California's Prison Gangs
07/01/2014
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Via Marginal Revolution, here’s a fairly interesting book:

The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System by David Skarbek

I read the first 38 pages online. It focuses on California prison gangs largely from a rational choice economics model. Unfortunately, the free sample runs out just as the book is explaining how the immense increase in nonwhite prisoners in California post-1960s changed the culture inside of prisons from the largely gang-free 1950s (which sounds a lot like a Jimmy Cagney movie: “To me, you’re a face and a number, and let’s keep it that way”) to the gang-run present.

I wrote about California prison gangs for VDARE a decade ago. The SPLC has made a huge amount of money off the existence of “white supremacist” prison gangs (for some reason, the Mexican Mafia or the Black Guerilla Family are never described as “supremacist”), but even the introduction to this book shows how misleading the SPLC’s marketing stance is.

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