Prison Gangs and Security Threat Groups - Research Paper Example

Prison Gangs and Security Threat Groups: Establishing a Connection with the Phenomenon of Illegal Immigration This paper deals with the pressing issue of gangs and security threat groups in American prisons – a topic that has been much discussed, especially in light of increasingly alarming reports on violence taking place inside prisons. Indeed, the issue of gangs and security threats in prisons can take on many dimensions and angles, but this paper will focus on the relationship between prison gangs and the issue of illegal immigration and immigration policy. This paper will try to look at the complicated picture of immigration in the country today and see how this is giving rise to gang violence, particularly in prisons. It will answer the following main question: to what extent is the phenomenon of prison gangs/security threat groups a result of immigration policies in the United States of America? Firstly, this paper will establish the connection between gangs and immigration – pointing out how many gangs are non-American in origin. Second this paper will then argue that the policy of keeping illegal immigrants in jail has had tremendous social ramifications, one of which is the creation and flourishing of prison gangs that wreak violence and create problems not only for the jails but extending even into the cities and the non-incarcerated population. Thirdly, this paper will look at the other side of the issue and discuss if gangs have also emerged as a result of unfair racial profiling, a “self-fulfilling” prophecy if you will. Finally, this paper will end with some conclusions and reflections, as well as recommendations for policy changes. I. Gangs and Immigration Immigrant inmates in American jails are growing. Says the Federation for American Immigration Reform (2007): "The criminal alien problem is growing. Criminal aliens--non-citizens who commit crimes--are a growing threat to public safety and national security, as well as a drain on our scarce criminal justice resources. In 1980, our federal and state prisons housed fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens. By the end of 1999, these same prisons housed over 68,000 criminal aliens. Today, criminal aliens account for over 29 percent of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities and a higher share of all federal prison inmates. These prisoners represent the fastest growing segment of the federal prison population. It is true that there are some gangs that are based in the United States and do not have any immigrant roots. A very good example of this is the Aryan brotherhood gang which is made up of white males and who originated in the San Quentin State Prison, California Department of Corrections. Their main ideology is white supremacy and in fact, detest immigrant groups, especially blacks. However, by and large, prison gangs and security threat groups are made up of immigrants – particularly those coming from Latin American countries like Mexico, Puerto Rico and Colombia. A good example from the Florida Bureau of Corrections information website is the Neta, whose membership is made up of Hispanics, primarily those of Puerto Rican descent. They are involved in the drug trade and are often engaged to perform acts of violence, also known as “hits”. Another example is the Black Guerrilla family, which is made up of blacks and actually is the most political of the gangs, with an anti-racism agenda and a Marxist-Maoist-Leninist ideology. From Mexico, one has the La Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia. The La Nuestra Familia is made up of rural Mexicans, while the Mexican Mafia is made up of urban Mexicans. Both have a deep hatred for each other. In fact it is said that the Nuestra Familia was formed to protect against the Mexican Mafia. All of these gangs have similar characteristics: violent methods, a clear hierarchy and structure, and recruitment within the jails. But perhaps the inspiration for these gangs and the most well-known security threat group is none other than the Italian mafia. The Italian Mafia is now raking in big profits in the drug trade, conducted even from the confines of prison. It is said that the Mafia in the United States began when Giussepe Esposito relocated to the United States from Sicily. He moved to New Orleans, where he oversaw a flourishing Sicilian criminal operation. (Lyman, 2011: 256). Seeing that America presented huge opportunities, the Mafia kept on growing. In the 1920s, the Mafia families had control over virtually all criminal enterprises, and they purchased impunity by corrupting high-level police and government officials. The 20s was the period of the Prohibition, and the Mafia gained immense wealth through bootlegging, or the smuggling of prohibited liquor. They then spread out and engaged in other business, most notably drug trafficking. The Pizza Connection was a large-scale investigation undertaken in the 1980s that revealed just how big the drug operations of the Sicilian Mafia were and how they have managed to penetrate the American markets. According to Lyman, “the breadth of the investigations expanded worldwide, with Mafia members identified in such countries as Brazil, Canada, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and