyers, and activists on the outside. He developed a detailed and coherent political analysis of the American prison system as an extension of racial capitalism, an argument that the mass incarceration of black men was not an accidental byproduct of the criminal justice system, but a deliberate mechanism for maintaining a racial hierarchy that had used slavery and then Jim Crow and then the prison as successive instruments of black oppression.
His letters from that period were collected and published in 1970 as Soledad Brother, a book that became one of the defining texts of the Black Power movement and that was read by activists, academics, and revolutionaries across the United States and internationally. Jackson’s analysis was not and is not without basis.
The documented racial disparities in American criminal justice, from arrest rates to conviction rates to sentencing lengths to parole decisions, demonstrate patterns consistent with the systemic racial bias that Jackson described as the fundamental operating principle of the carceral state. Whether one accepts his revolutionary conclusions or not, the underlying empirical observations about what the prison system does to black men and black communities have been consistently supported by decades of subsequent research. The Black Guerrilla
Family that Jackson helped found in 1966 reflected this dual nature, a political revolutionary organization with a criminal gang’s need for disciplined violence and territorial control. The BGF’s constitution set out three objectives. The first was to eradicate racism in the United States. The second was to help maintain dignity in prison.
The third was to overthrow the United States government. Those three goals do not obviously coexist in a single organization. They did not coexist easily in the BGF either. What actually unified the organization as it grew through the late 1960s and into the 1970s was the same thing that unified every other prison gang.
The need for physical protection in a violent institutional environment and the economic opportunities that an organized criminal enterprise could exploit within that environment. Jackson was killed on August 21st, 1971 at San Quentin. The California Department of Corrections reported that he was shot by guards while attempting an escape using a pistol that had allegedly been smuggled into the facility inside a recording device.
Jackson’s supporters disputed that account arguing that the escape story was fabricated to justify an execution of a man who had become too politically dangerous to allow to continue living. The circumstances of his death have never been definitively established to the satisfaction of his family, his attorneys, or the scholars who have examined the evidence.
What is established is that the man who founded the Black Gorilla Family, whose political writings had reached an international audience, and who had become the most recognized black prisoner in America, died at San Quentin at the age of 29 with a bullet in him. His death did not end the BGF. It turned him into a martyr.
And the organization that inherited his legacy carried both the revolutionary ideology he had articulated and the criminal enterprise structure he had built inside the prison walls. The violence between the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Gorilla Family through the 1970s and 1980s established the pattern that the rivalry has followed ever since.
A specific killing on one side produces a retaliation from the other, which produces a further retaliation in a cycle that accelerates during periods of institutional stress and subsides to a background level of hostility during periods of relative stability without ever fully stopping. The institutional stress that most consistently accelerated the violence was competition over the drug economy inside the prisons.
By the mid-1970s, heroin and later cocaine had become major commodities inside California’s correctional system. The gangs that controlled access to drugs inside a prison facility controlled one of the most valuable economic resources available in an environment where conventional money was not freely circulating and where the informal economy was organized around barter, debt, and violence.
The Aryan Brotherhood’s primary drug inside prison was methamphetamine, which it distributed through a network that used the same organizational structure it had built for violence. The BGF’s drug operations were less centralized but no less significant. Competition over drug markets inside specific facilities was a direct trigger for much of the most intense violence between the two organizations.
The 1972 alliance that the Aryan Brotherhood formed with the Mexican Mafia against Nuestra Familia is one of the most revealing organizational decisions in the AB’s history and it reveals something important about the relationship between racial ideology and criminal pragmatism in the prison gang world. The Aryan Brotherhood was a white supremacist organization that drew its founding ideology from Nazi racial theory.
And yet, it allied itself with a Latino gang against a different Latino gang when the tactical situation made that alliance advantageous. The ideology was real, the racism was real, the hatred directed at black inmates and at the BGF specifically was also real, but when criminal interests required setting that ideology aside in one direction while maintaining it in another, the AB showed no difficulty making that calculation.
That flexibility, which the Southern Poverty Law Center noted when it observed that the Aryan Brotherhood’s white supremacist beliefs had not precluded it from engaging in criminal business with members of other races, is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It reflects the truth that the Aryan Brotherhood was always, as the Britannica entry on the gang notes, more about the consolidation of power and acquisition of profit than about a coherent racial ideology.
