Prison Gangs Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Prison Gangs - Essay Example The violence might be the cause of this gender based bias. Men tend to be more violent in prison than women. The need to join a gang for protection becomes a necessity in a male prison due to the excessive violence. In the end, prison gangs are dictated by race, class, and gender. Gangs emerged on the street during the sixties and seventies. At first gangs were like formed like the Guardian Angels in New York City. Gangs developed out of the Civil Rights Movement ironically. Black Panthers and other minority groups formed gangs to patrol their neighborhoods against corrupt officers that would lynch and kill in the aftermath of the African American’s victory of the Civil Rights Movement. White bikers formed clubs (gangs) after returning from the Vietnam War, they wanted to get together drink and forget the war. When the drug trade was introduced in the late seventies and early eighties, gangs became the gun toting, drug dealing and violent criminals that are known today. Despite law enforcements gang unit and suppression measures, gangs are still a major problem across the United States. One problem of trying to suppress gangs is the availability of new recruits. One scholarly paper suggests: Another consequence of suppression efforts is that such efforts may promote substitution effects, whereby the removed gang member is simply replaced by another gang associate or recruit. Still yet, the use of suppression efforts may lead to an over-reliance on these measures and may mask other appropriate but less intensive alternatives to deal with gang members. (Trulson, Marquart, and Kawucha 2008) Gang units arrest gang members, normally resulting in long prison terms. The gang members taken off the street continue to live the gang lifestyle in prison. Thus law enforcement has to have strategies on the streets and behind prison walls. Race is the number one factor in male prison gangs. Gang membership is considered on a race basis. The Aryan