I Thought Solitary Confinement in Iran Was Bad -- Then I Went Inside America's Prisons

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Barneburg started here in 1997, and after 15 years on the job, he comes off as a man under duress. He makes a point of assuring me that he and his gang investigations team of 10 are not "knuckle-dragging thugs." He tells me he has to regularly take the stand in court to defend gang validations. To date, prisoners have sued him at least 30 times, though I could find no record of any having succeeded. "I don't want to go as far as saying gang investigators are persecuted, but…"

He is giving me a PowerPoint presentation detailing the structures and operations of the seven prison gangs targeted by the department of corrections. The Nazi Low Riders. The Aryan Brotherhood. The Texas Syndicate. The Black Guerilla Family. The Mexican Mafia. The Nuestra Familia. The Northern Structure. "It's about power," he says. "It's about control. It's about extortion. It's about money. It's about dope. It's about murder." Membership in a gang is not illegal in the United States—it's a right protected by the First Amendment—but Barneburg says segregating gang members is the only way to keep prisons from being overrun by racial strife, stabbings, and killings.

When I ask him how well that's worked, he stutters and says diffidently, "I think there's been less violence."

He's wrong. The rate of violent incidents in California prisons is nearly 20 percent higher than when Pelican Bay opened in 1989. As I walk with Lieutenant Acosta alongside the general population yard—a grassy, if bleak, fenced-in area where, unlike in the SHU, prisoners are allowed to interact—he unwittingly contradicts Barneburg's claim too, saying that violence in Pelican Bay has seen dramatic spikes over the years. In the 1990s, he says, "you didn't see the big fights, all the riots. It was like one, two guys fighting, maybe three guys." But since then, prison gang violence has escalated dramatically, with riots involving upwards of 200 people.

Prison violence fluctuates for myriad reasons, among them overcrowding, gang politics, and prison conditions. It's impossible to say for certain what role SHUs play; what is clear is that in states that have reduced solitary confinement—Colorado, Maine, and Mississippi—violence has not increased. (Illinois plans to close its notorious Tamms supermax soon.) Since Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman released 75 percent of inmates from solitary in the mid-2000s,  violence has dropped 50 percent.

CDCR officials claim California is different because the gang problem is worse here, though they don't have data to confirm this. Barneburg says without SHUs, there would be no way to prevent gang leaders from giving orders to the general population. What he doesn't say is that very few SHU inmates are considered gang leaders even by CDCR's standards. Only 22 percent of those serving indeterminate SHU terms are validated even as members of prison gangs. The rest, like Dietrich Pennington, are classified as associates, people who are accused of having had some connection with members—or other associates—of prison gangs.

Former San Quentin Warden Daniel Vasquez says association with prison gangs—for protection, among other things—is "pretty inescapable" in the hostile and racially segregated atmosphere inside. "You're going to come across them in some form or fashion," he says. "You are going to start experiencing the pressures of these gangs." Barneburg himself acknowledges it is hard for a Mexican from Southern California, for example, to keep away from the Mexican Mafia, since the gang sees itself as the authority over any Mexican prisoner from the lower part of the state. A full 2,201 people currently serving indeterminate SHU terms are validated as associates of that gang; there are only 98 validated members.