Lockdown: Gang Vs. Family Premieres Sun. September 9, 9p et/pt A Lockdown Struggle Inmates must choose what path they walk down. Watch a Preview >>

Kathryn Wallace - Associate Producer

The words “Maximum-security prison” and “Utah” aren’t exactly a natural fit. Before my visit to Utah State Prison, I wondered if the state – whose most famous exports included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Donny and Marie Osmond – had enough criminals to fill their sprawling 700-acre facility. It turns out yes – Utah has law-breakers of all stripes – more than 4,000 men and women – locked up at Utah State Prison. And a bigger surprise: almost half of these inmates have gang ties.

From my vantage point, Utah didn’t look urban to me. So where are gangs springing up without the urban feeding grounds for gangs and crime? Officers and inmates told me that the most violent gangs on the street and in the prison are actually imports from California or Mexico – dangerous crime syndicates like the “Surenos” and “Nortenos.” The bloodiest feuds are turf battles between the newcomers and the older gangs in the handful of larger cities like Salt Lake City and Ogden.

But then a good portion of the prison’s gang inmates are from the almost mythically small Utah desert or mountain towns with names like Kanab and Bountiful – cities with little to offer and lots of wide-open space to get in trouble. You get the feeling from talking to inmates from these small towns that they are getting their script on how to act straight from the movies. At first, I had a hard time taking these gangs seriously. But as small-timing as I thought some of the desert gangsters are, officers warn me that these inmates are actually some of the most volatile and dangerous behind bars; to them, prison is the “Big Dance” – an audition in front of real gangsters for a bigger part.

One Utah gangster defined “respect” behind bars as a willingness to do violence; and based on the inmates we came to know in the gang unit, there appears to be a lot of ladder-climbing gangsters in Utah.

The first sign of gang ambition: inmates’ bodies. Every prison has a healthy supply of tattoo artists who craft tattoo guns from ballpoint ink pens, pieces of cassette tapes or bedsprings. They burn baby oil and use the resin for ink – that’s what gives the milky-grey faded look of a prison tattoo. I can’t imagine this is a fun way to get a tattoo but inmates in the gang unit somehow find a way to get new tats with greater frequency than any other prison I’ve been in – and now the count is just under one dozen prisons.

And this is also the only prison I’ve known where officers perform routine full-body tattoo checks. (Officers say they gather gang intelligence from reading inmate bodies). If you are trying to keep your gang affiliation under wraps (and many inmates in the gang unit swear they aren’t affiliated) then maybe inking a great big “Sureno Killer” across your chest sends the wrong message? It is clear that these inmates aren’t trying to impress the officers with good behavior in this unit, but instead are trying to get the notice of gang leadership – their own or perhaps one of the larger groups like the Surenos or the Nortenos, that absorb many of the smaller local gangs once behind bars.

And the women at the prison are just as eager to please their gangs. On my first visit to USP, I found a group of women over on the female yard taking a break from their work in the prison kitchen. Female convicts can be pretty intimidating, especially in a group. In my time working for Lockdown, I’ve found female inmates are much more likely than men to hurl an insult or taunt our film crew. But these women were young and pretty with quick smiles – they all wanted to know the brand of my jeans, what colors the women were wearing on the street and if they could answer any questions for me.

I asked them if there was pressure for women to join gangs behind bars. Of this group of nine inmates, eight of them were gang affiliated -- from the streets. Gang activity is what got them in prison. Because they are women, they’d had to be extra violent to earn a place in the gang, they told me. Drive-by shootings, stabbings, getting beat into the gang: they all had violent stories to share, and they seemed to be very willing to go the extra mile for their gang.

It’s this willingness to be violent that makes Utah State Prison so dangerous – and sadly cost one officer his life. Just a week after our crew left the prison, an inmate from a homegrown Utah white supremacist gang was able to grab the gun from the holster a transportation officer – the only officers that carry weapons – and shoot him in the face, killing him. This officer, Stephen Anderson, had been with the department almost 30 years and was about to retire. Utah bears the black mark of being the first state in several years to have a corrections officer killed – and any of the inmates in the STG unit are capable of this violence. Yes – even in Utah.