Structural Disorganization: Can Prison Gangs Mitigate Serious Violence in Carceral Institutions?

This article employs a theoretical framework of disparate origin I term Structural Disorganization to analyze the apparent inverse relationship between the emergence of inmate organization hegemony and the rate of serious inmate violence in California prisons demonstrated by over 3 decades of inmate violence data collected from 1975 to 2006, suggesting the mitigating effect of inmate organization structure on serious violence in the carceral community. While the limitations of the data available preclude definitive proof of causality in the positivistic sense, the structural disorganization framework provides an intriguing analytical perspective for the seeming anomaly in the data regarding the effects of inmate organization hegemony and rates of serious inmate violence. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for the wider Kingpin Strategy employed by the US government and its proxies, followed by speculation on how the structural disorganization framework can be employed in future research and analysis to explain the relationship between organizational structures and rates of serious criminal violence in criminalized communities, both domestic and international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]