Abstract
Drs. Pyrooz and Decker have conducted a landmark prison gang study named the LoneStar Project. These highly regarded criminologists and gang scholars are eminently 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 functions 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 homicides occurred inside Texas prisons), and much of the violence was due to explosive intergroup 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 administration 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 number of confined persons in almost half of the 50 U.S. prison systems. To be sure, the Texas prison system provided a fertile setting for their study of prison gangs.
Pyrooz and Decker set out with several big picture research issues in mind: how gangs organize and govern inside prisons, who joins gangs and how they get out of them, the dark side of prison gangs (including misconduct and violence), the ways in which gang membership spills into the streets, and the direct links between the street-based and prison gangs. To address these key research issues—and many others—the study authors’ research team interviewed 802 imprisoned male gang members and nongang individuals (368 gang members and 434 nongang persons) at the outset and again immediately prior to their release from Texas prisons. In addition, Pyrooz and Decker drew a large sample of confined persons for private interviews upon release and following their return to communities (research that is not reported in the current volume).
Thanks to having asked confined persons a series of questions about gang joining and associated ages during the initial interviews, Pyrooz and Decker were able to reconstruct whether respondents joined the gang before, during, or after imprisonment. Hence, these measures allowed them to generate three main membership pathways: (a) street-only gang members, (b) street-to-prison importation gang members, and (c) prison-origination gang members. Gang membership status consisted of three mutually exclusive confined groups: (a) current gang members; (b) former gang members, or persons who said they were no longer an active gang member in prison; and (c) nongang members or persons who told the researchers they had never been in a gang while in prison. More than half (55%) of the interviewed individuals who were incarcerated had been gang members at some point, and only 30% of the gang-involved respondents had remained active in those gangs when Pyrooz and Decker interviewed them. As expected, current gang members were involved in more violent, instrumental, and substance offenses than nongang members while incarcerated.
One of the many ingenious features of Pyrooz and Decker’s landmark study is their illumination of an interactive processes between street gangs and prison gangs: (a) the movement of people and structure between prison and the street, (b) the transmission of gang culture from one setting to the other, and (c) the explicit links between activities on the street and to the prison, and vice versa. Interestingly, 71 of Pyrooz and Decker’s 378 respondents said that their gang was “street only,” 79 indicated that their gang was “prison only,” and 326 (a large majority) said that their gang operated both on the street and within prisons. Hence, it appears that describing gangs as “street-based” or “prison-based” is a false dichotomy. At the time of Pyrooz and Decker’s prerelease interview, 30% of their total sample had a history of gang membership; thus, a noteworthy proportion of people in custody (12%) had joined a gang for the first time in their lives while imprisoned. In their comparison of street gangs and prison gangs, the authors draw attention to three key differences. First, gang membership spans a longer period among prison gangs—owing mainly to lengthy prison sentences. Second, members of prison gangs have a stronger collective identity. Third, prison gangs inflict greater harm in the ways these gangs exercise discipline over their members.
Next, Pyrooz and Decker investigated correlates of various pathways into gangs for three categories of people in custody: (a) street-only gang members, (b) street-to-prison importation gang members, and (c) prison-origination gang members. The most striking finding is that Black participants ordinarily did not join gangs in prison (just 4%). Rather, gang membership originated on the street for 93% of Black persons. The opposite pattern was observed for White participants, with 71% joining while in prison, and just 19% were gang members beforehand. Among Latino respondents, 59% joined following confinement and one third were members prior to their imprisonment. Pyrooz and Decker developed a useful four-part typology of prison gangs, consisting of (a) organizational structure, (b) misconduct and victimization, (c) perceptions of social order, and (d) gang joining and leaving.
Another unique feature of Pyrooz and Decker’s study is their examination of the relationship between gang membership, misconduct, and victimization in prison. Surprisingly, this matter had remained unresolved in prior studies of prison gang members. Utilizing multiple measures of misconduct and victimization—while distinguishing between current, former, and nongang members—Pyrooz and Decker found that both current and former gang members reported higher levels of misconduct and victimization over the course of their imprisonment. From TDCJ and Department of Public Safety records, published records, and vast knowledge of criminal conduct gained from this study, nearly one half of the study respondents were involved in substance-related misconduct, about one third were recorded as having engaged in violence, and one quarter were involved in misconduct. In addition, current gang members were more likely to fall into the victim–offenders overlap category than were nongang members for every outcome and by a large margin.
To examine patterns of misconduct and victimization among 31 gangs included in their analysis, Drs. Pyrooz and Decker created an ingenious classification scheme, consisting of four groups: street-oriented, prison-oriented, and two Security Threat Groups (STGs)—no segregation and STG-segregation. Notably, the total number of disciplinary reports for prison disorder and violence was statistically lower among segregated STGs than the other three groups (STG-nonsegregated, prison-oriented, and street-oriented). Just seven gangs reported more victimization than misconduct among their members (Barrio Azteca, 52 Hoover Crips, Texas Chicano Brotherhood, Tango-West Texas, Black Disciples, Party of the Mexican Revolution, and Vice Lords).
Another noteworthy contribution of Pyrooz and Decker’s pioneering study concerns the complications associated with leaving gangs. Along with other gang scholars (e.g. Roman et al., 2017), Pyrooz and Decker substantiated this event as a complicated one for members of street gangs, that (a) multiple rather than single factors for leaving gangs are most common, (b) push factors exceeded pull factors in prevalence and frequency, and (c) motivations for disengagement are typically age-graded and appear to increase in complexity with age. The main reason given in this study was disillusionment with gang life, and eight out of 10 gang-involved respondents said there were consequences associated with leaving a gang inside prison. In addition, Pyrooz and Decker’s research should not be interpreted as substantiating the popular contention that prison gangs’ control of people in custody is often substantial and expansive across TDCJ’s prisons. This contention has been suggested in two widely circulated volumes that have garnered considerable attention (Roth, 2020; Skarbek, 2014).
With respect to leaving gangs, Pyrooz and Decker conducted a preliminary evaluation of the TDCJ’s new Gang Renouncement and Disassociation (GRAD) program under the umbrella of this study. Their assessment, that compared outcomes for 53 GRAD participants in the LoneStar Project with 64 non-GRAD people in custody, concluded that GRAD appears to be a promising program for breaking the grip of prison gangs on individuals. Thus, prison authorities in other states should consider using this program—provided that an evaluation protocol is added to assess effectiveness elsewhere.
Looking back, Pyrooz and Decker stated that they had set out to restore the gang to prominence in prison research. Mission accomplished! This study will long stand as a tour de force in this field—for four important reasons. First, there is no other study of gangs inside prisons that rivals theirs. Second, the public policy import of their research provides guidance for prison administrators in future programming that surely will produce worthwhile benefits in the enterprise of controlling prison gang violence. Third—and most important—future generations of gang researchers will view this book as a foundational body of research on prison gangs, in the same way that Thornberry and colleagues’ (2003) book was the first longitudinal study of gang membership from childhood into adulthood, and it inspired numerous other such studies. Fourth, Pyrooz and Decker utilized a rigorous study methodology. The sole limitation of this most salutary study is that only prison gangs in Texas were studied. However, the excellent research methods used in this study can be utilized in other states. It would be ideal if federal funding were provided for replications of this research in other geographic regions.
