Competing for Control

"Certainly, prisons are dangerous places that impact the communities as well as the lives of inmates and those who work there. Over the last several years, prison gangs have made headlines across the country. The 2013 inmate hunger strike in California-involving over 30,000 inmates-was organized by members of black, Latino, and white gang members housed in solitary confinement for indeterminate sentences (K. A. Reiter 2016); the Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Corrections was executed at the doorstep of his home in 2013 by a recently-released 211 Crew prison gang member (Prendergast 2014); and a multi- jurisdictional task force led to the indictments of nearly 75 Aryan Brotherhood of Texas gang members, some of whom were implicated in the blowtorch removal of a gang tattoo, the inspiration for a Sons of Anarchy episode (Schiller 2016). These are just a few of the events that illustrate the significance of prison gangs for society"--