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

• Author: D'Amico, Daniel
• Position: Book review

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

By David Skarbek

New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Pp. xii, 224. $99 cloth.

David Skarbek's new book The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System is meticulously researched, soundly reasoned, well written, and accessible to specialist scholars and casual readers alike. It should be considered required if not immediate reading for anyone with serious research interests in either economics or the applied fields of crime and punishment.

First and foremost, Skarbek's work reaffirms the explanatory power of the economic way of thinking. His commitment to rational-choice analysis and his understanding surrounding the potentials for self-regulating and spontaneously evolved social institutions offer fresh insights to comprehend an important topic relatively uninvestigated in recent years through similar techniques. Previous researchers attributed prison gangs' rise and stability to latent racial hostilities, but such analysis leaves much unexplained and fails to fully accord with the particular timing and magnitudes of the trend. In contrast, Skarbek considers seemingly psychotic gang members as rational and purposeful agents. Their preferences are subjectively shaped by their criminal identities, just as their pursued courses of action are uniquely constrained by their imprisonment. As a result of this view, he is able to recognize how the distinctive conditional factors of prison society--such as extreme resource scarcity, a population of potentially violent and hostile agents, and unreliable security from public authorities--shape inmates' incentives and behaviors in favor of the emergence of rules and customs galvanized within the organizational form of prison gangs.

Skarbek provides a uniquely compelling and I think accurate explanation for the puzzling and recent rise of criminal gang organizations throughout the American prison system. In short, inmates coalesced on the organizational form of prison gangs because guarded security and previously common social customs were less effective amid extreme prison population growth during the late twentieth century, and so the inmates received from gang organizations governance mechanisms akin to contract enforcement, personal security, and dispute resolution.

In prison societies, material resources from basic amenities to narcotics are heavily regulated and/or...