State prisons prep for federally ordered integration

Tanya Schevitz, San Francisco Chronicle

- San Quentin State Prison inmate Lexy Good is white, hangs out with whites on the prison exercise yard and must be careful not to associate with blacks and Latinos. No cards, no basketball outside the color lines.

Those are the unwritten inmate rules of prison life. People stick to their own race. Good, who’s doing a short stretch for receiving stolen property, likes it that way.

“We segregate amongst ourselves because I’d rather hang out with white people, and blacks would rather hang out with people of their own race,” said Good, 33, of Walnut Creek. “Look at suburbia. Look at Oakland. Look at Beverly Hills. People in society self-segregate.”

Soon that may change in the prisons.

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