The racial hatred was organizational infrastructure, a way of recruiting and retaining members through the specific appeal of white solidarity in a multi-racial environment, and a way of maintaining the violence against specific enemy groups that kept the organization feared and powerful. The criminal enterprise was the actual purpose.
The federal RICO prosecution of the Aryan Brotherhood that produced its most significant convictions in 2006 is the most fully documented legal account of how the organization operated and what it was capable of. A 140-page federal indictment outlined alleged gang actions resulting in 32 murders or attempted murders in and out of prison. The four most senior Aryan Brotherhood leaders were charged.
Barry Mills, known as the Baron, Tyler Bingham, known as the Hulk, Edgar Hevle, and Christopher Gibson. All four were already serving life sentences when they were indicted on federal racketeering charges. The government’s theory was that the AB had committed murders and other violent crimes in service of its criminal enterprise, and that under RICO, those crimes could be charged against the leadership regardless of whether the leaders had physically committed them as long as they had ordered or authorized them.
Barry Mills was the most prominent figure in the prosecution. He had entered the California state prison system after an armed robbery in 1969 and had never been free since. He rose through the Aryan Brotherhood’s hierarchy over decades of incarceration, eventually becoming the organization’s co-leader alongside Tyler Bingham.
He was convicted in 1979 of nearly beheading another inmate over a gambling debt at USP Atlanta. He ordered murders from solitary confinement at the Federal Supermax ADX Florence in Colorado, communicating through handwritten notes that were passed through intermediaries in a system that law enforcement took years to fully document.
The 2006 federal prosecution produced convictions. Mills was sentenced to additional time beyond the life sentence he was already serving. Bingham received the same. Two of the four defendants were found guilty of murder charges that technically carried the death penalty as a possible sentence, though the jury ultimately did not impose death.
The government had achieved convictions of the Aryan Brotherhood’s top leadership on racketeering charges that documented the organization’s murders, drug trafficking, and extortion as elements of a single criminal enterprise. The BGF faced its own major federal prosecution, one of the largest in the history of California organized crime, when in 2012 federal authorities in Maryland unsealed an indictment of 34 BGF members and associates in connection with a corruption scheme inside the Baltimore City
Detention Center. The scheme documented in that indictment was extraordinary in its scope. BGF members had essentially taken over the detention center with corrections officers acting as smugglers and facilitators for the gang’s operations inside the facility. Gang members impregnating multiple female guards and cell phones, drugs, and other contraband flowing through a network of corrupted staff with a regularity that made the official operations of the detention center secondary to the BGF’s unofficial ones.
The indictment described a criminal enterprise that had subverted an entire correctional institution rather than simply operating within one. The BGF leader at the center of the Baltimore indictment was Tavon White, a man who had smuggled cell phones into the facility and who had used those phones to run the BGF’s operations while incarcerated.
Four female corrections officers became pregnant with his children. They smuggled contraband, relayed orders, and facilitated his control of the facility in ways that the Department of Corrections official oversight failed to detect for years. Pelican Bay State Prison in the Northern California town of Crescent City, opened in 1989 as California’s first Supermax facility, is the institution that has most defined the modern phase of the AB-BGF conflict in the broader landscape of California prison gang politics.
Pelican Bay houses California’s most dangerous gang leaders in a security housing unit where inmates are confined to their cells for 22 and a half hours a day with no contact business, no congregate activities, and no access to the general prison population. The facility was designed specifically to neutralize the organizational capacity of prison gang leaders by eliminating the human contact through which they had previously issued orders and maintained control.
It worked imperfectly. The Aryan Brotherhood’s leadership adapted. Orders were passed through attorneys’ visits, through mail, through the legal correspondence that could not be fully monitored without triggering constitutional challenges, and through intermediaries in other facilities who maintained contact with the supermax leadership.
The BGF adapted in the same ways. The isolation that Pelican Bay imposed slowed organizational communication, but did not stop it. What it did stop was the direct physical violence between gang leaders since the security housing unit’s design prevented any contact between inmates that could produce a stabbing or an assault.
