Prison Gangs

        Prison Gangs are growing across the country from California to Massachusetts. They are very organized and deadly. They reach out from their cells to help organize and control the crime in the streets. Law enforcement personal began to monitor gang activities in the 1970’s. Their first attempts were only to identify the gangs which had some form of formal structure, a constitution of what they believed in or some identifiable tenets guiding their activities. Law enforcement realized that even less organized groups could still have a significant effect the security and control how an institution is running. In 1986 the United States Department of Justice identified 114 different prison gangs in the U.S. that constituted as much as three percent of the total prison population in the United States. Five have emerged as the most powerful and influential gangs. The Mexican Mafia, the Lu Nuestra Familia, the Texas Syndicate, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Black Guerilla Family. Each one of these gangs maintain a membership requirement of murder or spilling of another’s blood. Illegal drugs from the drug trade is what these organizations rely heavily on for revenue. Some gangs are nothing but a group of inmates in one prison, while other’s gangs can be large enough to connect with others in different U.S. Prisons.

        In 1996, the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that prison disturbances increased by about 400 percent in the early nineties, which indicted to authorities that gangs were becoming more active. In states like Illinois, as much as 60 percent of the prison population belongs to gangs. Florida’s Department of Corrections identified 240 street gangs operating in their prisons. Prison gangs cause a lot of problems in the correctional system because what it is doing is separating inmates in to groups and then the groups don’t like each other.

        One of the biggest gangs in the correctional system is the Aryan brotherhood. The Aryan brotherhood was started in San Quentin prison in 1967. The reason it was formed was to protect white inmates from the blacks and Hispanics. Many of the original members had a Nazi type gang history. Other names for the Aryan brotherhood are: AB, Alice, Alice Baker, Tip, and Brand. In the beginning, the premise of the Aryan brotherhood was white supremacy and German and Irish ancestry. Over the years, the Aryan Brotherhood has moved away from the Neo-Nazi philosophy, with members staying with Irish ancestry and Viking symbolism and history. The Aryan brotherhood has a “blood in-blood out” rule, which means the only way in is to kill, and the only way out is to be killed (gangs or us). The Aryan Brotherhood has several was to identify them by the symbols the use. Some of the symbols are shamrock