Academic literature on the topic 'Prison gangs'

In many countries, there has been growing academic attention towards the activities of street and prison gang members. However, while much of the American literature explores the experiences of prison gang members, such investigation has been notably absent in the English context. This article seeks to address this deficit in the literature. Through gathering data from interviews with active prison gang members, it shows how reduced staffing levels in English prisons has led to an increasingly ‘ungovernable’ prison space. This, in turn, has led to an increase in levels of gang membership. Most notably, the high numbers of street gangs ‘imported’ into prisons has had the unintended effect of creating several ‘in prison’ gangs, which form for the first time in prison, with their members seeking protecting from more established gangs. This proliferation of gangs has had a significant impact on rates of in-prison violence, and how prisons are managed.

This article focuses on the interaction between the larger community's drug markets and youth and adult prison gangs, and the process that leads to specific adverse consequences both to the youth gangs as organizations, and to individual members. Described is the emergence of a restructured heroin market dominated by an adult prison gang. A major consequence of this was the increasing use of heroin among Mexican American gang members and their transformation from autonomous youth gangs to extensions of the adult prison gangs or their demise. Data was collected from 160 members of 26 Mexican American youth gangs and key informants in San Antonio. Findings focus on organizational rules, drug market transformations, consequences on members, and the impact of heroin on the gang's organization. Discussed is how the dominance of prison gangs is related to the increased incarceration and recidivism rates of Mexican Americans and declining economic opportunities for urban minorities.

In the United States, some prison gangs control not only inmates, but also what happens on the street. Since most gang members eventually get detained and incarcerated, prison gangs will victimize or kill any resistors in jail and prison. In this paper, I examine such a case between the California prison gang, La Eme, and the rebel Maravilla gangs of East Los Angeles. La Eme controls almost all the Latino gangs in Southern California and enforces prison and street rules that “Southsider” gangs must follow. Between 1993 and 2006, the Maravilla gangs resisted La Eme’s prison co-governance and then experienced a violence and victimization perhaps unrivaled in the gang world. Through field research on the Maravilla gangs, this paper reveals how some gangs defy prison co-governance, which then makes them feel meaningful in the gang world.

How can people who lack access to effective government institutions establish property rights and facilitate exchange? The illegal narcotics trade in Los Angeles has flourished despite its inability to rely on state-based formal institutions of governance. An alternative system of governance has emerged from an unexpected source—behind bars. The Mexican Mafia prison gang can extort drug dealers on the street because they wield substantial control over inmates in the county jail system and because drug dealers anticipate future incarceration. The gang's ability to extract resources creates incentives for them to provide governance institutions that mitigate market failures among Hispanic drug-dealing street gangs, including enforcing deals, protecting property rights, and adjudicating disputes. Evidence collected from federal indictments and other legal documents related to the Mexican Mafia prison gang and numerous street gangs supports this claim.

Gangs became a permanent feature of New Zealand prisons during the 1980s. Surveys indicate that more than 20% of inmates have past or present gang affiliations. This article looks at the gang phenomenon both in the community and in prisons. A case study looking at the impact of gangs at Auckland Maximum Security Prison (Paremoremo) is included; a unique inmate subculture was destroyed and inter-gang conflict resulted in the prison being run on a unit basis. Using information from the 1989prison census, including unpublished material, the article examines the level of gang membership and compares gang members and unaffiliated inmates over a range of variables. Gang members were found to be more likely to be younger, classified as requiring medium or maximum security custody, convicted of violent offences and serving longer sentences. The article also looks at management approaches to gangs in prisons and a fresh approach being adopted by the Department of Justice.

That gangs have a prominent place in South African prison violence—like in many other geographical contexts—has become increasingly clear. Based on qualitative research among South African inmates and ex-inmates, we propose that prison gangs be considered adaptation strategies to the extremely coercive and oppressive environments of prisons. We focus on the relationship between gang involvement in prison, violent acts among inmates, and the risk of being subjected to violence during incarceration. By providing emic perspectives, we aim to demonstrate how inmates negotiate three types of social roles, largely defined by their ability and willingness to use violence: franse, gangster, and wyfie. Our findings suggest that prison gangs may jeopardize the personal safety of inmates, but can also paradoxically offer some inmates the opportunity to establish a sense of safety and agency by avoiding random violence.