the United States. So vast was the investigation that it took federal investigators one full year to try the case.” (page 259). The Mafia often relies on the strategy of cooptation of state agents through corruption. So embedded are they in the structure that they often pose serious consequences, not only for law and order, but for the growth of the legitimate economy. Says Fiorentini and Peltzman (1997: 35), “the mafia creates monopolies in local enterprises, controls entry and maximises revenue by extracting monopoly profits as protection payments; new investment may be discouraged and old investment driven out.” The similarity between the Mafia and other prison groups is that these organizations typically make use of very well-defined structures within the organization to exact commitment and accountability from its members. Because of the illegality of the operations, it is necessary that no one informs the police or in any way go against the leadership and disclose the covert activities of the organization to a competitor. The main difference is that whilst the Mafia is made up of only one ethnic origin (Italians or more specifically Sicilians), the organizations are made up of diverse ethnic origins such as Latin America. What was cause for surprise is that these drug organizations or gangs have turned out to be even more powerful than the Mafia. According to Lyman, “(i)n some cases, drug territory has even been surrendered to the newer gangs, with drugs being viewed as too risky or competitive.” (page 248). II. The rising number of illegal immigrants in jail and the proliferation of gangs In this part, this paper looks at one of the main reasons for the rising of gangs: the policy of jailing illegal immigrants. There are two-fold issues that accompany the social impact. The first one is that it does not solve the problem of crimes committed by illegal aliens at the root. If we want all the crimes that attend the phenomenon of illegal immigration – for example, human trafficking and drug trafficking – to ba addressed with dispatch, the best thing to do is to send the ringleaders back to their home countries. Keeping them in our jails means keeping them in our territory, and still enables them to communicate with people. Drug cells, for example, are run from inside prison sometimes. An “operation” is occasionally masterminded by a person in detention with the good fortune of having a cellular phone. For example, we always here in the news of drug syndicates being run by a drug lord who is in an American prison. It is likely that he is not an American citizen, but he is incarcerated in American soil and he continues drug operates from the confines of his cell. Also, in some cases it is in the jails where the criminals become more hard-core, instead of becoming rehabilitated. In the jails of Texas, for example, the Texas Chicano Brotherhood is doing active recruitment among young men who find themselves in jail for petty crimes (Camp, 1985). When they come out, they become active members who graduate from petty theft and vandalism, to murder and drugs and human trafficking. Are these the people we want back in our streets? Would we really feel safe having them in our midst? If we think that for as long as they are in jail, they are no longer a burden to society, we have to think again. A recent article by the Telegraph (2011) has reported that the Mafia resorts to creative ways to get in touch with jailed Mafia bosses, even using the text ticker function of a football show on television to send coded messages that sound innocent to Mafia bosses who are behind bars. There is no truth therefore to the naïve belief that just because someone is in jail, he cannot do damage to society and he no longer poses a threat. That the upswing in illegal immigration has taken a toll on law and order is confirmed by the Western Governor’s Association in a 2006 policy resolution with the title “US- Mexico Border Security and Illegal Immigration”: "As a result of the shared border and proximity to Mexico, Western states of the continental United States suffer a disproportionate financial burden on... criminal justice systems because of unauthorized migration from Mexico. Illegal immigration, however, is not solely a Western issue. It impacts the economy of the entire nation... Because border control measures have increased in recent years, so has the use of human trafficking networks, resulting in more violent crimes along the border, a dramatic uptick in assaults on law enforcement, and overwhelmed state and local criminal justice and correctional systems." Thus, if we really want criminal activity to abate – particularly criminal activity that are in our country as a result of the inflow of shady immigrants – the solution is not to keep them in our jails and provide them not only with opportunities to wreak more havoc, but also opportunities to recruit new membership into their unholy criminal fold. (Fong, 1990). It is even possible that they recruit young Americans and turn them to a life of crime. Indeed, for our country’s security it is easier to just send them back to their country of origin and permanently stamp on their passports that they can no longer return to the United States of America. Another issue that arises is the congestion of our courts. Our