by Ben Horowitz
In prison, you have these very charismatic guys, great orators. They move their team into doing all kinds of shit using their charisma—but beneath it is no substance.
Our leaders were charismatic but duplicitous. For example, one of our guys was named T Man. He had money coming in from outside and people in our organization knew that, and knew that he was insecure about whether he was black or mixed race, so they were manipulating him and stealing his money. Uncertainty about which clique you were in made you vulnerable. I was like, “We’re not doing that anymore, because it’s against our code.” The leaders weren’t cool with that because they were profiting off this guy. So I said, “The people of this organization are going to ride with you or ride with me.” The young guys wanted to ride with me, because they wanted to do the right thing. I was able to challenge the leadership with their own moral code.
In the Melanics, you couldn’t run a straight coup and take over violently because part of our code was that you could never physically violate another member. So my takeover had to be psychological. I’d use the Socratic method at our meetings and ask the group questions such as “If a leader does not follow his own instructions, is he a leader?” Our members began to realize we needed to change, and they followed my idea that we’re going to do what the fuck we say we’re gonna do. As I rose to the top, the old leaders gradually became executive advisors. They still had privileges, but no direct control.
White began to understand that even observing the Melanics’ code to the letter wasn’t going to fully satisfy him.
I first realized that I could be a different person when I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I saw that it was possible to change. But I also had to deal with the environment I was in. I had Malcolm X on one shoulder saying “You can be better” and the prison guy on the other shoulder saying “Fuck this motherfucker, he should have paid the three dollars when it was due.” So I was a sophisticated thug. The clash of the two voices led me to develop a more diplomatic approach to conflict. I still made guys aware of the threat of violence, but also suggested we could resolve issues without stripping away your manhood.
It was at this point that I began to realize that everything that I came from on the streets was filled with bad energy and bad intentions, so I changed my name to James X. Everyone began calling me Jay X. But then, as I did research on Africa, I took the name Shaka Senghor, from the great warrior Shaka Zulu and from Léopold Senghor, the Senegalese poet and cultural theorist who served as the first president of Senegal.
When you have power, you have responsibility. It took me a long while to realize that the plays we were making affected not only me and my squad, but the whole prison environment. And that when a member left, he would carry that culture with him. First I had to learn there was a different way, then I had to master those skills, then I had to decide that was truly how I wanted to live my life. It was a three-step process, and it took me nine years to get through it. I was lucky it only took that long—due to my status, the other men didn’t try to test me, so I didn’t regress.
The Melanics’ code was complex, but it essentially made everyone responsible for his fellow members. If an outsider struck a member, the entire organization would rise against him, which meant he would not be safe in any prison. You had to come to the aid of any member in need who was a worthy brother; his beef became your beef. If a member was deemed unworthy—often because he hadn’t come to another member’s aid—he lost his protection.
Senghor focused on the following principles: Never take advantage of members. Never physically accost them. And, in general, treat them the way you’d want to be treated.
Then he began to embed these principles in the squad:
You’re dealing with low levels of literacy, so people memorized the code without understanding it. Because they didn’t really understand it, they weren’t living it.
To build the culture, we would hold study groups once or twice a week. As educational director, I’d pass out literature such as Visions for Black Men by Na’im Akbar, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, or Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. I wrote study guides that broke these books into basic components, and I made it mandatory for guys to study. Two years after joining up, I became the Melanics’ cultural leader, which meant the leader. The younger guys really bonded to me, because everybody wants something to believe in.
If you’re not honoring the culture yourself, nobody fucking believes you. The principles were my natural principles. I believed in them. I was also willing to defend them. This shifted the culture to a better place.
Senghor explained how the idea of making the cultural principles universal worked:
Let’s say this is our crew: me, you, and Cartheu. Cartheu decides to rob a motherfucker, and word comes back to us that that guy and his friends now want to fuck Cartheu up. So we have a conflict. Because in our code, we don’t allow anyone to do anything to our members. But Cartheu has violated our tenet that you never compromise the organization by doing dumb shit. So we have a responsibility to protect him, we have a responsibility to protect the organization, and then we have an external responsibility to deal with the person who was robbed.
Poor leadership would say, “Let’s get a couple of soldiers and go fuck these guys up,” and then we’ll deal with our guy internally. That was the culture when I came in. But that way of operating gives the other organization moral high ground—they can say we let our members do random bullshit. So I shifted our way so there was a consequence for Cartheu, not for the guy he robbed. Cartheu should apologize to him and pay restitution.
If you handle external matters this way, people in your organization will look at that as a model. If you don’t, then the way you treat outsiders will leak back into your own organization.