This article aims to bridge the gap in our knowledge about Iranian prisons and the sociodynamic relations that animate them by illuminating the characteristics and activities of prison gangs in Iran. The interaction between gang affiliation and drug networks, security and violence will be discussed in detail. The in-depth qualitative research, which is informed by grounded theory, serves as the first academic study of gangs in Iranian prisons. Research participants included 38 males and 52 females aged 10–65 years. They were recruited in several different settings, both governmental and non-governmental organizations. The study employed theoretical sampling and in-depth, semi-structured interviewing. Results show that gang-affiliated inmates in Iranian prisons gain monopoly over the drugs market inside prison networks, which leads to inevitable extortion of both prisoners and correctional officers. Gang affiliation blurs the lines between violence and safety, while providing a sense of identity, belonging and financial and emotional support. Prison gang membership also offers some benefits to prisoners and staff, as their existence underpins an informal social order that can be used to govern prisoners. The article discusses this less well-known and unexplored dimension of the topic.

This article explores recent concerns about the emergence of gangs in prisons in England and Wales. Using narrative interviews with male prisoners as part of an ethnographic study of ethnicity and social relations, the social meaning of ‘the gang’ inside prison is interrogated. A formally organized gang presence was categorically denied by prisoners. However, the term ‘gang’ was sometimes elided with loose collectives of prisoners who find mutual support in prison based on a neighbourhood territorial identification. Gangs were also discussed as racialized groups, most often symbolized in the motif of the ‘Muslim gang’. This racializing discourse hinted at an envy of prisoner solidarity and cohesion which upsets the idea of a universal prisoner identity. The broader conceptual, empirical and political implications of these findings are considered.

State efforts to provide law and order can be counterproductive: mass-incarceration policies, while incapacitating and deterring individual criminals, can simultaneously strengthen collective criminal networks. Sophisticated prison gangs use promises of protection or punishment inside prison to influence and organize criminal activity on the street. Typical crime-reduction policies that make incarceration likelier and sentences harsher can increase prison gangs’ power over street-level members and affiliates, a formal model shows. Leading cases from the Americas corroborate these predictions: periods of sharply rising incarceration, driven partly by anti-gang laws, preceded qualitative leaps in prison-gang power on the street. Critically, prison gangs use this capacity not only to govern and tax criminal markets but also to win leverage over state officials by orchestrating terror attacks, intentionally curtailing quotidian violence, or both. Thus, even if increased incarceration leads to reduced crime, it may do so by strengthening prison-gang power at the expense of state authority.

This article provides a critical historical analysis of the formation and proliferation of some of the earliest and most well-known prison gangs in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and the conflicts between them. This analysis provides an alternative explanation for prison gang formation that contrasts with existing pathological perspectives on prison gangs by examining the role of the prison staff and administration in the formation and proliferation of prison gangs and the provocation of conflicts between them. The historical narrative and analysis is constructed from existing literature, qualitative research using both formal and informal interviews, and descriptive data acquired from CDCR Annual Reports.

The objective of the thesis is to study how contacts/relationships are established in prison, and whether this is of significance for co-offending. A further objective is that of studying co-offending among individuals classified as gang members. Data have been collected from the Register of Suspected Offenders for all individuals released from Swedish prisons over a period of six months (n=3,930). Data have also been collected for individuals deemed by prison service officials to be members of various gangs (n=1,310). Twelve individuals (four women and eight men) with experience of serving time in prison have been interviewed.

The results of the register study show that it is uncommon for individuals who have spent time together at the same prison to be suspected of committing offences together subsequent to release. This was the case for two percent of the entire study population and three percent of the gang members. The co-offending of different gangs has also been studied by means of network analysis. There are substantial variations between different gangs as regards the proportion of suspected offences involving gang members and other individuals respectively, as reflected in both direct and indirect links. The interview study shows that there are different reasons for wanting to establish contacts/relationships with others. For some the intention is to maintain contacts of value for future crimes. A number of different reasons emerged however for why such contacts are discontinued. Inmates return to their old friends, they are re-arrested, women find themselves back in the worlds of men, a long time may pass between the individuals’ respective release dates, they may live a long way apart or drug use, leading to the breakdown of contacts as a result.

