VALDOSTA — Carol Jensen is a worried mother.

Her son has spent the last 27 years of his life in Georgia prisons and will never again see the outside world. He was sentenced to life plus five years for kidnapping, false imprisonment, aggravated sodomy and impersonating an officer, all in north Georgia, according to Georgia Department of Corrections records.

Six weeks ago he was transferred from Baldwin State Prison in Milledgeville to Valdosta State Prison, Jensen said. What scares mother and son about Valdosta, she said, are the gangs.

“He never had problems with gangs at the other Georgia prisons,” she said. “He says gangs have about taken over (Valdosta State Prison).”

The SunLight Project team — representing newspapers in Valdosta, Thomasville, Moultrie, Milledgeville, Ga., and Live Oak, Fla. — took a look at the problem of gang activities in local jails and nearby state prisons.

What is a gang?

Gangs are fueled by greed, egos, guns and drugs, said Bob Bolton, a Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office investigator and assistant to the Southwest Georgia Gang Task Force.

“Many gang members have been displaced from their homes, and they are looking for some kind of structure and discipline,” he said. “They are looking for a sense of belonging to something.”

How big is the problem?

Gangs are a fact of life for prisons, said Warden Billy Howell at Colquitt County Correctional Institution, which holds about 190 inmates, nearly all of whom are housed for the Georgia Department of Corrections.

“The bottom line is we have them in the prison system,” he said. “You’ve got them in every jail and prison population.”

Across Georgia, there are about 13,000 known gang members in a state prison population of 54,000, said Derek McKinney, the state corrections department’s security threat group coordinator.

At Valdosta State Prison — one of Georgia’s larger lockups — 469 inmates are known gang members, he said. That’s almost exactly half of the prison’s overall inmate population of 932.

At the Lowndes County Jail, there are usually about 100 gang members incarcerated at any one time, Bolton said.

Officials with the jail in Thomas County say there are no signs of gang activity within their walls. Sheriff Carlton Powell said there hasn’t been any gang activity in the county in a decade.

Likewise, gangs haven’t been an issue at the Suwannee County Jail in North Florida, officials report.

Gangs are an issue for Monroe resident Carol Jensen. Her inmate son has been threatened by the gangs in Valdosta State Prison, she said.

“I’m afraid for his life,” Jensen said.

Spotting gang members in jail

Officers can spot suspected gang members being booked into the Lowndes County Jail from their clothes, tattoos and past histories, Sheriff Ashley Paulk said. Most of the gang members in the jail are repeat offenders, Bolton said.

When gang members are arrested by Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office deputies, they begin an extensive process of giving their personal information to jail personnel before they are assigned a cell. They are asked questions about the suspect’s possible gang affiliations and perpetrators are rarely ashamed to admit their allegiance.

“Most of them do; they’re proud of it and we don’t have a problem with it,” said Major Lynnette LaRocque of the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office on whether gang members voluntarily reveal their colors. “It’s just one of the questions we ask. The other thing is if they’ve been here before, we already know (their affiliation) because we have their past records. It’s still a question we ask just in case they switch sides, which does happen on occasion.” 

The question of loose gang affiliations can be tricky. Though most gang inmates in the Lowndes County Jail identify as members of the Bloods, Crips or Gangster Disciples outfits, many are actually members of local “hybrid gangs” which shift their loyalties, Bolton said.

“Bloods today, Crips tomorrow,” he said.

Identifying gang members is Job No. 1 for state prison officials, McKinney said.

“The ones who fly in ‘under the radar’ are the troublemakers,” he said.

The major gangs operating in Georgia prisons, including Valdosta State Prison, are the Bloods, the Crips, the Gangster Disciples, the Ghostface Gangsters, the Goodfellows and various units of the Mexican Mafia, McKinney said.

Recruiting and education

Gang members actively search for new recruits in jail populations as a matter of protection, hoping to protect themselves from rivals, Bolton said.

“What are they looking for in a recruit? Someone who’s loyal, follows the rules, someone they can educate and mentor,” he said.

The same problem exists in state prisons. Young toughs can learn from more experienced felons and make connections with larger groups, McKinney said.

“In prison, gangs tend to become more of a crime syndicate,” he said.

Crimes behind bars

Just being incarcerated doesn’t mean that gang activities are put on hold.

In the last six months, there was a case of one gang member jumping another at the Lowndes County Jail, resulting in charges, Bolton said.

Gangs sometimes cooperate in jail for economic reasons, said Colquitt’s Warden Howell.

“A lot of times you see rival gangs on the street who will gang together (behind bars) to control contraband,” he said. “They’ll actually work together so they’ll all have contraband.”

