Strategic Anarchy; a Model of Prison Violence as a Means to Informal Governance and Rent Extraction

Prison gangs are often thought to create a “culture of violence” in U.S. prisons and jails. Yet mounting research and evidence suggests that prison gangs, in pursuit of profits from illicit market activity, also act as a check on the violent behavior of the broader prison population. This paper synthesizes existing research on prison gangs into a modeling framework that treats gangs as profit-maximizing suppliers and sources of informal governance in an illicit marketplace. The model offers broad policy implications for correctional policy and highlights the futility of certain policy approaches that fail to address the market rents underlying gang activity