The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System.

• Author: Bates, Adam
• Position: Book review

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

David Skarbek

New York: Oxford, 2014, 224 pp.

"In short, in California, the question of how to manage prisons has resolved itself into the question of how to manage prison gangs." With these introductory words from researcher John J. Dilulio Jr., David Skarbek's The Social Order of the Underworld establishes its premise: the inmates run the asylum, and America's criminal justice and prison policies are largely responsible.

Skarbek, currently a lecturer in Political Economy at King's College London, goes where few economists have gone: into American prisons to learn how they are governed. Due to the limited availability of data about the inner workings of prison populations, as well as the illicit nature of much of what his study describes, Skarbek primarily relies on court records, firsthand accounts, and documentaries, along with whatever data he was able to glean from state governments and extant sociological research. The end result is a meticulously researched and persuasive argument for rejecting previous explanations for the rise of prison gangs in favor of a rational choice conception of prison governance.

Rational choice theory consists of two main ideas: people are subjectively self-interested and people adjust their behavior according to a rational cost-benefit analysis. Indeed, Skarbek notes, the incentives for prisoners to behave rationally in response to institutional changes are even greater than for free men, as the cost of deviation for a prisoner is often swiftly imposed and brutal.

The American prison system denies many high-demand goods and services to prisoners. In turn, the provision of those goods and services is inevitably a profitable endeavor in a system that lacks the legal authority to employ particularly brutal means of suppressing it (Skarbek rather blithely makes the point that prison gangs do not appear to be a problem in countries where the punishment for inmate gang affiliation is death). The result is a massive black market for drugs and amenities like cell phones. In addition, and perhaps more interesting, are the governance institutions that emerge to resolve disputes, establish order, and facilitate commerce. Gangs have proven to be an effective means of meeting these demands.

It wasn't always so. Skarbek walks us through the 20th century of California prisons, beginning in the 1940s and '50s when prison gangs did not...