Having information on each gang member's personality through a personality assessment is good security threat information. Knowing an inmate's character traits helps us in classifying an inmate for security and housing needs. We need to know if the inmate has a history of violence. We need to know the gang member's family history and obtain any personal life history we can on each inmate. Street contact information is extremely important when dealing with gang members.
We need to know if the inmate is an active gang member or a former gang member. Here are a few: Interview the inmate in person; many times the inmate will tell you their gang affiliation. Ask the inmate to share any gang information they are willing to disclose. Ask the inmate what rank they hold within the gang. Use a security threat group questionnaire as a guide for questions to ask. Research those tattoos for their meaning and history.
Ask the inmate what the tattoos mean. Work with outside law enforcement agencies and share information with them. Obtain the inmate's pre-sentencing record from the courts; valuable personal and criminal history are found in those records. Probation and parole pre-sentence and post-sentence investigations have a lot of good personal and criminal information that should be reviewed and placed in the inmate's prison file.
Recording inmate phone calls is a great way to gather intelligence and find new code words. Inmate mail going to and from the inmate can provide valuable information and contain coded messages. Monitoring, recovery and documentation of inmate contraband can lead to good information on gang and drug activity. Money trails often lead to good information on outside contacts. This information is valuable in accessing behavior patterns.
Housing prison gang offenders Gangs and gang members are responsible for a large part of prison violence. Inmate classification We rely heavily on our jail and prison classification officers to make the right decision on classifying inmates.
How digital intelligence tools can stop crime from the inside out. More leaked video shows Ariz. Feds: Vice Lords gang conspiracy includes hits on inmates. Key principles of security threat group intelligence operations in jails. Corrections1 Top 5 15 prison tattoos and their meanings Video released of Ill. Prison Gangs Cell shakedowns: How to handle strategic threat group contraband.
Find New Products Facility Products. Tactical Products. Latest Product News Spotlight: SwabTek's tests provide a simple and safe means to presumptively field test for threat compounds, narcotics and explosives by police. The public gets a glimpse of life on the inside only when there are riots , executions or scandals. As criminologists , we spent nine months interviewing over prisoners in Texas in They told us about their lives before and during prison, as well as their impending return to the community, a journey shared by over , people each year.
Our book , published in , pulls back the curtain on how gangs compete for control and structure prison life. Gangs wield power behind bars, but they are more fractured and have less control than people believe.
Conducting research in prisons is rare because it is hard to gain access. Prison officials tend to be risk-averse and loathe to let outsiders inside the walls. When the topic is gangs, these issues are even bigger. That was not our experience. About half of the people we interviewed were affiliated with gangs.
Prison gangs exploded across the U. Texas prisons were mostly gang-free until bloody battles broke out in between the Mexican Mafia and Texas Syndicate as well as the Aryan Brotherhood and Mandingo Warriors. Over 50 different gangs were represented in our study. Most of these gangs were active in prison and on the street. Race and ethnicity mattered to all gangs. Geographic proximity is the great social sorter for street gangs; it is race and ethnicity for prison gangs.
Nearly all of the prison gangs were composed of a single race or ethnicity. The people we spoke with made it clear that prison gangs in Texas are not what they used to be. Few prisoners, including gang members, believed that gangs brought order to prisons or made prisons safer, a claim often made about prison gangs. With the possible exception of North Korea, the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in adults.
The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in , at one in Less crime and softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then. When I met him, on a sunny day on the Strand, in London, he was craving a taste of home. He suggested cheeseburgers and beer, which made our lunch American not only in topic of conversation but also in caloric consumption. Prison gangs do not exist in the United Kingdom, at least not with anything like the sophistication or reach of those in California or Texas, and in that respect Skarbek is like a botanist who studies desert wildflowers at a university in Norway.
He is a treasury of horrifying anecdotes about human depravity—and ingenuity. The safest place for an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized for the contraband phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuck them away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar means a durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Pity the poor guy whose bar of soap is the size and shape of a Samsung Galaxy Note.
The prevalence of cellphones in the California prison system reveals just how loose a grip the authorities have on their inmates. In , the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confiscated 12, phones. Skarbek trained in an economic school of thought known as rational-choice theory, which aims to explain human behavior as the product of reasonable decisions by economic actors.
In many cases, rational-choice theory has shown behaviors to be rational that at first appear wild, irrational, or psychopathic. When people are encouraged or forced to act against their economic interest, they find work-arounds as surely as water blocked by a boulder in a stream finds a way to flow around it. Becker, who won a Nobel in economics in and died this past May, suggested instead that criminals offend because they make careful calculations of the probability and likely cost of getting caught—and then determine that the gamble is worthwhile.
This insight, Skarbek says, opened the study of crime up to economic theory. Skarbek attended graduate school at George Mason University, a bastion of rational-choice theory.
Prison, Skarbek claims, is the ultimate challenge for a rational-choice theorist: a place where control of the economic actors is nearly total, and where virtually any transaction requires the consent of the authorities.
Both settings have given rise to alternate currencies and hidden markets. Most famously, cigarettes have become the medium of exchange in many prisons. But when they are banned, other currencies take their place. California inmates now use postage stamps. After all, as Skarbek notes, California had prisons for nearly a century before the first documented gang appeared.
The explanation, Skarbek says, can be found in demographics, and in inmate memoirs and interviews. But starting in the s, things changed: The total inmate population rose steeply, and prisons grew bigger, more ethnically and racially mixed, and more unpredictable in their types of inmate.
Prisons faced a flood of first offenders, who tended to be young and male—and therefore less receptive to the advice of grizzled jailbirds. The norms that made prison life tolerable disappeared, and the authorities lost control. Prisoners banded together for self-protection—and later, for profit.
The result was the first California prison gang. That moment of gang genesis, Skarbek says, forced an arms race, in which different groups took turns demonstrating a willingness to inflict pain on others. The arms race has barely stopped, although the gangs have waxed and waned in relative power. The Black Guerrilla Family has been weakened, prison authorities told me, because of leadership squabbles.
The Mexican Mafia was the sole Hispanic gang until , when a group of inmates from Northern California formed Nuestra Familia to counter the influence of Hispanics from the south. Gang elders—called maestros—instruct the youngsters in gang history and keep the enmity alive. For example, consider the Aryan Brotherhood—a notoriously brutal organization whose members are often kept alone in cells because they tend to murder their cell mates.
You can take the Brotherhood at its word when it declares itself a racist organization, and you can do the same with the Black Guerrilla Family, which preaches race war and calls for the violent overthrow of the government. But Skarbek says that at lights-out in some prisons, the leader of each gang will call out good night to his entire cellblock. If a white guy starts yelling and keeps everyone awake, the Aryan Brothers will discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attack one of their members.
White power is one thing, but the need to keep order and get shut-eye is paramount. Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply street gangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer to the opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel Vocational Institution, in Tracy, California, in , and only later did that group, and others, become a presence on the streets.
Today, the relation of the street to the cellblock is symbiotic. But Skarbek says the prison gangs serve another function for street criminals. In a paper in American Political Science Review , he proposed that prison is a necessary enforcement mechanism for drug crime on the outside. If everyone in the criminal underworld will go to prison eventually, or has a close relationship with someone who will, and if everybody knows that gangs control the fate of all inmates, then criminals on the street will be afraid to cross gang members there, because at some point they, or someone they know, will have to pay on the inside.
Under this model, prison gangs are the courts and sheriffs for people whose business is too shady to be able to count on justice from the usual sources. Using data from federal indictments of members of the Mexican Mafia, and other legal documents, Skarbek found that the control of prisons by gangs leads to smoother transactions in the outside criminal world.
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