Prison gangs, in Latin America and in the U.S.

 It's one thing to be able to capture and confine prisoners. When gangs are involved, it's quite another thing to control the prisons, or the ability of prisoners to continue to control gang activity outside of prison.

The NYT has the story, from Latin America:

In Latin America, Guards Don’t Control Prisons, Gangs Do. Intended to fight crime, Latin American prisons have instead become safe havens and recruitment centers for gangs, fueling a surge in violence. By Maria Abi-Habib, Annie Correal and Jack Nicas

"Inside prisons across Latin America, criminal groups exercise unchallenged authority over prisoners, extracting money from them to buy protection or basic necessities, like food.

"The prisons also act as a safe haven of sorts for incarcerated criminal leaders to remotely run their criminal enterprises on the outside, ordering killings, orchestrating the smuggling of drugs to the United States and Europe and directing kidnappings and extortion of local businesses.

"When officials attempt to curtail the power criminal groups exercise from behind bars, their leaders often deploy members on the outside to push back.

“The principal center of gravity, the nexus of control of organized crime, lies within the prison compounds,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for Ecuador’s Army, and an analyst on security matters.

“That’s where let’s say the management positions are, the command positions,” he added. “It is where they give the orders and dispensations for gangs to terrorize the country.”

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I wrote a related post in November (see below) about a Brazilian prison gang, and received an illuminating email from Professor David Skarbek of Brown University, saying

"I enjoyed your blog post about the PPC Brazilian prison gang. I thought that you might be interested to know that the same phenomenon exists in the US as well. I'm attaching a piece I published in the American Political Science Review on the Mexican Mafia in Southern California."

Here's the link to that article:

Skarbek, David. "Governance and prison gangs." American Political Science Review 105, no. 4 (2011): 702-716.

Abstract: 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.

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Earlier

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Balance of violence: prison-based criminal cartels, the case of Brazil's PCC.