The theoretical framework employed in the thesis proceeds from social exchange theory. For co-offending to take place subsequent to release from prison, the contact/relationship established in prison must be worth something. Trust, contacts with other criminals, the size of an individual’s criminal network, and criminal capital are all relevant in this context.

This thesis investigates the practices and compositions of gangs in Greater Manchester, England. Primarily drawing from qualitative data gathered in two adult, men's prisons, it explores gang members' activities, how these practices develop on 'the street', and how they are later affected by imprisonment. The thesis also explores the links between race, geographical area and gang affiliation, analysing how a gang member's racial background and area of origin may relate to his gang. The results show the strong influence of gangs at the sample prisons, and how gangs affect the ways in which prisoners negotiate the carceral space: violent practices, gang allegiances and rivalries developed on 'the street' are regularly transplanted into prison. These high levels of gang 'importation' into the sample prisons result in the social and cultural significance of street gangs often penetrating prison walls. Area of origin and shared racial background are strong unifying 'banners' under which many prison gangs operate, and violence is an integral part of life in 'the gang'. However, reflecting the academic literature, gang members often contest the terminology around 'gangs', showing the polarized discourse around these topics. The thesis attempts to resolve some of these debates by presenting a comprehensive gang typology shaped by theory and prisoners' testimonies.

This research examines the presence of organised criminal groups in prison and its influence on inmate’s interaction and on the prison system of Rio de Janeiro. Information collected from a series of in-depth interviews with prisoners and ex-prisoners, members and non-members of the criminal groups and authorities of the criminal justice system, suggests that the current social organisation of prisons is working favourably towards the further development of organised crime and deviant behaviour. Prisoners are subordinated not only to the prison administration but also to the gang leaders. If a convict had no links with drug trafficking prior to incarceration, they definitely create one behind bars. Ninety-eight percent (98%) of interviewees from the sensitive sample engaged in drug trafficking while in prison. Off-brand inmates, those who are the less conspicuous convicts, end up engaging in illegal activities to avoid retaliation, perpetuating then a cycle of violence in a fragmented geopolitical gang space behind bars. Political pressure towards the validity of the classification system stratified by gang affiliation has impacted on the prison administration to create multiple categories of prisoners, which are mutually exclusive. This has had pervasive impacts on penal affairs such as allocation of sentences, lack of vacancies and disruption of prisoner’s routine. The research shows that the State goes beyond classification of inmates by gang affiliation; it has incorporated elements of gang’s violent tradition to assess and influence justice and prisoner’s progression. This study offers an interesting scope for a comparative analysis through the study of anti-prison gang strategies. Experiences around the globe have been driven to target gangs with racial and ethnical rivalries. Prison gangs in this study are devoted to a more capitalist goal: the monopoly of illegal drug markets in the streets. Such understandings and contextualizing make a significant contribution to re-examining the role of inmate culture as well as the value of contemporary penal reforms designed to making the penal institutions more responsive and interventionist in addressing inmate needs.

Examines the attitudes and perceptions among parolees, and police officers on why inmates join prison gangs, how powerful they are, and their power and control in prison. Data was gathered from 250 surveys distributed to a group of parolees at an undisclosed southern California municipal police department jail, and 250 surveys distributed to police managers attending the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Results of this study validated the hypothesis that there is a significant difference in attitudes and perceptions of parolees and police officers of why inmates join prison gangs and the power and control gang inmates have in prison.

People outside of prison tend to imagine sex in prison as violent gang attacks on defenceless individuals, but in actual fact, sex in prison is more complicated than the isolated gang rapes that take place. For the purpose of this study, the researcher followed the qualitative research approach from a constructivist perspective to understand how participants portrayed or constructed their experiences of victimization and/or perceprion of rape.

