An Overview of theOverview Challenge of the Challenge of Prisonof Gangs 1 Prison Gangs Mark S. Fleisher and Scott H. Decker A persistently disruptive force in merica now imprisons men and women correctional facilities is prison gangs. with ease and in very large numbers. At the Prison gangs disrupt correctional end of the year 2000, an estimated two mil- lion men and women were serving prison programming, threaten the safety of Aterms. The mission of improving the quality of life inmates and staff, and erode institutional inside our prisons should be a responsibility shared quality of life. The authors review the by correctional administrators and community citi- history of, and correctional mechanisms to zens. Prisons are, after all, public institutions sup- cope with prison gangs. A suppression ported by tens of millions of tax dollars and what strategy (segregation, lockdowns, happens inside of these costly institutions will deter- mine to some degree the success inmates will have transfers) has been the most common after their release. Oddly though, citizens often be- response to prison gangs. The authors lieve that anyone can offer an intelligent opinion argue, however, that given the complexity about prison management and inmate program- of prison gangs, effective prison gang ming. In recent years, elected officials have called for intervention must include improved tougher punishment in prisons, stripping color tele- strategies for community re-entry and visions, removing weightlifting equipment, and weakening education programs as if doing these more collaboration between correctional rather trivial things will punish inmates further and agencies and university gang researchers force them to straighten out their lives and will scare on prison gang management policies and others away from crime. If criminals choose to com- practices. mit crime, “let them suffer” seems to be the prevail- ing battle cry of elected officials and citizens alike, Key words: collaboration, prison gangs, who have little formal knowledge of crimogenesis, violence punishment, and imprisonment. A parallel argument would let smokers suffer the ravages of cancer because their behavior, above all others, caused their health problem. Similarly, we should allow students who do not choose to study to remain ignorant because their behavior led them to marginal illiteracy. As we sanction cigarette compa- Mark S. Fleisher, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. Scott H. Decker, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Corrections Management Quarterly, 2001, 5(1), 1–9 Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Mis- © 2001 Aspen Publishers, Inc. souri in St. Louis, Missouri. 1 2CORRECTIONS MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY/WINTER 2001 nies for selling a carcinogenic product, as we strive to million poorly educated American prisoners whose improve public education, we also should continu- economic future grows more distant from the main- ously improve prison management and the quality of stream economy as the nanoseconds pass. Prisons life inside these costly, tax-supported institutions. are our last best chance to help lawbreakers find a We do not advocate coddling inmates but we surely lawful, economically stable place in mainstream do not advocate allowing millions of imprisoned in- communities. mates to live with drug addictions, emotional diffi- That is a lofty mission, indeed, especially with tens culties, and educational and employment skills so of thousands of inmates entering prison annually. To poor that only minimum-wage employment awaits accomplish the difficult job of retraining, educating, them. These are the disabilities that, to some degree, and treating inmates, prisons must be well-managed define the American inmate population, and these public institutions. Every prison cell house that same disabilities will damage the quality of life in our burns in a disturbance burns millions of tax dollars. communities when these untreated, uneducated, Managing prisons is difficult and that task should be and marginal inmates return home. delegated exclusively to the correctional experts Criminologists have argued for decades that per- rather than to elected officials pandering to voters. sistent criminals often do not have the power to con- The highest security prisons hold the most violent trol the destructive forces in their environment, and disruptive inmates who are most likely to be as which created their disabilities. Many criminals are, disruptive inside as they were outside. In such places in a real sense, victims of family abuse and neglect, and others of lower security, a social force is operat- school disciplinary practices that expelled them be- ing today that will thwart even our best efforts to fore they had sufficient education to get a good job, create and sustain high-quality prison management. and impoverished neighborhoods well outside the That disruptive social force is prison gangs. opportunity networks in the dominant community. Western civilization has used