The 2011 and 2013 hunger strikes at Pelican Bay, organized by inmates across racial lines in opposition to the conditions of solitary confinement, produced one of the most remarkable moments in the history of the AB BGF conflict. Members of both organizations, along with Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia members, agreed to a formal cessation of racial hostilities for the duration of the protest.
The agreement to end hostilities, signed by representatives of all four major California prison gangs in 2012, committed the signatories to stop all racial group attacks. It was described by prison officials and advocacy organizations as historically unprecedented. The agreement to end hostilities has had partial and uneven effects.
It has been credited with reducing the race riot incidents that were once a regular feature of California prison life. It has not ended the violence between the gangs, which has continued in facilities where the agreement’s authority does not reach, or where local leadership has not enforced it.
It has not ended the hostility between the organizations, which remains structural and ideological, as well as criminal. What it has done is demonstrate that even in the most entrenched and most ideologically committed gang conflict in American prison history. The men involved are capable of recognizing when continued warfare serves none of their interests.
The reach of the AB BGF conflict beyond the prison walls is a dimension of the rivalry that most directly affects the communities surrounding California’s correctional facilities and the neighborhoods from which both organizations recruit. Members of both gangs are released from prison regularly. They return to the same communities they came from carrying the affiliations, the debts, and the conflicts that their incarceration produced.
AB members on the outside operate criminal enterprises that include drug trafficking, particularly methamphetamine distribution, and extortion. BGF members on the outside maintain connections to the prison leadership, facilitate the smuggling of contraband into facilities, and run drug distribution networks in the communities where they settle after release.
The violence that each organization directs against the other does not stop at the prison gates. BGF members on the street have been killed by AB connected violence. AB members have been targeted by BGF affiliated individuals operating on the outside. The specific cases are documented in law enforcement records and in the federal indictments that have periodically swept up both organizations’ street operations.
The communities most affected by that street level violence are the same communities that supply both organizations with members. The predominantly white working class communities in rural California that produce Aryan Brotherhood recruits and the predominantly black urban communities in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and elsewhere that produce Black Guerrilla Family members.
Neither of those communities is well served by the violence that the prison gang rivalry brings back to their streets. Both of those communities have been shaped by the same forces that produced the rivalry in the first place. Economic marginalization, inadequate institutions, and a criminal justice system that processes their young men through a correctional apparatus that is more likely to connect them to prison gang structures than to rehabilitate them.
The deepest truth about the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerrilla Family is the same truth that runs through every other gang conflict documented in this series, stated here in its most extreme and most explicit form. Both organizations were founded in a single California prison in a two-year span. Both were founded as responses to the specific conditions of incarceration and desegregation that the California correctional system had created.
Both drew their initial membership from men who had arrived at San Quentin with their own histories of violence and disadvantage, men whose communities had failed to provide them with the educational, economic, and institutional supports that might have kept them out of prison in the first place. And both organizations, in the six decades since their founding, have perpetuated and amplified the violence and the racial hatred that their founding conditions generated, producing a conflict that has now outlasted the careers of every
government official who was running California’s prisons in 1964, the presidencies of every politician who has declared a war on crime since that year, and the lives of many of the men who joined the organizations in their earliest years. The racial ideology that the Aryan Brotherhood carries is genuine, and it is evil.
White supremacy is not a neutral position. The specific terror it visits on black inmates, the murders carried out as initiation requirements, the race riots organized to maximize casualties, the systematic violence against black men that the AB has made its organizational signature for 60 years is a form of racial terror that deserves to be named as exactly what it is.
The fact that the organization is also primarily a criminal enterprise organized around profit does not diminish the evil of its racial ideology. It simply explains why that ideology has proven so durable. It serves the organizational interests of a group that needs to recruit white men in a prison environment where racial solidarity is the most reliable glue available.
The Black Gorilla Family’s founding ideology, rooted in George Jackson’s revolutionary Marxism and his analysis of the prison as an instrument of racial capitalism, carries its own complications. The political analysis Jackson developed in solitary confinement at San Quentin has been partially vindicated by subsequent history in the sense that the documented racial disparities of American mass incarceration are consistent with the structural racism he described.