Over the last fifty years, California has become one of the largest jailers in the world, incarcerating nearly 128,000 men and women on a $10.5 billion budget. The prison population has rapidly risen over this period, resulting in overly crowded, chaotic prisons and jails that became increasingly difficult to manage. As correctional officers and officials lost control over the prison social order, inmates looked to themselves and created a new set of social norms through race-based gangs. What began with the formation of the Mexican Mafia in 1957 now dictates prison social life, where racially segregated cells, cafeterias, yards, and gyms are the new norm. In an attempt to manage this new social structure, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation unofficially employed the use of racial segregation during the intake process for prison housing. The practice was challenged and eventually overruled in the 2005 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. California, but the State continues to struggle with compliance on multiple fronts. This thesis examines the history and development of race-based gangs in California in an attempt to understand how to manage the racially segregated world of prisons today. It finds that tensions between the courts, the State, and the inmates are ultimately perpetuated by the continuance of racially segregation policies, and it will ultimately take the political will of Department officials to eliminate race-based gangs and enact cultural change.

This thesis examines self-identified gang members and extremists incarcerated in Navy and Marine Corps brigs and disciplinary barracks. Information was gathered from interviews conducted with inmates. The interviews focused on several key issues, including reasons for enlisting in the Navy and Marine Corps; truthfulness with recruiters concerning certain illegal activities prior to enlistment, including juvenile arrests and convictions; the nature and severity of crimes for which members were convicted, including links with gangs or extremist groups; and reasons for lack of assimilation and acculturation into military service. This thesis also provides background information on present enlistment screening procedures, current Department of Defense policies concerning gangs and extremist groups, and demographic data on the characteristics of self- admitted gang members who are incarcerated in a Navy brig. Common themes that emerged from the interviews are presented, and selected summaries are included in an appendix. In addition, the study examines enlistment screening procedures for identifying applicants who have gang or extremist group affiliations, and recommends a number of areas for farther research

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A presente tese dedica-se a uma análise crítica das instituições contemporâneas de controle sobre a população carcerária do estado de São Paulo, e, de maneira mais específica, a uma análise do conflito de coordenação que caracteriza o seu modus operandi. Ajustando o foco sobre os diretores das unidades prisionais, a pesquisa busca compreender como ocorre a atuação desses frente à interveniência crescente de outros atores e grupos sociais na gestão prisional, com destaque para o poder Judiciário e as lideranças internas entre presos, além das secretarias estaduais responsáveis pela gestão prisional às quais os diretores são subordinados. A pesquisa procura compreender a emergência desses novos atores no contexto da gestão penitenciária identificando o processo de fragmentação institucional do exercício de poder sobre a população carcerária por meio de sucessivas reformas realizadas ao longo do século XX, e o quanto esse fenômeno estimulou a emergência de novas forças que se colocaram em disputa pela primazia sobre essa população. Para isto é realizada uma caracterização dessas forças, entre as quais se tornaram mais proeminentes: administração penitenciária central, diretor, diretor de segurança, facções, juiz da execução, defensor público e mídia, e analisa as interações mantidas entre esses atores, com tensões e cooperações estabelecidas ao longo do tempo. A partir de uma análise crítica das premissas que orientam o comportamento de cada um desses atores, a tese apresenta as características da profunda crise de coordenação que define a gestão carcerária no estado de São Paulo nas últimas décadas.
This dissertation provides a critical analysis of contemporary control institutions responsible for the prison population within the state of São Paulo. More specifically, it analyzes the management conflict that characterizes its modus operandi. By focusing on the prison wardens, the research endeavors to understand how the behavior of these actors is influenced by a number of other powers, such as judges, inmates, and the bureaucracy in the state correctional department, to which wardens are subordinate. The research shows that the emergence of these other influences has led to institutional fragmentation in the exercise of power over the prison population. To this end, the research carries out a detailed characterization of these powers and subsequently analyzes the interactions between these actors including their tensions and cooperations over the years. The prominent actors included in analysis are the prison central administration, the warden deputy, the security warden, prison gangs, judges, public defenders and the media. By conducting a critical analysis of the principles that guide the behavior of these actors, the dissertation is able to identify the characteristics of the profound crisis that defines prison administration in São Paulo in the last decades.