prisons as an experi- A Brief History of Prison Gangs mental site where socially destructive human behav- ior supposedly is transformed into socially produc- Lyman (1989) defines a prison gang as tive behavior. This experiment has yielded an organization which operates within the prison system as consistently poor results. As we begin the next cen- a self-perpetuating criminally oriented entity, consisting of tury, we might want to rethink the mission of the a select group of inmates who have established an orga- prison, shifting the prevailing approach from pun- nized chain of command and are governed by an estab- ishing convicted offenders to using these public in- lished code of conduct. The prison gang will usually oper- stitutions as society’s last chance to reform men and ate in secrecy and has as its goal to conduct gang activities women who, for whatever reason, have not been able by controlling their prison environment through intimida- to conform to mainstream community norms. tion and violence directed toward non-members (p. 48). American history shows prison inmates have, for We have only a rudimentary knowledge of prison the most part, been marginal to the dominant gangs as social groups operating inside prisons and economy of the time and were the society’s most of the interplay between street gangs and prison poorly educated and least well-prepared citizens to gangs. Thus the scope, understanding, and study of hold gainful employment. But now the gap between prison gangs are broader and somewhat different the social and economic margin and mainstream from street gangs. One thing we do know: prison grows wider and faster than it ever has grown. In the gangs are gang researchers’ final frontier and prison 1950s, a general equivalency diploma (GED) was suf- managers’ biggest nightmare. ficient to enable employment in America’s expand- While we debate prison gang demographics and ing factory economy, but now the GED affords only their distribution in American prisons, we know such minimum-wage employment in the fast-food indus- groups have been in prisons a long time. The first try and/or service work in hotels, malls, and restau- known American prison gang was the Gypsy Jokers rants. America’s high-tech twenty-first century has formed in the 1950s in Washington state prisons (Or- decreasing career opportunities for the nearly two lando-Morningstar, 1997; Stastny & Tyrnauer, 1983). Overview of the Challenge of Prison Gangs 3 The first prison gang with nationwide ties was the prison gangs is weak. What documentation exists is Mexican Mafia, which emerged in 1957 in the Califor- generally only for departmental use. Second, prison nia Department of Corrections. managers are reluctant to allow outside researchers Camp and Camp (1985) identified approximately into facilities to conduct prison gang research. Fears 114 gangs with a membership of approximately over security and concern that research might ham- 13,000 inmates. Of the 49 agencies surveyed, 33 indi- per the welfare of the prison are the oft-cited reasons cated that they had gangs in their system: Pennsylva- for excluding prison researchers. Third, prison gang nia reported 15 gangs, Illinois reported 14. Illinois members themselves are secretive and likely would had 5,300 gang members, Pennsylvania had 2,400, not disclose sensitive information about their prison and California had 2,050. In Texas, there were nine gang group to outside researchers. prison gangs with more than 50 members each, total- ing 2,407 (Ralph & Marquart, 1991). Fong (1990) re- Prison Gangs: Structure and Organization ported eight Texas gangs with 1,174 members. Illi- nois reported that 34.3 percent of inmates belonged Prison gangs share organizational similarities. to a prison gang, which was then the highest percent Prison gangs have a structure usually with one per- of prison gang-affiliated inmates in the nation (Camp son designated as the leader who oversees a council & Camp, 1985). of members who make the group’s final decisions. Lane (1989) reported that the Illinois Department The rank and file form a hierarchy, making these of Corrections (IDOC) estimated the inmate gang groups look more similar to organized crime than population to be nearly 90 percent of the entire their counterparts on the outside (Decker, Bynum, & population, attributing that number to the importa- Weisel, 1998). The United States Department of Jus- tion of gangs from Chicago’s streets, which is sup- tice (1992) suggests that leaders and hard-core mem- ported by research (Jacobs, 1974). Rees (1996) shows bers are some 15–20 percent of a gang’s membership that Chicago police estimated more than 19,000 gang and that the majority of members do not have a members in that city and a high percent of IDOC vested interest in the organization leadership. inmates were arrested in Cook County. Other correc- Prison gangs, like some street counterparts, have a tional agencies, however, report their gang troubles creed or motto, unique symbols of membership, and started inside rather than outside prison walls.