Gangs in prisons Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Gangs in prisons - Essay Example The reasons of joining these gangs while in prisons are equally diversified and include the search for protection and in order to command control over all others. This study therefore intends to analyze the trends in prison gangs holistically within US, the reasons of their formation as well as the possible means of destroying them. The United States have increasingly been recording higher rates of gangs organized within the prisons over the last years (Sheldon, 2004). Both the increase in the number of gangs and gang members along with the increase in criminal activity by these individuals has lead to harsher responses by the criminal justice system including an increase in the incarceration of many gang members. For example, a study conducted in 1999 by prison administrators indicated that 24 percent of male prisoners and seven percent of female prisoners belong to a prison gang (Shelden, 2004). This was an approximately 167-percent increase in the number of prison gang members reported in 1991 whereby only nine percent of male and seven percent of female inmates reported belonging to a gang. In another study conducted in 1999 approximately 47,220 male were gang members in 1999 compared to a similar study in 1993 whereby 43,765 men were identified to be gang members in American prisons (a 7.9 percent increase ) (Shelden, Tracy & Brown, 2001). However, some states that have been identified with higher number of gangs in their prison population, for example Illinois, reported that as many as 34.3 percent of inmates belonged to a prison gang (Fleisher & Decker, 2001) which was the highest percent of prison gang-affiliated inmates in the nation. Despite the number of identified gang members in prisons, research on both the existence and the handling of gangs behind institutional walls is relatively nonexistent (Scott, 2001; Skarbek, 2012). Gangs exist in all prisons throughout United States (Fleisher & Decker, 2001).