"This work includes talking about the crime of Camp Speicher, in which 1,700 students of the Iraqi army of the Sheea creed were killed by the gangs of the terrorist organization ISIS, with the aim of eliminating the members of this sect because of the misleading ideology carried by those gangs. On 6-12-2014, Iraqi soldiers at Camp Speicher (Speicher Air Base) in Tikrit were subjected to murder and enforced disappearance by terrorist organizations because of their affiliation to the Sheea creed. This crime was among a series of brutal crimes for the genocide of Sheeas in Iraq. This is similar to what happened in the Badoush prison crime in the province of Mosul, which the Iraqi Parliament considered it as a crime of genocide, in which these gangs executed about (400) members of the prison inmates of the Sheea component. After ISIS took control of the city of Tikrit in Iraq, and one day after they took control of the city of Mosul, they captured (2000-2200) soldiers and led them to the presidential palaces in Tikrit, and they shot them there and in other areas and buried some of them alive. This disaster had a negative impact on the families of the victims of the Speicher where they went out in demonstrations demanded that the leaders who handed over the victims of Speicher to ISIS must be prosecuted, and in one of the demonstrations they managed to enter Parliament and demanded that the leaders who handed over Speicher to ISIS be held accountable. After that, many demonstrations took place by the families of the victims, some of which led to the closure of a bridge in Baghdad a few times Protesting the government's delay in clarifying the fate of their children or taking quick measures. The Iraqi parliament and government recently considered the Speicher incident “genocide” in reference to the premeditated murder of Badoush Prison inmates in Nineveh Governorate and the unarmed Speicher military base, the premeditated murder of members of the Albu Nimr, Jabour, al-Lahib, and al-Ubaid tribes, and the killing and displacement of civilians from Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks in Sahel Nineveh, Sinjar, deliberate killing and displacement of Turkmens in Tal Afar and Bashir. This decision paves the way for obtaining international recognition from it as a ""genocide"" as stipulated in the Contract of the United Nations in 1948, and Iraq signed it in the fifties of the last century. This study attempts to explain the Al-Ikhnasas Court in looking into the crimes of genocide committed by ISIS against the bereaved students of the Air Force Base (Speicher) due to what this issue raised from the national and international public opinion, especially after the involvement of the Iraqi army leaders in this massacre, according to what witnesses reported in that area and what was reported by soldiers who survived the incident, in addition to the involvement of some members of the Sunni tribes in these crimes with the terrorist organization ISIS. The importance of this study lies in the following aspects: - That ISIS elements were tried according to Anti-Terrorism Law No. 13 of 2005, and from our point of view that the aforementioned law is vague and broader than it should be, and it applies to serious and simple crimes from murder to crimes of sabotage, and the list of crimes punishable by the death penalty according to the aforementioned law is a long list and spacious. - The Iraqi government has embarked on an attempt to develop a legal framework to prosecute ISIS elements, and its mission focused on understanding the procedures and results drawn from those judicial efforts, and its mission also focused on showing the efforts taken by the Iraqi government to address violations in the field of the right to life, including those committed by affiliated forces government as well as other international and domestic actors. The International Criminal Court is specialized in considering specific crimes under Article (5) of its Statute, which are war crimes, aggression and crimes against humanity, which necessitates the adaptation of Speicher's crime within any of the mentioned types of crimes. The assumption of the International Criminal Court in relation to the Speicher crime, includes several positive matters and results at the same time a set of negatives, which must be presented to those positives and negatives in order to give preference between them and the choice of authorizing the court to consider the crime or not. The terrorist organization ISIS has committed serious systematic violations, including war crimes and others, and perhaps those that are not under its control, and that none of these crimes can be addressed within the anti-terrorism law, which cannot address human rights violations. The international community has recognized the heinous violations committed by ISIS against the citizens of Iraq by adopting Resolution (2370) in September of 2017, issued by the Security Council, which authorizes the Security Council to appoint an investigation team to support local efforts to hold ISIS elements accountable by collecting and preserving evidence in Iraq, which can rise to a high level, and it was committed by the elements of the organization. It considers that the decision constitutes a burden and an obligation on Iraq to investigate all allegations of violations committed by government forces for the purpose of holding them accountable, as well as requiring the establishment of special courts and trained judges in relation to ISIS crimes to deal with them. Terrorism is a global curse that has recently spread horizontally to all countries of the world and its effects have been concentrated vertically in some countries, and no one denies that the parties to this phenomenon are increasing (perpetrators and victims) and the United Nations in particular and the international community in general has not succeeded in reducing it despite the fact that the resolutions of the UN Security Council It is increasing, but the proportionality is absent between these decisions and the practical reality. The phenomenon of terrorism is spreading rapidly, and the perpetrators of terrorist acts are on the rise, corresponding to an increase in the victims of terrorism. Also, the circumstances and events that Iraq is going through, especially after 2003, put it at the forefront of countries which suffers from terrorism that has killed the people, using methods and forms that were not previously known and brutal and bloody cruel. ) for the year 2005, and since terrorism was not limited to Iraq, but included many countries, and was not specific to a place or time, nor was it recent in terms of composition. In addition, the aforementioned law cannot be aware of all violations of international and humanitarian law, as we mentioned previously, which requires the necessity of referring the criminals to a competent court. The Court conducts its rule under Article (13) of its Statute when referred to it by a state party to the same system or by the Security Council or when the Public Prosecutor conducts the investigation on his own, and then how does the Court take its measures regarding the aforementioned crime if we take a look Considering that the State of Iraq is not a member of the Statute of the Court. The rule of the court is free from the death penalty, which makes the idea of authorizing the court to consider the crime rejected by most Iraqis, especially the families of the victims. What are the negative aspects of the Iraqi national judiciary’s view of the Speicher crime, and how can it be avoided if the International Criminal Court plays this role? What are the guarantees provided by the court in the event that it proceeds with its procedures regarding this crime? The research on this subject is according to the appropriate method, which is the analytical and comparative method, which works on studying and comparing topics by analyzing ideas and jurisprudential rulings, and the positions of the governments of countries and the United Nations, as well as the resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly, and comparing arbitration between Iraqi courts. And the international courts regarding the trial of the perpetrators of the Speicher base crime, and then come up with a set of conclusions and recommendations."