dockets are already congested as it is and adding the cases of illegal immigrants is an overburden to the system. Burke and Myers (2011), writing for Huffington Post, sum up the situation nicely: Sentences for felony immigration crimes, which include illegal crossing as well as other crimes such as alien smuggling, accounted for about 87 percent of the increase in the number of Hispanics sent to prison over the past decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission data. The trend has divided lawmakers and officials in the courts and along the border. Some politicians believe the en masse hearings should be expanded to deter illegal immigration. Others question whether the system actually affects people seeking to cross the border, while some contend the programs distract prosecutors from pursuing more serious crimes. The latter position appears to be more sound. The system does not seem to affect the decision of Hispanics to come to the United States, as more and more of them enter our borders every year. They are seemingly impervious to the very real possibility of being caught, apprehended and detained. What the system does effect is the criminal justice system itself, which is made up of a finite number of personnel and have a finite number of hours to complete their jobs. If their daily schedules are filled only to attending illegal immigration cases, what is to become of the other serious cases that they must handle as well? A poignant excerpt from the same article (ibid) is as follows – The programs have raised concerns about defendants constitutional rights and the sheer volume of work flooding the courts. Critics say the programs overburden the court system and distract authorities from prosecuting major crimes.The debate surfaced tragically on Jan. 8, the day of the Tucson shooting rampage that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Arizonas Chief Judge John Roll, who died in the gunfire at the Safeway parking lot, had been pleading with Congress to hire more judges in Arizona, the busiest corridor for illegal immigration and drug smuggling. There were not enough judges to handle cases because of the sheer volume of illegal immigration cases that needed to be resolved. This underscores a serious flaw in the criminal justice system that needs to be properly, urgently and definitively addressed: how do we beef up the system so that it can still use an iron fist against illegal immigrants and the phenomenon of illegal immigration but can still have the operational capacity to address problems of crime? The most equitable solution therefore would be to just deport all illegal immigrants under deportation proceedings so as not to burden our jails and the judicial system. III. Illegal Immigrants and “Labelling”: how this causes the rise of prison gangs On the other side of the coin, it is also possible that we unwittingly encourage the rise of prison gangs by automatically labelling illegal immigrants as threats. It is important to note that the process of labeling begins at the behest of a ‘moral entrepreneur’ (Becker, 1963, p. 147), who makes a claim that some behavior or action is wrong and then makes new rules or code of conduct in order to stop that behavior or action, and punish the actor. They package their efforts as a moral crusade, but what really happens is that “they add to the power they derive from the legitimacy of their moral position the power they derive from their superior position in society" (Becker 1963, p. 149). In illegal immigration in the United States, the moral entrepreneurs were those who expressed objections to the unfettered entry of Mexicans into American soil, a phenomenon made complicated by the fact that many of the wealthy and powerful took advantage of the cheap labor provided by these immigrants. Bustamante (1972) presented a fascinating description of the beginnings or root of this labeling of illegal immigrants: The appearance of the Border Patrol in 1924 altered the primary deviance of the illegal entrant by crystallizing a new social reaction to the violation of immigration laws. The new police force was to reveal these primary deviants, violators of immigration laws. In this process, the term ‘wetback’, previously purely descriptive, acquired a new meaning. It became the ‘label’ or ‘stigma’ by which the illegal immigrant was made visible. At the same time, the label ‘wetback’ also became the symbol by which the illegal immigrant was able to identify a new ‘me’ for himself. (p. 708) It was not difficult to see how the immigrants had become treated as deviants. There was rising resentment caused by their presence because they were taking away jobs from the local people, since it became more economically efficient to hire those who do not refuse work even at very low wages and subhuman conditions. Thus, there is a lot of blaming involved. The American farm worker blames the Mexican for depressing the wages. The reaction then was to characterize them as deviants – not only because they were here in the country illegally, but because of a panoply of stereotypes attached to them: uncivilized, stupid, with a penchant for criminal behavior. There is perhaps credence to the observation made by Goode (1974, p. 577) when he said that: We can never fully understand what is deviant until