Shot callers
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Shot callers were the prisoners each faction at FCI Loretto designated to speak and negotiate for it. John Kiriakou defines a shot caller as a trusted advocate from the group who could mediate disputes within the group.

His account presents the arrangement as the reason a low-security prison stayed relatively calm. Much of the sense of order at Loretto, he says, flowed from the larger pecking order and from the smaller pecking orders within each faction, and shot callers regularly sat with one another to mediate on their factions' behalf. The system, in his summary, worked out most problems before they led to violence.

Structure by faction

The number varied. The Black prisoners tended to have three shot callers: an overall boss, a representative of the Bloods and a representative of the Crips, with the two gangs generally keeping their distance from one another.

Among the Hispanic prisoners the structure was finer-grained, because identity was too. Kiriakou describes prisoners identifying by country of origin and by street gang as well as by the Pisces prison gang that all of them had to join, with each subgroup having its own shot caller.

The Italians were the exception. Unlike all the other factions, Kiriakou says, they did not have and did not need a shot caller: they were very tight as a group, always eating, working and socialising together, and because they were direct and honest in their dealings the Italians commanded and received respect from pretty much every other faction in the place.

Manipulating the system

Because shot callers decided who was acceptable at a table, they could be worked. Kiriakou describes taking forged court papers he had assembled in the prison law library to the two white shot callers, presenting them as a tip about a man at his own table. The pair argued briefly about whether the man was old enough to have committed the 1970s offence in the papers, concluded that he had, and banished him to the rat and pedophile table.

The full account is at the Bob Jones frame-up.

Context

Kiriakou is careful about the level of violence the system was containing. Loretto was a low-security prison, double fences topped with concertina wire, motion detectors and roving patrols, but no guard towers and no armed correctional officers, and he says the violence associated with prisons is much more prevalent in medium-security facilities and penitentiaries, where serious, injury-inducing fights are routine. At Loretto, most of what violence there was broke out over what to watch on television.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- The Italians at Loretto
- Pisces Prison Gang
- Bob Jones Frame Up
- The rat and pedophile table
