Working at Indiana’s Putnamville Correctional Facility has great perks — subsidised housing, government benefits, and free reign to mash anyone you don’t like into a bloody pulp while your colleagues pin him down. At least, that is, if you’re a member of The Brotherhood, an alleged white-supremacist organization that has reportedly presided over a reign of terror at the prison for more than a decade.
A scathing new report from ISARP (INDIANA STUDENTS AGAINST RACISM IN PRISONS) alleges that senior administrators and the Indiana Department of Corrections knew about the Brotherhood’s culture of violence — and did little to halt it. Now, ISARP is calling on the DOC to compensate fired whistleblowers and eliminate the Brotherhood.
Moreover, Putnamville seems to be far from an isolated incident. With more rural areas becoming homes to high-security prisons in which the staff is mainly white and the inmates mostly men of color, says the report, white supremacy in prisons is widespread and growing.