Brittany Friedman is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, an affiliated scholar of the American Bar Foundation and the author of “Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.”
Last year, the public outrage over a video showing officers standing by as young juvenile hall detainees violently assaulted each other finally seemed to give way to actual accountability. Thirty Los Angeles County Probation officers were indicted in March 2025 for allegedly orchestrating 69 “gladiator fights” pitting detainees against each other at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey.
A year later, many of those cases are falling apart. In April, the Los Angeles Times reported that prosecutors have dismissed charges against at least 10 officers. Four others accepted plea deals that will erase their indictments after they complete community service.
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As a sociologist who researches criminal justice, I am not surprised by this. Cases like these that follow a familiar arc – whistleblower allegations, video footage then mass indictments – often collapse, no matter the outrage they generate at first or whether the people incarcerated are adult prisoners or youth detainees. The state prosecutes this abuse as if each time it has discovered a new batch of bad apples in an otherwise clean bunch, when my years of research shows a different reality: Gladiator fighting is deeply ingrained in a rotten correctional culture. Dismantling it will require a lot more than the occasional mass indictments that lead to failed prosecutions and continued abuse.
I have spent well over a decade interviewing survivors of correctional abuse, including officer-orchestrated gladiator fights. Among them was a man I gave the pseudonym Andrew, a Pelican Bay State Prison survivor who told me that the fights provide on-the-job entertainment for officers and act as a tool for spreading fear among incarcerated people. Their routine occurrence is an open secret in California, which incarcerates people at a rate closer to that of authoritarian Turkey than liberal democracies such as Italy or France.
This culture makes prosecuting officers accused of orchestrating fights exceedingly difficult. A low-ranking officer’s claim of deferring to superiors can collapse a case, as we’re seeing with some of the officers at the Downey juvenile hall whose lawyers say their clients “were following directives and doing their jobs” and told not to break up fights. The probation officers’ union has called the prosecution a “rush to judgment,” and defense attorneys are using phrases like a “giant witch hunt sweep.”
In other words, this is not an individual officer problem. It is a correctional culture problem that is much older and much deeper than this case. Headline-grabbing prosecutions have failed to fix this scourge in the past, and they’re continuing to fail now.
Twenty-six years ago, following an FBI investigation, eight officers were acquitted in a federal trial where testimony alleged that officers at Corcoran State Prison in the San Joaquin Valley engineered gladiator fights between rival factions and shot dozens of incarcerated men under the cover of “breaking up” those fights. From 1989 to 1995, seven men were killed and more than 40 were wounded by officer gunfire at Corcoran. After a trial in 2000, Amnesty International expressed concerns over reports that the judge barred testimony about the “code of silence” among officers.
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That code of silence also hides an ugly truth that my research has uncovered: Officer abuse is often racially organized. What Andrew, who survived Pelican Bay, told me is a warning for all.
In interviews I conducted with him, we sat for several hours over days talking about his life. His hands were covered in tattooed swastikas, and he had been incarcerated for more than 40 years. When I asked him the purpose of officer-orchestrated gladiator fights, he said, “It’s all sport to them.” He described surviving a fight set up against men of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. He specifically recalled the officers laughing, patting each other on their backs and placing bets.
During our conversations, he stood up often, his voice cracking and his hands shaking as he talked. He sobbed. Andrew, like other formerly incarcerated men I interviewed from various racial and ethnic groups, survived decades of prison time shaped by officer abuse that ranged from gladiator fighting to the facilitation of sexual assault.
Joel Bellman
But you don’t have to interview people who have survived inside prisons, jails and juvenile halls to understand how desperately the victims of gladiator fights want this culture to end. During a historic hunger strike at Pelican Bay in 2012, delegates from multiple racial and ethnic groups at the prison’s “supermax” unit signed the “Agreement to End Hostilities.” This landmark statement, along with a class-action lawsuit that year, highlighted officers’ use of a variety of techniques, including gladiator fighting, to spread fear and divide incarcerated people on the basis of race and ethnicity.
Context like this is indispensable to understanding the problem of gladiator fighting. But in criminal courtrooms, juries hear only about the fights pertaining to a single case, not decades of organized fights, the code of silence among officers or efforts to racially divide incarcerated people. They do not hear about the broader correctional culture that makes these fights probable and not just possible.
Until this changes – and until the state’s oversight agencies gain real disciplinary power to fire employees and start listening to what survivors have said for decades – officer-orchestrated gladiator fighting will continue in California. That goes even for the children confined in juvenile halls like Los Padrinos.
Josh Gohlke
Mariel Garza
