POWER ON THE INSIDE

Eye-opening examination of the different hierarchies and ideologies employed by prison gangs around the world.

In many instances, writes criminology professor Roth, prison gangs are essential units of self-government in places where institutional management is weak. In the Philippines, for example, they provide a “network of social support in what is generously described as an overcrowded and deprived environment.” Similarly, the Neapolitan Camorra was the only branch of the too widely applied term Mafia to have been born inside the prison walls, where its leaders maintained order and discipline on behalf of the wardens for a hefty fee, even while “taxing prisoners for every facet of their prison existence.” Some prison systems have a clear ethnic component. The laws of apartheid South Africa, for example, “guaranteed that a large proportion of black South African males would be exposed to the criminal justice system at one time or another,” and the structure of New Zealand justice is such that while Maoris represent a small portion of the population, they constitute about half of the country’s prisoners. The U.S. is, interestingly, broad-based in its ethnic representation owing to what Roth characterizes as a vast expansion of the prison system beginning in the 1950s. The country has the world’s largest population of prisoners, but “its prisons are comparative sanctuaries of safety and order” in which the bloody riots common in places like Guatemala and El Salvador seldom occur. Even so, American prisons are carved up into territories belonging to groups such as the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Nations that operate both inside and outside the walls and exact a harsh justice system of their own. Ranging across the world, Roth closes with the ominous prediction that prisons are likely to remain overcrowded and gang-infested well into the future since “a much larger supply of potential gang recruits looms on the horizon as the world’s population gets younger.”

A revealing study with broad implications for policymakers and law enforcement.