Prison gangs

A prison gang is an inmate organization that operates within a prison system. It has a corporate entity and exists into perpetuity. Its membership is restrictive, mutually exclusive, and often requires a lifetime commitment. Prison officials and others in law enforcement use the euphemism "security threat group" (or "STG"). The purpose of this name is to remove any recognition or publicity that the term "gang" would connote when referring to people who have an interest in undermining the system.

Before the rise of large, formal prison gangs, political scientists and researchers found that inmates had already organized around an understood "code" or set of norms. For example, political scientist Gresham Sykes in The Society of Captives, a study based on the New Jersey State Prison, claims that "conformity to, or deviation from, the inmate code is the major basis for classifying and describing the social relations of prisoners". Prisoners achieved a social equilibrium around unwritten rules. The code may include an understanding of jail yard territory based on rank or ethnicity, or it could simply be loyalty between inmates and against guards. Sykes writes that an inmate may "bind himself to his fellow captives with ties of mutual aid, loyalty, affection, and respect, firmly standing in opposition to the officials." Hostility between wardens and prisoners, restrained freedom, and, some argue, the lack of access to heterosexual relationships shaped prison social environment and political dynamics.

When researchers or political scientists actively discuss "classic prison gangs", they are referring to prison gangs in the United States of America; such gangs began to form in the mid 1960s. Around this time, across the United States prison system, the prison population increased markedly.

As prison populations grew, the informal convict code no longer sufficed to coordinate and protect inmates. The constant surge of prisoners coming into the system with no understanding of the status quo had disrupted the established equilibrium cohesion. And as demographics inside prisons changed drastically, small groups centered on ethnicity, race, and pre-prison alliances were disrupted. John Irwin states in his book, Prisons in Turmoil, that by 1970 "there [was] no longer a single, overarching convict culture".

Furthermore, as the prison population grew so did the consumer base for contraband items, not only drugs and weapons but also items that are legal outside of prison but are illegal to trade within prisons, such as money, alcohol, tattoos, etc. Several challenges arose that destabilized the socio-political system of self-enforced cooperation that had existed under the convict code. These new conditions posed complications to consumer-supplier relationships in the already distrustful environment of an underground economy. It became more and more difficult for independent individual suppliers to accommodate this increased demand. Under tight prison security and with limited means, these individual suppliers could only provide a limited amount of product. Their consumer base was too small for them to establish a "brand" or credibility themselves. New consumers would have to buy products of unknown quality and bear the risk of the supplier being an undercover informant and even the possibility that he would not deliver at all.

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