ABSTRACT
Modern orthodox criminologists pathologize gang membership while ignoring structural variables that prompt the creation of gangs. The deep, rich ethnographic study of gangs that characterized early gang research is discouraged today in favor of a positivist analysis of urban, inner-city residents. Prison gang research is shoddier. Modern gang researchers have abandoned imagination and now analyze gangs using existing doxa that fails to question preconceived ideas about gangs. Prison gang researchers often operate through a criminal justice lens that focuses on violations of institutional rules while ignoring the institution’s role in the creation of misconduct and violence. Thus, prison gangs are not portrayed as subcultures of resistance designed to combat institutional and state-sanctioned violence; the gang members’ lived experiences are ignored in favor of a criminalized stereotypical trope. Academics are complicit in this superficial understanding of prison gangs because our dependence on government grants restricts research foci. This chapter evaluates existing prison gang research and argues for a return to critical, ethnographic prison studies that center structural variables and individual voices.