The Turning Point: Unintended Consequences
Senghor forced the Melanics to live up to their code, but that code was still largely the one he had inherited until a conflict with the Nation of Islam caused him to reconsider everything.
There were two schools of thought on how to organize your squad in the Michigan prison system. One system prevailed at Jackson State Prison, run by the older guys, and the other at Michigan Reformatory, run by us. At Jackson, the guys had access to hard drugs, which they used to incentivize addicts to take out their enemies. Their power derived from having so many hit men on payroll.
Our members weren’t into heroin, so a business model based on addiction wasn’t an option, but I don’t think I would have used it in any case. That model, built on a foundation of payments and manipulation, led to a weak organization. Your team wasn’t battle-ready, because it lacked what you need when things get difficult: loyalty and commitment.
I based our system in the Melanics on belonging and loyalty. It started with selection. I would be very clear that there were two requirements. You either had to be willing to serve a life sentence for whatever we asked you to do, or be willing to die.
Once in, in order to stay in, you had to carry yourself in a certain way. You couldn’t use the N-word, or profanity. If you smoked, you couldn’t smoke while wearing your membership badge. You couldn’t get caught by the guards smoking weed or drinking prison wine, because this showed a lack of intelligence and self-control. You couldn’t do anything that would be perceived as weak or disrespectful. Your shoes had to be clean and your prison blues had to be neat and pressed. In addition, you had to work out every day and dine with us in the chow hall. I emphasized discipline and bonding.
Our gang was less than half the size of rival squads, but when the fighting started 100 percent of our guys were ready to go, while 80 percent of their guys would abandon their group. So nobody wanted to go against us.
Our principles were put to a severe test when one of my guys told me a guy named Stoney was coming to our prison. A domestic-violence guy, a bad apple who beat up women, Stoney had beaten and killed the daughter of one of my members. As a matter of loya
lty, we had no choice but to get him. If we didn’t protect one of our own and avenge his daughter’s death, then our whole way of doing things would be based on an empty promise.
As soon as Stoney entered the prison, he began attending the services of the Nation of Islam. New prisoners often did this to get protection. The Nation was powerful, not just in our prison, but in prisons nationwide. It provided the highest form of safety.
I called a meeting with Money Man, the head of the Nation of Islam. I explained that I had no choice but to take Stoney out. However, out of respect, I wanted to give him the chance to turn the guy over to me. Money Man took my request seriously, but replied, “Okay, you can have him—but one of your members killed one of my members’ cousins. I need that guy in exchange.”
Turning over one of my guys in a hostage exchange would violate our loyalty principle. So I came back with, “My guy is a member. The guy I want is your guest, not your member. That’s not an exchange I’m willing to make.”
We continued negotiating for three weeks with no progress. I had to make a choice: take Stoney out and risk war with the Nation of Islam or leave him alone and risk undermining my entire culture.
I chose the former. I talked to two of my most loyal members who were both doing life sentences and never getting out. I told them what needed to be done, and they did it without hesitation. Then we waited for the repercussions.
The repercussions never came. Our culture was so strong that not even the Nation of Islam wanted to go to war with us over a guest. Money Man ultimately respected our logic, backed by our strength.
My decision solidified our organization. But it also solidified an aspect of the culture that I did not intend. We were fucking savages.
Senghor had studied the culture, assimilated it, and meticulously improved it as he rose through the ranks. Once he reached the top of a gang, he was faced with a new set of choices—which prompted a profound realization. All those life-risking decisions he’d made, all those moments of serial integrity, had added up to a culture he didn’t want.
Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at all. Senghor was beginning to confront that classic problem.
At that point in my life, I was only focused on adherence to our internal code. I didn’t think about forgiveness or any of that other stuff. I didn’t think about how most of what we did caused somebody’s family harm.
I first realized things could be different in 1995, when Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam held the Million Man March. Leading up to the march, the prison authorities were in panic mode—they didn’t know what might happen—and the guards started getting excessive with shakedowns. My guys reacted with all these half-cocked ideas.
The brothers come up to me and one of them, Hustle Man, says, “Me and Merch gonna stab some white guys for the Million Man March.” In my head I’m like, This has got to be the dumbest shit ever. I’m like, This is not what my organization is about. Having self-love is not about hating other people. So I tell Hustle Man, “Since you feel so strongly about this, how about you go stab one of the white officers?” He like froze. I went on, “If you’re not going to do that, then don’t talk to me about stabbing these other guys who are being oppressed and locked down and going through the same shit as us.” He just wanted an easy stabbing. He wasn’t willing to do the hard shit. I knew that before I challenged him.