One group, for example, may have the connections to get the contraband inside, while another may have the means to distribute it inside the facility. The gangs will control the trade, with higher-ranking members forcing newer members to take most of the risks involved, Howell said.

The initial investigation of inmates determines whether they go to a high-security prison or can safely be housed at a county facility, he said.

There are reasons a gang member prefers the latter, Howell said. Inmates get to go outside instead of being locked up 23 hours out of the day, a gang member may feel safer in such a setting and he may see it as an opportunity to engage in the distribution of phones, tobacco and drugs.

Gang members can get creative in smuggling goods into a jail or prison. An Albany gang, for example, had members’ girlfriends get jobs as state correctional officers as a way to bring contraband into the prisons, Howell said. Recently, an officer noticed a bulge under the diaper of a baby brought for a visit at a state facility, resulting in the seizure of illegal items.

Statewide, the major contraband that gangs try to control within prisons include tobacco, drugs and cell phones, McKinney said. Locked-up gang members also work white-collar scams such as identity theft and credit card fraud using the illicit phones, he said.

The cell phone problem exists at Valdosta State Prison. In November, someone tried to smuggle drugs and smartphones into the prison hidden inside cabbages, and there have been numerous reports through the years of people trying to throw phones over the prison’s walls.

In June 2016, Valdosta State Prison was one of several state detention facilities put on lockdown following a gang-related homicide at Calhoun State Prison and a gang brawl at Smith State Prison that sent 16 inmates to the hospital.

A report from the Southern Center for Human Rights details an incident where 12 inmates were hospitalized after a series of attacks at Valdosta State Prison during a period of three days in July 2012, including one “violent confrontation” between rival gangs that sent nine men to the hospital.

Also in 2012, Darryl Christmas, once one of Atlanta’s most powerful gang leaders, was killed by “multiple unidentified inmates” in the Valdosta facility, according to a story in The Valdosta Daily Times. 

Gang violence hit close to home for Carol Jensen. She claimed her inmate son was sexually assaulted by gang members in recent weeks at Valdosta State Prison.

“Two weeks after he got there, he was raped at knife point,” she said.

Divide and conquer

A policy of keeping gangs separated within jails is a common practice among law-enforcement agencies.

At the Lowndes County Jail, staff try keeping members of different gangs separated, Sheriff Paulk said.

“When you put rival gangs in the same cell block, you’re going to have problems,” he said.

Similarly, once Baldwin County deputies determine a suspect’s possible gang affiliation, jailers assign inmates to cell blocks far removed from rivals.

“Normally we don’t have any issues,” LaRocque said.

According to Capt. John Mills of the Suwannee County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office, as soon as groups or cliques start to form, jailers take action. They will begin to move the inmates to different pods to keep them away from each other.

“It’s a lot harder for (inmates) to get control of anything if they’re broken up than just to have them in the same pods,” Mills said. “There will be groups that get together and we’ll bust them up usually. But we’re not to that point where we have the gangs and all of that.”

Instead, he said, the biggest issue at the jail is typically two inmates who know each other and are not on the best of terms.

“Maybe it’s two of them that knew each other off the street and they didn’t get along on the street and they don’t get along in the jailhouse,” Mills said. “I’m not saying that Suwannee County doesn’t have gangs, but we don’t see it in our jailhouse … It may come one day.”

In addition to reassigning the inmates to another pod within the jail, Mills and the guards may also keep them separate during recreation time.

On a state level, Georgia prison officials try to spread members of various gangs evenly around the state’s prisons so no one group is dominant at local facilities, McKinney said.

‘They don’t care’

As the mother of an inmate, Carol Jensen has tried to raise the alarm about the threat of gangs behind bars. She said her efforts have largely been in vain.

“In the 27 years my son’s been in prison, I’ve written letters to the governor, to the Department of Corrections and to our congressmen,” she said.

The only result was a form letter from the governor’s office referring her to the corrections department, Jensen said.

“They don’t care,” she said. “They’ve done nothing to help. Nothing.”

That’s not true as far as the Lowndes County Jail is concerned, Paulk said. 

“They’re all human beings,” he said. “They all need to be cared for mentally, physically and medically as all human beings should.

“We’re not perfect, but we try to do our best.”

The SunLight Project team consists of reporters Terry Richards,  Thomas Lynn Jordan Barela, Will Woolever, Jamie Wachter and Alan Mauldin. The SunLight Project is overseen and edited by Jim Zachary and Dean Poling. To contact the SunLight team, email sunlightproject@gaflnews.com.

Terry Richards is senior reporter at The Valdosta Daily Times.

Terry Richards is senior reporter at The Valdosta Daily Times.