Face aging and rejuvenation is to predict the face of a person at different ages. While tremendous progress have been made in this topic, there are two central problems remaining largely unsolved: 1) the majority of prior works requires sequential training data, which is very rare in real scenarios, and 2) how to simultaneously render aging face and preserve personality. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we develop a novel dual conditional GAN (DCGAN) mechanism, which enables face aging and rejuvenation to be trained from multiple sets of unlabeled face images with different ages. In our architecture, the primal conditional GAN transforms a face image to other ages based on the age condition, while the dual conditional GAN learns to invert the task. Hence a loss function that accounts for the reconstruction error of images can preserve the personal identity, while the discriminators on the generated images learn the transition patterns (e.g., the shape and texture changes between age groups) and guide the generation of age-specific photo-realistic faces. Experimental results on two publicly dataset demonstrate the appealing performance of the proposed framework by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.

In recent years ultrasonic-guided waves (UGWs) have been successfully employed in structural health monitoring (SHM) for damage localization due to their high sensitivity to changes in the mechanical properties of the medium they travel through. Lamb waves (LW) are a particular type of UGW that can be generated by piezoelectric transducers placed on thin-walled structures, such as vehicles in general (terrestrial, naval, and aeronautical), and present characteristics that are favorable to SHM. Damage localization using LWs has been commonly accomplished through tomographic algorithms. However, these methods have unresolved issues such as artifacts generation in damage probability maps and a strong reliance on sensor network configuration for signal acquisition. As a solution, data-driven approaches based on supervised machine learning have been suggested. These methods have demonstrated good performance. However, for reliable results, they require large, labeled datasets, meaning that acquisitions must be performed before and after the structure is damaged. These datasets, especially data from the damaged state, are generally not available for real-life structures, given the cost and complexity to experimentally replicate certain damages. Unsupervised machine learning methods might be a solution to this problem, given that the neural network is trained using data acquired from the un-damaged structure only. To this date, no fully unsupervised damage localization frameworks have been proposed. Hence, in this work, two unsupervised data-driven methods are presented to process LWs to localize damage. Specifically, convolutional auto-associative neural networks (CAANNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs). Both methods process diagnostic signals without requiring any prior feature extraction. After all signals are processed, a damage probability map is generated. The performance of both methods is tested using an experimental dataset of LW acquisitions using a set of piezoelectric transducers on a full-scale composite wing. Results showed that the proposed methods have good damage localization accuracy.