Episode Details

Danny Walsh grew up in Texas with a mother consumed by addiction and a father who was never in the picture — and when he and his brother essentially raised each other as teenagers on their own the path toward trouble found them both before anyone was old enough to stop it. In this episode of Locked In with Ian Bick, he shares how an early sentence in the Texas Department of Corrections led him to become a peckerwood and join one of the most notorious prison gangs in the Texas system before a federal conviction in his early 20s handed him 25 years and sent him into the most brutal maximum security federal penitentiaries in the United States. He opens up about becoming a shot caller — the power, the rules, the violence and the politics that position actually involves — what spending years in solitary confinement did to him mentally and what the PTSD that prison produced has made reacclimating into society nearly impossible in ways that the system that put him there has done almost nothing to address.

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#shotcaller #federalprison #truecrimestories

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Thank you to HIMS & FACTOR for sponsoring this episode:

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Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick:

https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en

https://ianbick.com/

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Timestamps:

00:00 Growing up in a rough Houston neighborhood

04:08 Early drinking and harmful experiences

06:06 Normalizing poverty and abuse

06:55 Time in isolation and breaking down demons

08:15 Fighting to stay un-institutionalized

09:59 The dangers of accepting prison as home

10:40 A bus station lesson in institutionalization

11:40 Refusing to accept a prisoner's life

12:52 Youthful dreams of the military and football

13:48 Arrested and learning the code

15:15 Brother's tough lessons on loyalty

16:32 Drug use and the cycle of incarceration

17:42 Facing federal charges and refusing to snitch

19:43 The deal is a lie: 25-year sentence

22:20 Betrayed by a lawyer and becoming hardened

24:39 Why the excessive sentence?

25:45 Rejecting the state's offer on principle

28:01 Adapting from state to federal politics

29:49 TDC initiation: riots and lockdown

34:05 Surviving lockdown and a cell fire

36:15 Joining a Texas prison gang

38:08 Your gang arrives in the feds

39:37 Taking control and building respect

41:07 The lie of gang philosophy

44:32 The failure of the prison system

46:40 Fighting for resentencing and 11 years over time

48:42 Release: 23 years later and a new world

52:35 Initial struggles with a changed society

54:55 Getting a job and building a new life

58:02 Fired by the state for tattoos

01:00:49 The struggle for identity and self-love

01:02:55 Jail habits that persist

01:04:24 Why not join another white gang?

01:05:43 Misconceptions about white inmates

01:08:12 A fight for respect over a TV

01:13:40 Relationships with other races and gangs

01:18:00 Prison economy and cross-racial business

01:20:18 How did you become a shot caller?

01:23:56 Dispensing justice and avoiding trouble

01:27:10 Sex cases and the white racial