The organization he helped found, however, evolved into a criminal enterprise that has caused significant harm to the black communities it claimed to be liberating through drug trafficking, through the violence of the prison gang world, and through the corruption of institutions like the Baltimore City Detention Center that black communities themselves depend on.
The war between these two organizations is the concentrated form of the racial conflict that American society has failed to resolve across its entire history. It is happening in the worst possible environment for resolution, a closed institution built on coercion where every interaction is potentially violent, where the administrative structure has historically been indifferent or actively hostile to the welfare of black inmates, and where the informal economy generates constant competition for
resources that both organizations need to maintain their power. It is a war that the founding of the prison system, the failure of desegregation, and the construction of a mass incarceration apparatus that processes black men at catastrophically disproportionate rates have all contributed to creating.
Barry Mills died in federal custody in 2018, still serving multiple life sentences. Tyler Bingham remains incarcerated. The current leadership of both organizations sits in Pelican Bay or in federal supermax facilities directing operations through whatever communication channels they can maintain.
New members are being recruited in every California correctional facility that houses enough young white men or young black men to sustain both organizations’ membership rolls. The agreement to end hostilities is still nominally in effect. The war is still running underneath it, and the prisons that reduced both organizations are still producing the conditions that will sustain the conflict for the next generation of men who are processed through them.
George Jackson died at San Quentin with a bullet in him in 1971. The Diamond Tooth Gang became the Aryan Brotherhood in 1964. 60 years of war later, the prison is still the prison. The conditions are still the conditions. And the next generation of men who will carry both organizations into the future are already inside the walls making the same calculations that the founders made in the same institution in a country that has never seriously asked itself what it is building when it puts this many people in a place like
this and leaves them there. That is the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerrilla Family. That is 60 years of the bloodiest prison rivalry in American history. And that is the question that six decades of that rivalry has never forced anyone in a position of power to answer. What kind of institution produces this? And what does it say about us that we keep building it? The daily mechanics of how the AB BGF conflict operates inside a California prison is something that the formal record of court documents and policy
reports tends to flatten into abstraction. It is worth describing in concrete terms because the reality of what the rivalry means for the tens of thousands of people who are incarcerated in California system at any given time is not abstract at all. In a California state prison where both organizations are present, a correctional officer begins each shift knowing that the racial and organizational dynamics in the yard he is supervising represent a loaded weapon.
The intelligence unit for the facility maintains files on every known gang members affiliation, status, and known conflicts. Movement through the yard is structured to minimize contact between hostile gang members. Housing assignments are made with gang affiliation in mind. And yet, despite all of that management, the violence happens.
A member of one organization sees an opportunity to hit a member of the other. A debt from another facility follows a transfer inmate to his new housing unit. A word gets back through the prison communication network that someone has been talking to investigators, and the response comes through the most direct available channel.
The weapons used in that violence are among the most improvised and most lethal in the American criminal landscape. Prison officials confiscate conventional weapons constantly, so inmates manufacture their own. Shanks fashioned from sharpened metal, from melted plastic, from glass, from whatever material can be converted into a blade.
Razor blades embedded in the end of a toothbrush to create a slashing weapon that is small enough to conceal in a clenched fist. Locks and socks used as a flail. These weapons do not produce clean wounds. They produce the kind of injuries that the prison medical system, itself inadequate in most California facilities, cannot always manage.
In the 10-year period ending in 1985, Aryan Brotherhood members were linked to 40 homicides in California prisons alone. That is four per year from a single organization in a single state’s prison system. That number does not include injuries from stabbings and assaults that did not result in death, which ran significantly higher.
It does not include homicides attributed to the Black Guerrilla Family in retaliation for AB violence. It does not include the indirect casualties, inmates who were not gang members, but were caught in riots or targeted because of their racial categorization rather than any personal offense. The race riot is the most spectacular form the conflict takes, and it is the one that occasionally breaks through into public awareness when the scale is large enough to attract media attention.
A race riot in a California prison is not a spontaneous eruption. It is an organized military action planned by gang leadership and executed by members on a signal. Both sides mobilize their people simultaneously or in rapid sequence. The violence lasts until guards deploy gas or physical force sufficient to stop it.
