San Francisco prison guards reportedly forced inmates into fight club

A view from above in a San Francisco prison.
(Image credit: Brendan Riley/Flickr Creative Commons)

The father of an inmate at a San Francisco jail blew the whistle on four guards who were forcing prisoners to fight each other on threat of torture while the guards placed bets on their performance. At this point it is unknown how long the fight club continued, but investigators suspect other prison employees were aware of it even if they did not directly participate.

"Deputy's betting against me and forcing me to fight and if I don't fight, then he's basically telling me that he was going to beat me up, cuff me, Tase me all at once," said one prisoner, Ricardo Palikiko Garcia, who was required to fight a man more than twice his weight.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.