we get a good look at what isn’t. By looking at both, we realize that it is not ‘social cost’ nor any objective threat to society that accounts for behavior labeled as deviant or crystallized into formal law. We couldn’t deal with the issue if we concentrated exclusively on deviant (or criminal) behavior itself. It is also argued that the labeling of deviancy has the tendency to be a self-fulfilling prophecy – with the labeled party assuming the label as his identity and perhaps experimenting with other forms of deviance. In cases of alcoholic deviancy, Roman and Trice (1968, p. 245) wrote that, “the mere process of labeling and sick-role assignment may serve to aggravate and perpetuate a condition which is initially under an individual’s control.” An analogy may be drawn here to the case of illegal immigrants. Because they are pushed to the side, because they are treated not as human beings but as burdens, the human tendency is to lash back. There is also a tendency to retreat to social groups where deviant activities are accepted (Bernburg, et. al. 2006, p. 68), and this can push the immigrants into an even deeper web and a life of crime. They may not have been criminals or deviants in their home countries but because of the stereotypes that have been assigned them, they find themselves adopting these stereotypes. This becomes especially so when there are public announcements of the deviancy (Wilkins, 1964, p. 45).Where illegal migrants are concerned, this can take the form of public raids, humiliating arrests by border patrols, even media reports where immigrants are subjected to derision and ridicule. It creates in the illegal immigrant a sense that he or she is being labeled as deviant and criminal by society, and this defines them and determines future actions. Conclusion These are trying times for the United States – the economy is at a downturn, joblessness is a reality for many ordinary Americans, there is a global right-wing trend sweeping over the world as a result of the recession that is making governments erect higher borders. There is reason to believe that the policies will tilt persuasively against illegal immigrants and there will be a stricter implementation of immigration policies. This might mean more border patrols, greater penalties for illegal immigrants, greater penalties for those who hire them. It will also mean, unfortunately, the rise in prison gangs from those who think the system is unfair or those who feel the need for a mistaken sense of brotherhoods. Oftentimes too, police brutality begets violence because they feel that violence is the only way to aside. Alongside this plethora of problems, it must bear repeating that we have to reexamine our penchant for labeling people as a result of our fears and our need for “sameness”. It is valid to push for stricter anti-illegal immigrant regulations in order to safeguard American jobs, but it is never valid to judge people on the basis of race or culture, or to make “illegal immigrant” the core identity of the Mexicans, Peruvians, Filipinos and others who enter our borders because this is akin to labeling them. This can cause problems not only for the labeled but for the country as well, and can bring about social consequences with irreversible damages. References Becker, Howard. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Becker, Howard. (2008). “Labelling Theory” in Thio, A., Calhoun, T. & Conyers, A. (eds.). Readings in Deviant Behavior (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson.Education,Inc.  Bustamante, J. (1972). “The Wetback as Deviant: An Application of Labeling Theory”. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 77(4), 706-718. Bernburg, J., Krohn, M. and Rivera, C. (2006). “Official Labelling, Criminal Embeddedness and Subsequent Delinquency: A Longitudinal Test of Labelling Theory”. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. Vol. 43, pages 67-88. Camp,C. (1985). Prison Gangs: Their Extent, Nature and Impact on Prisons. Washington, DC: Criminal Justice Institute. Chiswick, B. (1988). “Illegal Immigration and Border Control.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. Vol. (3), 101-115. Farrington, David P. (1977). “The Effects of Public Labelling.” British Journal of Criminology. Vol. 17, 112-125. Federation for American Immigration Reform. (2007). Criminal Aliens. Retrieved from http://www.fairus.org/site/PageNavigator/issues/illegal_immigration.html Fiorentini, G. and Peltzman, S. (1997). The economics of organised crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fong, R. (1990). “The Organizational Structure of Prison Gangs: A Texas Case Study.” 54 Fed. Probation 36. Goode, E. (1974). “On Behalf of Labelling Theory.” Social Problems. Vol. 22, 570-583. Lyman, M. D. (2011). Drugs in Society: Causes, Concepts and Control. (6th Ed.), Burlington, MA: Anderson Publishing.  Roman, P. and Trice, H. (1968). “The Sick Role, Labelling Theory and the Deviant Drinker.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry. Vol. 14, 245-251. Squires, N. (2010). “Mafia Using Football Show to Send Messages to Jailed Bosses.” The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/7958800/Mafia-using-football-show-to-send-messages-to-jailed-bosses.html Wilkins, Leslie. 1964. Social Deviance. London: Tavistock Read More