The casualties on both sides are taken to the infirmary or, in serious cases, to outside hospitals. The lockdown that follows confines the entire facility or the relevant unit to their cells for days or weeks, disrupting programs, visitation, and the daily routines that maintain whatever stability exists in the institution.
Corcoran State Prison in the San Joaquin Valley became notorious in the 1980s and 1990s, not just for the AB BGF conflict, but for the specific way that guards were alleged to have managed it. A federal investigation eventually documented allegations that Corcoran guards had staged the gladiator fights in the special housing unit, forcing rival gang members to fight each other for the entertainment of staff.
Multiple inmates were shot and killed by guards during these alleged staged confrontations. The investigation, which produced a 1998 federal grand jury presentment, found evidence that the culture within the facility had normalized a level of staff facilitated violence that went well beyond any legitimate penological purpose.
Several guards were charged. The prosecutions were largely unsuccessful. The culture at Corcoran was described by the investigators as one in which the AB BGF conflict had been not just tolerated, but in some respects exploited by the people whose job was to prevent it. That detail, the possibility that prison staff were actively using the gang conflict as a management tool or a form of entertainment, is the darkest dimension of the AB BGF story and the one most resistant to any simple framing. If the allegations from
Corcoran were accurate, then the state of California was not simply failing to stop the bloodiest prison rivalry in American history. It was, in at least some documented instances, facilitating it. The literature on prison reform has been documenting the connection between the conditions of California’s prisons and the persistence of its gang conflicts for decades.
Robert Martinson’s 1974 paper arguing that correctional rehabilitation programs had no measurable effect on recidivism, which became popularly known through the phrase “nothing works”, provided political cover for decades of disinvestment in prison programming in California and nationally. If nothing works, there’s no justification for spending money on education, vocational training, mental health services, or the other programs that might interrupt the pipeline between poverty and incarceration and gang membership.
The “nothing works” conclusion has since been substantially revised by subsequent research which has identified specific programs with measurable positive effects on recidivism, but the political inertia it created persisted long after the research had moved on. California’s prison system in the period when the AB BGF conflict was at its most lethal, the 1980s and 1990s, was one of the most underfunded and most overcrowded in the country.
The three strikes law passed by California voters in 1994, which mandated a minimum 25-year sentence for a third felony conviction regardless of severity, accelerated the population growth in a system that was already beyond capacity. By 2006, the California prison system was operating at nearly 200% of its design capacity.
The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Brown v. Plata in 2011 that California’s prison overcrowding had produced conditions constituting cruel and unusual punishment and ordered the state to reduce its prison population. That ruling, a federal court ordering a state to release tens of thousands of inmates because its prisons were too crowded and too dangerous to meet constitutional standards, is the most extreme possible official acknowledgement that something fundamental had gone wrong.
Barry Mills ran the Aryan Brotherhood from supermax confinement for decades. He died in 2018 having spent his entire adult life in federal custody. Tyler Bingham remains in federal custody. The BGF leadership that the Baltimore indictment documented running an entire detention center through cell phones and corrupted guards demonstrated that physical confinement does not disable organizational capacity when the organization is sophisticated enough to adapt.
Both gangs have shown across 60 years of prosecution and confinement and anti-gang policy that they are more durable than any individual effort to destroy them. They are more durable because the conditions that produced them are more durable. San Quentin still stands. California still incarcerates black men at rates that vastly exceed their proportion of the population.
The racial inequality that George Jackson analyzed from a solitary confinement cell in the 1960s is still documented in the criminal justice data of the 2020s. The white working class economic desperation that drove the founding members of the Diamond Tooth gang into prison in the first place is still producing the recruits that the Aryan Brotherhood draws from.
The war is 60 years old, the conditions it started are older than the war, and the prisons that house it are still being built. That is the final accounting of the bloodiest prison rivalry in American history. Not the body count, though the body count is real. The final accounting is this. We built the institution that produced this war.
We have maintained that institution for 60 years while the war ran inside it, and we have never seriously answered the question of what we are willing to change in order to stop it. The answer so far has been not enough.
