There is a lack of camaraderie among the Jan. 6 defendants being held together inside the jail in Washington, DC.
"Inside the Washington, D.C., jail, where a group of defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have been held for as long as a year or more, a bitter divide is growing, current and former inmates say," NPR reported Thursday. "A combination of that intense proximity, the stress of criminal cases and a fight over more than a million dollars donated to support the defendants has contributed to the rift."
Over 800 people have been charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
NPR spoke to a dozen current or former inmates for the story, with one saying the problem as "too many rats together in a small cage for too long."
"Tempers naturally get short," he explained, with "cliques solidifying further into independent 'camps' as time progresses."
The Jan. 6 defendants being held in DC are all in the section C2B.
" And so the decision to hold a disparate group of alleged Capitol rioters from all over the country — including people linked by prosecutors to the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and QAnon — in one section of the jail for a protracted period has had unintended consequences. Initially, the inmates seemed so unified and bonded that a defense attorney told a judge the jail had developed a 'cult-like' atmosphere. Experts on extremism worried that the jail was radicalizing the inmates," NPR reported. "But recently, conflicts have blown up between the inmates and grown into what another attorney referred to as a "schism" and what an inmate compared to a 'middle school lunchroom.'"
One of the men being held in C2B said compared it to "the movie Mean Girls, but with racist, antisemitic extremists."
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