How Gangs Provide Structure in Prison

The Changing Social Structure of Prisons
Introduction
In one sense, prison is a microcosm of the society outside its walls: an extremely concentrated reflection of the social forces at work in the civilization that has erected it. In another sense, prison is its own world—a unique environment in which social structure is determined by the interplay of forces that outside prison would never find themselves confined together in such close quarters. Their confinement, however, in prison creates the context for a new social structure to emerge—one which today is predominantly organized by gangs. This formation is evidence of the changing social structure of prisons. In 1940, Clemmer described the prison community of the average American penitentiary in these words: “The prisoner’s world is an atomized world. Its people are atoms acting in confusion. It is dominated and it submits. Its own community is without a well-established social structure. Recognized values produce a myriad of conflicting attitudes…” (p. 1). Those words no longer ring so true. Today’s prison community does indeed have an established social structure—thanks to the gangs that perpetually occupy its cells and corridors. There is a way of life in prison that inmates are obliged to accept: it is a way that shares some similarity with the outside, at least for inmates who are familiar with the gangs there. Since 1940, prisons—like much of society—have changed substantially. This paper will explain the changing social structure of prisons, including gangs, racial tensions, contraband, and sex in prison.
Gangs
While gangs may be the custodians of crime on the streets, in today’s prisons they are actually “the unlikely custodians of order behind bars” (Wood, 2014), as many of them have a permanent residence and place in today’s prison system. In Pelican Bay State Prison, for instance, many of those incarcerated are members of one of Californias six big prison gangs: “Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Northern Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood, respectively)” (Wood, 2014). As gangs are major participants in illegal trafficking, they are highly organized and the same goes in prison, where the gangs can be viewed as competing organizations that must be, like corporations vying for dominance in the market place, extremely aware, protective, yet aggressive when need be to ensure a balance of power—which ultimately leads to a kind of order that did not exist in 1940: “Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way. They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them” (Wood, 2014). According to Skarbek (2014), gangs face organizational challenges just like any other governmental structure: they have to always be on the lookout for high-quality recruits; they must “limit behavior that imposes costs on other members,” and they must monitor their own actions (Skarbek, 2014, p. 109). If a gang member is doing business in prison—attacking a rival or a member who requires discipline, or doing a drug trade or moving contraband—gang leaders have to be able to measure the member’s performance to see how well he did, how far he can be trusted, and whether more assignments of that nature can be given to him. The nature of the prison environment is such that criminals are operating within a highly secured facility but essentially allowed to operate to a limited degree according to the rules they live by on the streets. 
As such, it may appear on the outside that wardens and corrections officers provide the social structure that inmates must conform to—but this is not true. Corrections officers know exactly how far they can stretch their authority before they lose control. They know that mixing gang members among one another is a recipe for disaster. They know the precise methods of releasing inmates into the yard to avoid conflicts breaking out in undesirable areas of the prison. As Wood (2014) shows, guards see everything the inmates are doing and understand their own limitations: at a certain point they must let the inmates operate their own social structures—so long as it does not break out into chaos, the system works. Indeed, as Skarbek (2014) indicates, the social structure of the criminal world helps keep order in the prisons.
Racial Tensions
Racial tensions add to the complexity of the social structure in today’s prisons—and this too like much of the social environment of the prison world is largely gang-related. The various gangs consist of their own ethnic or racial backgrounds, so that there is a clear divide between certain groups, and these groups are not expected or even desired to mix for fear of violence breaking out and the social structure erupting into disorder. In a case out of Corcoran State Prison, guards were pitting rival gang members against one another in the yards for entertainment, knowing that the volatile nature of ethnic and racial divisions among gang members would lead to violence (Dryburgh, 2009). The effect of racial tensions is prisons has changed since 1940 as well, as the make-up of incarcerated persons has changed to reflect the trends of a widening opportunity gap. As the Sentencing Project (2016) shows, “more than 60% of the people in prison today are people of color. Black men are nearly six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 2.3 times as likely. For black men in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day” (p. 5). The Canon City Riot of 1975 serves as the first real instance of how race became a factor in prison social structures. In the earlier half of the 20th century, race was less of a factor in how the prison environment was organized. By the 1970s, the issue of race had become so politicized and energized by social and racial groups outside prisons—from the Nation of Islam to the Black Panthers to Neo-Nazis and so on—that this racial tension was bound to be reflected in prisons as well. Indeed, the Riot of 1975 occurred “because of internal tension produced from prison gangs framed by race. The historical changes from 1929 to 1975 in American society had reconstituted social solidarity and social organization among inmates in Cañon City Prison” according to a racial and ethnic framework, which is still very much applicable in prisons today (Colorado College, 2017).
Contraband and Sex in Prison
As gangs essentially organize and oversee the social structure of prisons, they are also responsible for the movement of contraband. And just like in a free market, there is competition among the gangs over who is moving what, where it is coming from, the connections on the inside, and the connections on the outside (Skarbek, 2014). Contraband is a violation of regulations within the prison, yet guards are aware that it goes on under the radar. It is one of the realities of the prison world that even though items are contraband, inmates routinely and somewhat easily obtain them. To eliminate contraband from prisons would be worse for guards and wardens than simply allowing the illegal trade and movement of items within a controlled set of circumstances: “drugs, alcohol, sex, cell phones, and a remarkable variety of other contraband are available in jails and prisons” (Skarbeck, 2014, p. 103). Like a well-run market, the prison social structure operates under the orchestration of gang leaders who are determined to continue with the habit of conducting operations even if it is behind bars.
Sex in prison is obtainable just like other contraband—and the social structure is in place to make it possible, though there are rules that govern the activity, as there are outside prison walls as well. As Skarbeck (2014) notes, one of the central tenets of the Mexican Mafia (a popular prison gang) is respect, and rule number of 5 of the gang’s code explicitly states: “A member must not show disrespect for any member’s family, including sex with another member’s wife or girlfriend” (Skarbek, 2014, p. 118). The Mexican Mafia’s code of conduct is a clear example of how gangs have attempted to restore some of the social structure of prisons that disintegrated in the 1960s and 1970s following the relatively tranquil old social order that existed in the 1950s and prior to the social changes impacting greater society in general by the second half of the century.
Conclusion
The old social structure of prisons was based on the old social order of society, with its hierarchies, respect for authority, and agreement upon basic precepts. That changed with the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and as violence and racial tensions erupted, prison social structure began to be based more on reputation than on authority. Thus, gangs developed and rose to power in prisons on the virtue of their reputation and ability to hold their own in the prison system/market. Today, gangs provide the prison social structure with a type of order that enables convicts to dabble in violence, the moving of contraband and the expression of racial attitudes without seriously disrupting the order desired by guards and wardens. It may be an imperfect system, but it is one that works at least on a functional level.


References
Clemmer, D. (1940). The prison community. New Braunfels, TX: Christopher Publishing
House.
Colorado College. (2017). Past, present, prison. Retrieved from
https://sites.coloradocollege.edu/hip/social-structures-inside/
Dryburgh, M. (2009). Policy implications of whistle-blowing: The case of Corcoran
State Prison. Public Integrity, 11(2): 155-170.
Sentencing Project. (2016). Trends in U.S. corrections. Retrieved from
http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf
Skarbek, D. (2014). The social order of the underworld. UK: Oxford University Press.
Wood, G. (2014). How gangs to over prisons. Retrieved from
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/how-gangs-took-over-prisons/379330/