Book Review: Competing for Control—Gangs and the Social Order of Prisons

• Date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/00938548211055715
• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Review

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2022, Vol. 49, No. 4, April 2022, 613 –616.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548211055715

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© 2021 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

613

BOOK REVIEW

Competing for Control—Gangs and the Social Order

of Prisons

Pyrooz, D. C., & Decker, S. H. (2019). Competing for Control: Gangs and the Social Order of Prisons.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 292 pp, $34.99 paperback ISBN 978-1-108-73574-2.

Drs. Pyrooz and Decker have conducted a landmark prison gang study named the

LoneStar Project. These highly regarded criminologists and gang scholars are emi-

nently qualified to conduct such a challenging study. Dr. Decker recently was recognized as

the most widely published scholar in gang research in the period 1900–2015 (Gravel et al.,

2016). Decker and Pyrooz (2015) were editors of The Handbook of Gangs, containing a

wealth of research on the gang topic. Undoubtedly ahead of all other young gang scholars

at this juncture in his career, Dr. Pyrooz already has authored or coauthored more than 50

gang research articles and book chapters. Pyrooz and Decker’s detailed prison gang study

(carried out in 2014–2018) is the first large-scale research on people in custody and the first

such study to incorporate a follow-up component.

Heretofore, limited rigorous research had been published on prison gangs, having begun

to advance slowly following Camp and Camp’s (1985) foundational study. Pyrooz and

Decker do an outstanding job in drawing attention to the most pertinent research to date and

integrating selected findings from prior studies that draw attention to key features and func-

tions of prison gangs. As examples, they acknowledge the noteworthy contributions of

Buentello et al. (1991) and Jacobs (1974).

Pyrooz and Decker selected the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prison

system for study because it has long been recognized as having multiple prison gangs and

considerable gang activity (Howell, 2015). In the landmark Ruiz v. Estelle (503 F. Supp.

1265 (S.D. Tex. 1980) case, the court ruled that confined persons selected by Texas prison

authorities to help maintain order (called “building tenders”) was an unconstitutional form of

prison security. Once that practice was terminated, the control vacuum was quickly filled by

prison gangs. A state of chaos followed and persisted for some time (during which 52 homi-

cides occurred inside Texas prisons), and much of the violence was due to explosive inter-

group conflicts, mainly between the Texas Syndicate and Mexican Mafia gangs. Inadvertently

making matters worse, 70,000 prison beds were added across the state during the administra-

tion of Texas Governor Ann Richards (1991–1995), doubling the prison capacity to 128,000

people (Reid, 2012). At the time of Pyrooz and Decker’s study, they note that the Texas

prison system housed more than 11,000 confirmed gang members—more than the total

1055715CJBXXX10.1177/00938548211055715Criminal Justice and BehaviorBook Review

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