The Breaking Time

Prison gangs and the breakdown of the justice system

Photo by Mark Allen Johnson

Back in March, two local prosecutors in Kaufman County, Texas, were killed, probably by members of the Texas Aryan Brotherhood. They were targeted for supporting a federal investigation. The prosecutor promptly withdrew "for security reasons."

About a month later, a sweeping indictment charged that the Black Guerilla Family, also a prison gang, had corrupted 13 prison guards and turned the whole Baltimore jail into a stronghold.

Despite their ideological origins, both are more traditional syndicates now, dedicated to running extensive drug and crime empires. This piece, by an ex-con familiar with the Aryan Brotherhood, illuminates some key points about how they operate on the ground level.

But what's missing from the discussion is exactly how dire a breakdown of the justice system the power of prison gangs represents.

While the mafia, and every other bit of organized crime humans have come up with, had connections within prisons and was prepared for its members to do time, the entire structure relied on most of the members being out on the street most of the time. 

Not so with prison gangs. They started with most of their members behind bars. Traditional ways of breaking up criminal power structures (isolating members in different prisons, big racketeering cases), just helped them to grow.

So what can the state use against them? Round them up and send them to prison? They're just going back home. Solitary confinement? Their leadership is used to it, and can still communicate just fine. Their power's enough that they can even outright attack the state in a way the mafia never dared to (the Five Families actually killed those who went after prosecutors).

A more ruthless government might see the simplest solution as executing the prison gangs' leadership: it has them imprisoned, after all. But given the brutishly corrupt nature of much of the existing prison system, that would probably just open the door to even more human rights abuses, including to prisoners who aren't even part of the gangs. If the corruption's deep enough, like at the Baltimore jail, it might even give the gangs another tool to consolidate their power by eliminating their rivals.

And that's not even getting into the existence of pockets like Mountain Home that serve as out-of-prison bases and no-go zones for law enforcement. That bodes well.

Amazingly, we've managed to create a system that fails at both punishment and rehabilitation.

Cash isn't going to disappear

Cash isn't going to disappear. Not now. Not as electronic currencies get more advanced. Not when your mother starts using Bitcoin. Human beings will continue to use currency for a long, long damn time to come.

There are simply too many niches in an economy that using physical, anonymous objects to represent economic value fills for it to fade entirely. 

I bring this up because every once in awhile someone suggests that cash is on the way out, or outright encourages it. With Bitcoins' recent price surge, even as governments look at ways to regulate those that use it, there's more talk about how close we are to a cyberpunk cashless society.

Yes, potentially, if enough large sectors of the economy agreed all at once, the transition could go a long way to squeezing cash out in favor of say, Bitcoin or one of its eventual descendants.

But realistically companies start accepting Bitcoins out of convenience, and will accept their regulation for the same reason: no one wants to be the sacrificial lamb to the government. If you don't believe me, ask Wikileaks who won after national governments started leaning on the companies it relied upon.

Even as anonymous online currencies become more advanced (and potentially more appealing to some sectors of the grey market), hard cash occupies too much of an easy route to fade entirely.

Put it this way: it takes serious, ongoing technological innovation to try and keep an electronic currency one step ahead of the state, while it take serious, ongoing resources from governments just to feebly track the existing under-the-table cash markets. They're probably not in too big a hurry to turn over every stone, either, as the black market helped bail out the legal one during the last financial crisis.

It's hard to beat the basic fact that you can hand a wad of faded paper to someone and they'll give you something in return. Hell, if you really want to get innovative, you can even use dish detergent.