A white inmate held in a Wisconsin correctional facility is headed back to trial once again — and not for the homicide(s) of which he was convicted. He’s actually accused of catching another body — a Black inmate — seemingly as a result of trying a join white supremacist prison gang.
Joshua Scolman is facing first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide after stabbing Timothy Nabors in the Green Bay Correctional Facility, per FOX 11. The report says Scolman was already serving a 45-year prison sentence for killing three people while drunk driving back in 2006.
In 2022, Scolman allegedly attacked an inmate while armed with a homemade knife. Scolman stabbed Nabors in the heart as he tried to break up the fight.
The Brown County Sheriff’s Office told the Green Bay Press-Gazette thst Scolman was already under investigation for “extremely concerning racist activity” because he was trying to join a white supremacist prison gang. If they needed any more evidence toward their probe, they can look no further than the fact that the knife Scolman used to stab Nabors had a swatstika engraved in it.
However, Scolman isn’t facing hate crime charges. His attorney also petitioned the court to allow him a competency evaluation ahead of trial, delaying the date from December to sometime in February.
This situation may seem like a crazy racist incident on the surface but it brings light to a deep-rooted issue of white supremacist violence inside prisons.
Read more about white supremacist prison gangs from the Anti-Defamation League:
Gang-oriented crimes include acts of violence against rival gang members or other targeted inmates. They also include violence against members of their own gang, often because a member may be suspected as an informer or because the member has broken gang rules. Large white supremacist prison gangs such as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and the
Aryan Circle have killed a large number of their own members and associates. The use of force also helps keep other gang members in line. Sometimes the violence is also designed to keep other white inmates “in line” as well. For example, in 2014, two inmates in a federal prison in Georgia, one a member of the Aryan Resistance Militia and the other a member of Soldiers of Aryan Culture, were convicted of second-degree murder for beating to death a fellow white inmate who had refused to protest against having an African-American cellmate.
The issue also spans beyond the violence itself to the tolerance of hateful ideologies. Michigan prisons agreed this summer to recognize the “Christian Identity” group as a religion — not the hate group that believes white people are superior and that nonwhite people are “mud peoples,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Who knows what gang or “group” Scolman was trying to join, but it’s probably looking for its next recruit.