Changing the Culture and Himself
Once Senghor realized the power of his influence, he began to make a concerted effort to shift the culture:
One specific incident changed my internal compass. A football player got into a car accident in Detroit. A young lady crashed into him on a bridge. He jumped out of the car like he was going to attack her and she got scared and jumped off the bridge to get away and drowned. It became a big national story. When he was on his way to the joint, all these guys were saying, “We’re going to stab this dude for what he did to the sister.”
And I was like, There are probably people’s family members who think that about us. So I end up calling these guys out. And we have a tense-ass yard meeting.
I’m like, “First of all, I don’t even know this guy but ain’t nobody gonna do shit to him.” To explain why, I go around the group and say to the first guy, “What you in for?” And he goes, “Attempted murder.” And I say: “Whoever you tried to kill, their family probably wants to fuck you up.” I turn to the next guy and he goes, “Assault with intent to murder.” I ask him how that guy’s family would feel about that. As I continued around the group the guys gradually stepped outside of their bullshit and realized we had all made poor decisions and that we’d been fortunate that nobody had seen those decisions as stabbing-worthy. It was my way of getting at the implications of perpetuating violence and how two wrongs don’t make a right.
The episode changed Senghor as much as it changed his squad. As a leader, you can float along in a morally ambiguous frame of mind until you face a clarifying choice. Then you either evolve or you wall yourself up in moral corruption.
Senghor used his incident as a catalyst:
I recognized my own hypocrisy when I chose to resolve conflicts by the rules of the yard as opposed to my own evolving principles. And I began to understand the different levels of how you shift an organization to be in line with your moral code.
It takes time, so I made it mandatory that we broke bread together, special meals of ramen noodles, summer sausage, cheese, or fresh ground beef or chicken. At our lunches we’d discuss the books that I’d sent out. That bonding and that sense of everybody feeling taken care of created a whole shift.
I wanted to change the culture so that when we went back to the community, we could help fix it for other kids. I could see that we all came from the same brokenness, the same fucked-upness. My analogy is this: imagine you’re a developer and someone says, “Here’s some land, and here’s a million dollars. Could you build me a house on this land?” So you build this guy’s dream home. And he moves in and then his family starts getting sick. Because what they didn’t tell you is that the land is toxic and it was a fucking dump site.
The existing prison programs were surface-level shit. One was called “Stop Think Practice,” or STP. The idea was that if you were about to get in trouble, and you stopped to think, then you’d behave better. Uh-huh. I took a psychotherapy class, but it didn’t get into the real stuff. It didn’t get into my mother nearly choking the life out of me over some bullshit. In one session, the instructor said, “You’re probably never going to get out of here.” How’s that for psychotherapy? They were trying to build a dream home on a dump site. Nobody was digging into the dump site itself.
I utilized my position to set up daily classes like “Real Men, Real Talk,” where we’d do deep dives on emotional intelligence. The classes were always packed, and we were able to dive into a lot of our bullshit. It got to a point where I would show up at a facility and the administration would be like, “Hey, would you help us organize some seminars on empathy and dealing with trauma?” So now I’m being entrusted by the same administration that was demonizing me.
Because I had maxed out what-the-fuck-you-can-become as a savage in prison, the guys knew I had nothing to gain from this—that I only wanted to make them better human beings. Now I see guys who are home and who benefited from that experience. They are thriving and living their lives the right way. That feels so much better.
Once he realized he had to make significant changes, Senghor knew that he had to align his team more tightly. He used one of the best techniques for changing a culture—constant contact. By requiring his team to eat together, work out together, and study together, he made them constantly aware of the cultural changes he was making. Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meetings abou
t it.
Who Is Shaka Senghor Now?
Senghor has been out of prison for ten years, is a best-selling author, and is a true leader in our society.
I knew that there was a responsibility to talk to young people when I got out. When I looked back on my life I realized that I could have been anything. I could have been that doctor, I could have been that lawyer. How the fuck did I go from this kid with all this potential to this fucking prison-yard goon? I wanted my abilities to make my path, but the street culture ended up determining who I was.
Who is Shaka Senghor? Is he a ruthless criminal and prison gang leader, or a best-selling author, leader in prison reform, and contributor to a better society? Clearly he’s capable of being both. That’s the power of culture. If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you’re in. Fortunately for the world he did. What he did is who he is.
5
Shaka Senghor Applied
Big Poppa smash fools, bash fools
N*gg*s mad because I know that cash rules
—Notorious B.I.G.
Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make. As a leader, this gap between theory and practice poses huge challenges. How do you get an organization to behave when you’re not around to supervise? How do you make sure the behaviors that you prescribe result in the culture that you want? How can you tell what’s actually going on? How can you know if you’ve succeeded?
Two lessons for leaders jump out from Senghor’s experience: