How Prisons are Governed

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0:00:08.4 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts I’m Trevor Burrus. 0:00:10.3 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:11.6 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is David Skarbek, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. His latest book is The Puzzle of Prison Order, how life behind bars varies around the world. Welcome to Free Thoughts David.

0:00:24.0 David Skarbek: Thanks, happy to be here.
0:00:25.7 Trevor Burrus: So why is an economist writing about prisons?

0:00:29.5 David Skarbek: I suppose that’s a fair question for me personally, I think there’s sort of two main questions, one is simply that as a matter of public policy and the state of American democracy, this is a really important issue to understand, the American criminal legal system and… And really places of punishment around the world, so this is to me, one of the most pressing social issues of our time, the second is that in studying prisons, it actually allows us to better understand a lot of other questions that we care about, where does order come from, how does exchange happen, how his violence regulated, how does social organization emerge and why does it look the way that it does? These are questions that social scientists and scholars are interested in the institution’s study, in a wide range of contemporary and historical locations. And the prison context provides I think an interesting and helpful context in which to sort of pursue some of these broader questions in political economy.

0:01:22.0 Aaron Powell: Do prisons get studied much in this way, because my sense is for a lot of Americans, a lot of people, a prison is a place… You just throw people out there and then ignore it unless we hear really important stories, but otherwise it’s just… We don’t wanna think about it.

0:01:38.3 David Skarbek: Yeah. Prisons are tucked away from society, they’re poorest places, and that what happens behind bars often matters a lot for those of us who are not incarcerated, but they’re difficult to observe, we don’t run across them in our daily lives with the caveat, of course, that in the United States, a large and growing number of people themselves and have family members who have been affected very much by the criminal justice system. In terms of academic studies, my work is a little different in that I am leaning very heavily one on economic theories of institutions as opposed to different sociological theories, they have the deprivation theory is one approach used to understand life in prison, another is the importation theory. And I can talk about what those things mean. I use a theory of institutions developed by Douglas North to understand the creation of European states, and it turns out that that broader framework of institutional analysis actually generates some very new knowledge, interesting questions and generate what I think are at least useful answers to understanding what goes on in prisons.

0:02:42.7 Trevor Burrus: It seems like some people would think that… And it’s not an unreasonable thought that if you talk about why prisons are different in different parts of the world, the obvious answer is because people are different in different parts of the world, whether it’s religiosity or level of violence or Americans level of violence generally, but south, in the south is much more violent than the rest of America, so if Southern prisons are more violent, the reason would seem to be that people are more violent down there.

0:03:08.2 David Skarbek: Yeah, that’s a very reasonable sort of response or reaction. I think there’s two ways to think about the first is that prison social order in different countries is not always the same, there’s a lot of historical variation that suggests that there’s not something specific about that location or that prison system that determines for their entire existence what life will look like there. A second is that I actually just sort of agree that lots of these different cultural things do matter, the nature of political systems matters a lot, but even when we control for those things, it looks like there’s actually a lot that’s not explained, and so I think this sort of economic approach provides an opportunity to dig into what some of those things are, and maybe if I could just sort of follow up to clarify a little bit, I think that prisons everywhere by definition or practice, share some really fundamental similarities.

0:04:00.1 David Skarbek: Some of the most key characteristics and features of prisons are the same everywhere, they take people who have been charged with or convicted of a crime, these people come disproportionately from disadvantaged, social and economic backgrounds, while incarcerated, they have very little choice with whom to socialize or live with, and there’s no exit options, each one of those characteristics is crucial to prisons and all the time periods that I’ve looked at, and when we think from a social science perspective, those are precisely the sorts of things that we look to to try to determine if social interactions are gonna create value, or are gonna be on net positive beneficial, or whether they’re gonna be negative, where I’m gonna maybe win and you’re gonna lose, or maybe we’re both going to lose.

0:04:41.0 David Skarbek: So from a theoretical and then just a practical what our prisons like standpoint. Those are really important, and so I try to leverage that to say that prisons everywhere, we can’t just explain them by looking at the cultures or the politics of those places, because these fundamental characteristics are the same…

0:05:00.1 Aaron Powell: We talk about studying prison governance or how they’re governed. What does that mean in practice? Because a prison is… You’ve got a bunch of people who have no rights and no ability to make decisions for themselves outside of the most minor edge cases, and then a group of people who have absolute authority to set all of the rules, so are they just… Is it just kind of like North Korea or something. Is there other evolving forms of governance, do they approach it in different ways?

0:05:32.5 David Skarbek: Well, what I found really interested in working on this book is that the description that you just gave of prisons is very true of many places, certainly true of many American prisons, but it’s actually not true at all in many other parts of the world, sometimes prisoners have tremendous freedom of movement, they can engage in economic activity, in many prisons, there are no sources of official control and governance, and so the sort of book idea is just try to say, why do these things vary, why does the degree to which prisoners act in solidarity, it being very important in some places, but not others, why do they organize in very centralized fashions with gangs in some places and not others.

0:06:11.2 David Skarbek: And so I think that that is… That’s the puzzle that the book title is pointing to is why is it that the informal life of prisons look so different given that they share such fundamental characteristics.

0:06:23.4 Trevor Burrus: And before we get into some of those examples, I think it’d be useful to talk about… And this is in the Douglas North tradition, government or governed versus governance, what the difference is between those two things.

0:06:35.9 David Skarbek: So the argument would be that governance institutions perform some central roles in most societies, they define and enforce property rights, they create the context in which economic exchange can take place, agreements are enforced, and they aid in the production of collective and public goods. These are some of the big social infrastructures that any society needs, and the government often sometimes provides the governance institutions. What we find in prisons for part of the reasons that have been alluded to earlier, either because of lack of interest or resources, prison officials sometimes don’t provide a lot of governance, there are needs for governance that prisoners have, that officials either don’t care about or can’t actually perform. And so in looking at the book, I’m trying to study extra legal governance, governance that takes place outside of state­based legal institutions. And it turns out in many times and places, the prisoner produced extra legal governance is very important and sometimes more important than the governance provided by prison officials.

0:07:43.6 Aaron Powell: You talk about a number of different prisons in the book, and so maybe we could start running through some of those and start with your example from Brazil.

0:07:53.6 David Skarbek: So across Latin America, there’s of course, variation in what their prison systems look like, both by states and even within states, but on average, typically prisons in Latin America have very few resources, they have a very poor administration of facilities and they provide very ineffective governance over either social or economic activities. And so what that means in practice is that there are often very large prisons, that are dramatically overcrowded, sometimes three or five times or greater the population than its designed capacity, that it’s for, there’s very few prison staff relative to prisoners, sometimes hundreds of prisoners per staff member.

0:08:38.1 David Skarbek: They don’t provide prisoners with basic necessities like food and water and health care, and as a result, these prisons are often very anarchic, sometimes are a chaotic, but there are places of desperate poverty. And so when I look into the research on prisons in Brazil and Bolivia and places like those, what we see is often, not always, but often that prisoners themselves, they respond to the scarcity of resources by this lack of order, and they create institutions to provide the governance that officials are failing to provide. And so in one… An example that I look at in the book in Bolivia, prison officials don’t even enter the prison facility, it is organized and run by prisoners themselves, prisoners have to buy their own place to sleep, to live, because there’s freedom of movement of economic resources from outside the prison into the prison, there is a sort of little market economy within the prison, so instead of relying on prison officials for the substance of your nutritional needs, prisoners turn to markets and civil society within the prison to gain access to those things.

0:09:44.8 David Skarbek: And that’s just one example among many of how different types of informal institutions, thriving might be too strong of a word, but they’re existing, they’re operating, they’re working to some degree in the face of the state’s failure to provide basic human rights.

0:10:01.7 Trevor Burrus: And that chapter… I couldn’t figure out what… It sound… Many times you’re like, Well, this sounds great. We should, in terms of cost effectiveness, prison is kind of a strange institution anyway, because there’s so much dead weight loss when the society is paying to someone to stay in a cage and also not… And they’re not producing any economic gains, but in this one it seemed to me that there was maybe something we can learn from there and say, especially the one in Bolivia, where it’s basically just… It’s on like a large walled off area where people are allowed to… Gotta behave, but then there are some really big drawbacks too.

0:10:34.9 Aaron Powell: Escape from New York.

0:10:36.4 Trevor Burrus: Yes. Escape from New York. There you go.

0:10:38.0 David Skarbek: Yeah, and it’s certainly important not to sort of overly romanticize what’s going on, these are very dangerous, difficult, deadly places to live, but they do have advantages. And one advantage is that the prison staff are not there to abuse or torture the incarcerated people, and we have countless examples across Latin America where that’s a systematic process, that’s a practice that is widespread. That’s one partial advantage. The second is that there is freedom to exchange with visitors and family across Latin America or a large source of food and water and clothing for prisoners, and that is an advantage in that they can often tailor or get what they want more so than you would with state provision, but it’s also delegating the cost that the state should be paying or would be paying to what are often very sort of poor and marginalized communities and families, so that cost is still very much being born by people there.

0:11:39.8 David Skarbek: The sort of aspect of the Latin American cases that do seem so interesting to me is that, there is very little official control and yet there’s a proliferation, not of a single source of governance, but of a variety of different ones. And so in the Bolivian case, that I discussed there are these sort of civil society organizations, there’s a Parents Association across Latin America, children of incarcerated parents can often live together. And so in Bolivia, you’re allowed to do that until age 8, but in practice, children of all ages live within the prison. And the parents there recognizing the needs and concerns of the kids, produced this little civil society organization to organize education activities, cultural activities, and to watch out for them, and they create rules that other prisoners who don’t have parents have to follow, you’re not allowed to fight in the presence of one of the children in San Pedro prison.

0:12:32.7 David Skarbek: And according to people who have been incarcerated there who I spoke with, this isn’t just like something nice that they tell other prisoners, prisoners respect and follow that rule, there’s enough social pressure for it to work. So there’s civil society organizations, there’s a form of political organization and as I mentioned, there’s a sort of market economy in some strange sense within these prisons, which means that there are economic institutions that allow it to operate there. And so from a social scientist’s perspective, that’s what’s interesting, it’s not one institution to provide some uniform type of governance they’re tailored to the very specific needs and the very unusual… From our perspective, the very unusual context in what they’re operating, so there’s not one big institution to do them all, there’s many and very types of institutions that are fairly functionally specific and tailored to the local needs and demands.

0:13:23.2 Aaron Powell: Regarding the abuse by prison guards, and I guess the lack of it in the places where there aren’t enough prison guards to be doing all that much abuse. Do we see abuse by the prisoners at levels comparable to what abuse from the prison guards looks like in other places, or are prisoners less likely to abuse each other than the guards?

0:13:44.0 David Skarbek: Prisoners can absolutely be very abusive and predatory, and the worst examples are appalling and horrific, large massacres, dozens of people being murdered and decapitated, sexual assault, just the worst examples are absolutely horrific. What’s interesting though, is that in many instances, we see that horrible violence as transitory as different groups vie for power, and if one gets into power, that tends to see violence drop. There’s a fascinating research project by Dr. Jennifer Pierce, and she looked at the Dominican Republic where they have two parallel systems of incarceration. In one, it’s the sort of old school, traditional Latin American approach, mostly the prisoners are involved, mostly officials are absent, and then one that looks more modern to use some square quotes, more western versions where the prison officials have a much greater presence, there’s better resources and they’re in charge in a way that we would expect to see in American prison.

0:14:53.1 David Skarbek: And so she surveyed people incarcerated in both prison systems to see, where did they feel safest, where did they feel respected, where was the moral performance of prisons better, and interestingly, she found a mixed… A mixed response. Prisoners like the resources that they get in the more western modern style prisons, and they dislike the sometimes arbitrary use of power by other prisoners in the old school system, there’s no clear winner in which system was preferable after surveying a large number of prisoners. So again, it’s not to romanticize one over the other, but just to note that there’s some serious differences in the way that we can organize social life in prisons.

0:15:36.2 Trevor Burrus: And if we skip over to the opposite end of Bolivia and to the Nordic countries, which I think it was… I was just googling this to try and make sure that Anders Breivik who killed 77 people was… In 2014, he was demanding an upgraded PlayStation as a human rights violation, ’cause he has a PlayStation in his cell in Norway. Now, I read those two chapters back to back, and my first thought, it’s a state capacity like Nordic countries like Norway are pretty well governed in a lot of different ways, so it’s no big surprise that their prisons are fairly well­ordered and highly governed from the top and Bolivia is not so well governed… Sorry, to any Bolivians out there, but you might agree with me, so that just explains exactly why the prisons are different, it’s sort of a state capacity, they’re just better at doing their things in Norway than they are in Bolivia.

0:16:27.7 David Skarbek: Yeah, and that’s sort of an argument that I’m very sympathetic to, and I think that it’s not just state capacity, but that’s a big part of it, so the culture, the popular opinion, the desire or willingness to provide the resources. So in Bolivia, it doesn’t seem, if they had the resources that there would be popular support to invest it, in their correctional facilities, for example. So there’s clear cultural difference in the Nordic region that these should be places for rehabilitation, they have a much smaller prison system, it’s much more homogenous community. It’s probably significantly easier to get the support and the resources needed to have the sort of high level of resources, they have incredibly effective prison administrators and the governance is substantial in those facilities. So that’s a crucial reason in the book, I argue that there’s not a proliferation of extra legal governance institutions, the state is providing governance actually pretty dang effectively, so why would prisoners use their time and energy to try reproduce or recreate the governance functions that the prison officials are already providing, argue that they have very little reason to do so.

0:17:39.9 Aaron Powell: Every now and then you’ll see photographs get passed around on social media of the interior of a prison cell in an Nordic country, and it looks like an Airbnb compared to then what we see from… When we see photos from inside Rikers Island, and you mentioned the cultural thing, but is there… If the purpose of a prison is to ultimately like we have them, because we think having them will in some way prevent crime, either by rehabilitating or locking away or creating a disincentive because you don’t wanna go there. Is there a worry that these super well­ governed prisons where people can upgrade their PlayStations, are… They’re putting people away? Yes, but that they’re failing on these other metrics by which we would judge a prison succeeding.

0:18:36.3 David Skarbek: Yeah, and that’s a great question. It’s a little tricky to know. There is plenty of anecdotal accounts of Nordic prisoners who are just desperate to get out of the prison. The deprivation of liberty is substantial and to not be able to control your life, that’s a real cost to many, many people so it doesn’t seem to be that that alone is problematic. We could also look at other studies. There’s been some nice well­identified studies in the American context of whether harsher prisons increase or reduce recidivism. And you might think if they’re really harsh, then people will never want to go back and so then harsher prisons reduce recidivism but that’s not what we find. We find that harsher prisons harden people, expose them to peers where there’s learning about other offending behavior that they might engage with. And so there’s sort of scattered evidence to suggest. Comparisons of recidivism rates across countries is notoriously difficult to do because everything is measured differently and counted differently but it doesn’t seem like the Nordic countries have much higher recidivism rates. If anything, it probably seems much less.

0:19:41.9 Trevor Burrus: It’s an interesting question and you understandably kind of touch on it just a few times in the conclusion of your book where you’re like the question of, well, which one is the best prison has so many different aspects of what the best prison is. There’s how much it costs to society, how much it lowers crime actually because on the Nordic side, ratio of roughly one guard per prisoner is exceptionally high and these very nice places, as Aaron pointed out, looking kind of like an Airbnb. But it feels so weird to ask that question, What is best? What’s the best way of thinking about it do you think?

0:20:18.9 David Skarbek: It depends why we have prisons and there’s four or five standard explanations. So punishment, retribution is the very old one and I think prisons are pretty effective at that. They’re pretty good at punishing people. Even in the sort of so­called nicer Nordic models, that’s a very real punishment. Deterrence, it seems like prisons aren’t amazing at deterrence because, as a penalty, incarceration comes pretty long after an offending choice has been made and it’s very uncertain and unlikely that a person will be incarcerated for any particular crime. We find in a wide range of studies that the best deterrents are swift, certain and fair. And prisons as used in most places are definitely not swift or certain and don’t seem terribly fair. So prisons as a form of deterrence, I think maybe that’s effective when we don’t use prisons very much and they attract in the highest offending individuals first but that’s not the go­to for deterrence.

0:21:16.3 David Skarbek: And then in the question of rehabilitation, prisons are very difficult places. It’s not obvious to me that people who have often suffered trauma throughout their lives can go to a prison which has always been desperately poor, where there’s incredible social pressure, there’s at least the threat or potential for violence and that would be the sort of ideal environment or an effective environment to help solve what’s often many years of difficulties and challenges and mental health issues. And then the final common explanation given for prisons is a sort of expressive or symbolic one, is that they communicate to society what are the right values and what are the wrong values, and that’s a tough one for a social scientist to empirically investigate. So the answer to which types of prisons our best depends on why we’re turning to them really.

0:22:07.4 Trevor Burrus: I was also, when reading the Nordic chapter, I was thinking back to a quote that I have often thought about, I think from Bryan Caplan. He just said it to me when I was an intern at Cato when he came to give a talk before I knew him very well. And I said something like, “Well, doesn’t the education system not work?” And he said, “Ah, it might work very well for the constituencies that have the most power, which would be like teacher’s unions.” To say if your outcome is student education, maybe not, which had me thinking about this Nordic model, and I don’t know if you looked into this, ’cause I was wondering what the prison guard union’s power is in those Nordic models because they could make it wildly skew the outcome of the prison system toward their desired result like one prison guard per prisoner is pretty excessive.

0:22:54.9 David Skarbek: That’s a great question. I didn’t look at it for the Nordic context. The California case is probably a phenomenal ideal case of what you’re talking about. Joshua Page’s book on the toughest beat is just documents. The political machinery, this was the most powerful union maybe second to the teachers unions in California and for decades, they lobbied for tough on crime laws, expansion of prisons, they funded victim’s rights groups to push for these things to expand the strength and power and resources of the union. And this is one of the things that often comes up when we talk about so­called private prisons or contracted out prisons is that there’s this idea that there’s a profit motive for private companies as if state actors don’t have profit incentive. Maybe it’s not financially into their pockets but it’s indirectly through resources and power. But yeah, it’s an alternative explanation for why prisons are used and it’s not to benefit the prisoners or society, but a vested special interest there and I think it’s a terribly interesting question.

0:23:58.6 Aaron Powell: So it may be difficult to figure out if a prison is working because we don’t… As you said, there are multiple things that we could look to for that but do… In like a free market economy, market agents respond to economic incentives and so they have a product they’re trying to sell and they measure success on the profit margins that they’re earning but if it’s not working, then they basically change up what they’re doing. And one of the arguments that Libertarians have a lot about government is the government short circuits a lot of those mechanisms to re­adjust and so it just kind of keeps doing failed things. Do prisons change the way that they govern internally based on what they’re seeing, recidivism or behavior, or do they just kind of stick to what they know?

0:24:52.4 David Skarbek: So it varies a huge amount. A lot of places, there’s not gonna be a lot of dynamism and innovation. It doesn’t have the high­powered incentives that we look for in markets so there’s an information and incentive issue going on but some bureaucracies are more innovative than others. In the state of Pennsylvania, I know in particular that they tried a wide range of very curious, interesting interventions that they’d measure and they will randomize the presence of these like pet dogs or blue rooms that you can go and relax in or calm down in. They did white noise in certain housing areas so that you could sleep better at night. You might think that would reduce tensions. And so there’s opportunities to do stuff like this. Other than curiosity and maybe cultures of bureaucracies, it’s not obvious how widespread that actually is or how to get more of that. But that’s the challenge and there’s also the broader bureaucracy, is that prisons don’t decide how many people enter their doors. That’s decided by local prosecutors, local political decision makers. They don’t entirely decide how big their budgets are and so they’re also constrained in how much they can do those things and that’s the nature of bureaucratic provision of public goods or public services, I should say.

0:26:11.8 Trevor Burrus: It was fascinating. I was excited when you go from Brazil, so prisoners co­govern; Bolivia prisoners basically govern; Nordic countries, the government governs, the guards govern. And then you go to Andersonville, which is something I’ve been reading about since I was a kid, the prison in Georgia where they held an excessively large amount of union soldiers during the Civil War, and that one is just no government, it seems like. No governance, no government. What was going on there?

0:26:41.7 David Skarbek: Yeah, this was a horrendous failure. A prisoner of war camp in the South during the last 14 or 15 months of the American Civil War, incredibly high fatality rate, I think more than a third of prisoners perished. They died from very preventable things, simple diseases, dysentery, things that things that if you had basic nutrition, a large number of these people wouldn’t have died. Like the prison in Bolivia, there were no guards within the prison. The officials didn’t provide any effective administration. There was no provision of a substantial, good enough amount of food for prisoners but again, we see a total failure. There’s desperate starvation and there’s no proliferation of these extra legal governance institutions that I found and found so interesting in the Bolivian case and officials that it governs. It is really actually a pretty horrific historical instance to read about. And so the question is, Why? Why were they successful in Bolivia and why did they fail in Andersonville? And it seems that there’s a few basic constraints that couldn’t be overcome. The first is that POWs at Andersonville didn’t have access to visits from friends and family on the outside. They have no economic outlet that they could turn to to fill in the gap in what officials didn’t provide. That’s a major hard constraint.

0:28:10.0 David Skarbek: The second is that the camp was just a field and very quickly anything that would be remotely useful from an agricultural perspective or wood just to fuel fires to keep warm, these things are used up very quickly and there’s no productive capacity, essentially, in a barren field that at the height of the crowding was substantially overcrowded with thousands of injured and sick soldiers. A final, I think, major explanation for the failure there was the mistaken belief that many of these soldiers had that they would be released soon in a prisoner exchange. This was a very controversial political issue during the war. Many people on both sides felt like it would prolong the war indefinitely if we kept exchanging prisoners back and forth but as we can tell from the diaries of camp prisoners that there were constantly rumors swirl and about amongst prisoners that they were gonna be exchanged or released this week or next week and that reduced substantially the time horizon that it made sense for them to operate in which is that, “I’m gonna be leaving soon. Why invest now in permanent structures that are only worth it if I’m gonna be here for many months or many years.”

0:29:23.9 David Skarbek: Likewise, collective action against a meagre guard platoon, the collective action to overthrow the people who were incarcerating them, if you think you’re probably going home in a week, that’s a really dangerous and risky move to make. But if you think you’re gonna be there for the remainder of the war or for the remainder of a period of a war that doesn’t seem to be stopping, the logic changes and you might very well have been willing to overthrow those things. So I think taken together, the inability to engage in any sort of productive or the stories of an exchange and these harsh constraints prevented them from having the resources or incentive to produce extra legal governance.

0:30:06.8 Trevor Burrus: I like that you analyzed it as you would as an economist on the individual decision­making level, why are these people not making the decision to join gangs, gangs that provide some sort of support or protection, for example. But then in your previous book, which is about the California gangs, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System, does that imply that the length of sentences and the punitive nature as it has gone up, especially since the 80s and 90s contributes to formation of gangs because the time horizon of prisoners is longer.

0:30:45.0 David Skarbek: Yeah, I think that’s one important aspect to the story. So I haven’t looked at the data very much recently but my understanding is that the median sentence length didn’t actually go up very much so it’s something like two years. But on the high end, the longer sentences, those go way up so one side of the distribution gets a lot bigger and I think one consequence of that, in addition to larger populations, was that there was a core of people who had very long time horizons. They had incentive to entrench some sort of political and social institutions and they had the ability to reproduce those things because they were there for five years or 10 years, they were there for life, and so they had an incentive to not treat this as some transitory social community. You could also contrast it with county jails. County jails are very hectic places. They hold people who are serving a year or less, and often much less. There’s a lot of churn and turnover of who’s there so there’s constantly new people arriving and maybe people who know what’s going on who are leaving and jails, according to incarcerated people, tend to be very chaotic places and some are often relieved to get to state prisons for a calmer, more stable social environment. And so the length of time that people are gonna interact with, I think yes, absolutely matters for the calculus and deciding what they’re gonna do.

0:32:06.4 Aaron Powell: Do we see more gang formation in more violent prisons in the sense that they’re forming them in order to have some form of protection or is gang formation more just the kind of things people do in the same way the cliques form in middle schools is not chiefly about violence deterrence and so on?

0:32:28.6 David Skarbek: It’s a tremendously difficult question to answer actually because two things could be going on, at least. One is that people are joining gangs and using the organization of the gang to be violent or it could be that in the face of violence, people are forming gangs to protect themselves from violence. And since we can’t randomize where prisons are more or less violent, it’s actually pretty difficult to tease out are both of those things true, what’s going on, is one true and not the other. And there’s also a second question which is, What’s the appropriate counterfactual that we’re comparing something to? So historically, in California, people formed gangs after violence was increasing in response to that violence, they also used the gangs to commit violence, but if you look at the California Prison system today, I don’t think necessarily that gangs make them safer than they would have been in the pre­gang era but if you were to take away the structures of control and not replace it with better official governance, violence might very well go much higher. So the question is: More violent compared to what? And it depends a little bit, from a social science perspective but then from a policy perspective, what are we comparing the rate of violence to. So I hope that was sufficiently vague to dodge answering the question. [chuckle]

0:33:45.8 Trevor Burrus: Well, this is a good time because we didn’t get a chance to have you on for your last book and it’s relevant to when you talk about women’s prisons in California. I thought the book is about gangs and prisons but the most interesting thing which I’d like you to elaborate on in the last book is how gangs in California prisons affect outside of the prison. Do they actually provide governing? Incarcerated abandons, I think is the term you use. Governing institutions for people outside the prison, how does that work?

0:34:14.7 David Skarbek: Yeah, and so this is what I sort of hinted at earlier in talking about porous walls. So the way that we rehabilitate or fail to rehabilitate people in prison, 98% of them are gonna be released in the US so that matters. But it turns out that in many places in California, Texas, Chicago, New York, the gangs that control within prisons are able to project that power outside of prisons. In Los Angeles, where this was sort of done arguably earliest and certainly very effectively, Hispanic street gangs that sell drugs across LA County, send a tax like drug tax or gang tax of somewhere between 10 and 30 percent to a relatively small number of incarcerated prison gang leaders and they do that for two main reasons. The first is that they anticipate that they’ll go to prison at some point in the future and these gangs have a credible that to hurt them. The gangs have fairly well­documented records where they write down everyone who doesn’t pay the taxes so if you show up and you’re on that list, you’re in trouble. That’s an incentive to say, “I know I’m gonna get locked up, everybody does occasionally, I’m gonna pay now to avoid trouble later.

0:35:26.4 David Skarbek: A second is that many of a person’s fellow gang members are already incarcerated and they can be used as a hostage. We’ll say, “We’re gonna hurt your friend if you don’t send the taxes.” So there’s far fewer prison gang members then street gang members in Los Angeles and we’d think they were weak because they were stuck inside a prison, you cannot directly and immediately threatened and carry out a threat. But it turns out because they control this space, they have a big incentive, the big ability to extract these resources and so the stationary bandit metaphor comes in next, without going into the details of the example, because prison gangs have this financial incentive in the activities of people on the street, they have an incentive to keep those people safe. They have an incentive to encourage people to respect the territory as it’s drawn because if they’re safe and they’re selling drugs, then the gang is getting its tax so they’re financially inclined than to try to regulate. As we know through court documents, they are often the adjudicator of disputes when even rival gangs who all pay to the Mexican Mafia have disputes. So they’ll make decisions and resolve conflicts to try to avoid violence.

0:36:43.5 David Skarbek: And in one of the most striking examples, the prison gang produced a ruling, an edict, that you could no longer do drive­by shootings. Drive­by shootings are very costly, especially to the extent that it harms innocent individuals and attracts really negative law enforcement and media attention and that attention can often substantially reduce or shut down drug activity that could be profiting the prison gangs. And so in the early 1990s, they basically said you can’t do a drive­by shooting. We saw a dramatic decline in deaths by drive­by shootings but not in deaths. They continued to hurt each other but they did it in a way that was less likely to negatively affect the market activity that was taking place. And so I thought that was just a really fascinating and interesting example of how a group that can extract and incredibly threatened you may actually, through a sort of invisible hand mechanism, produce something that we would sort of want good governance to produce, which is regulating these things that are massively costly for people who are not involved.

0:37:50.3 Aaron Powell: So it’s like… I was recently reading a book about the history of law enforcement in LA in the 40s and 50s, and it’s the same, like gangsters Mickey Cohen, running his outfits from behind a prison cell, it was just like half of the time they were running them right out of their cells and kinda keeping the peace between different competing factions, but I… One characteristic of prisons is that they are segregated by sex, and so a lot of the stuff that we talked about, the violence, the formation of governance, the gangs, what do these look like in women’s prisons?

0:38:28.1 David Skarbek: Yeah. So they’re strikingly different, and they’re strikingly different in that in California, the social order in women’s prisons has essentially remained the same since the 1960s, it’s not changed. In men’s prisons, there was no gangs, then gangs dominated, but there’s just striking similarity. And one possible explanation is that women don’t join street gangs, so there’s no street gangs to import into the prison. But that’s not true, actually. Many gangs have women and there are gangs of only women. Another argument might be that women for whatever genetic or social reasons are less likely to engage in violence. 80% of violent crime in America is attributed to male offenders, but in prisons, in a variety of different locations, it’s very common to find that women fight at higher rates amongst each other than men do in men’s prisons. Sometimes it’s at equal rates, which given the rates of violence on the outside is substantially larger, and in some places even more frequently than men fight. And so I think neither of those explains why there’s not gangs in women’s prisons.

0:39:37.8 David Skarbek: My argument is that there’s no gangs like in men’s prisons, in women’s prisons, because they have small communities and in small prisons, you can rely on these decentralized mechanisms, things like norms, gossip about people, ostracizing people. These are highly effective, they don’t require a lot of physical resources, they don’t require a lot of social organized in a collective action, and because in small populations, you really care about your standing, you don’t wanna be ostracized, you don’t. Those threats are serious, and those threats are often effective.

0:40:13.6 David Skarbek: In the men’s prison, before he had gangs, that’s what they relied on as well, norms, but as the prison size and the men’s populations grew, each one of those things becomes much less effective. You don’t know what the appropriate norms are, you don’t know what everyone’s reputation is, you’re ostracized by one group, but you can go to another, and when those fail, you need to invest in something more centralized like gangs. But in women’s prisons, they don’t. They’re not racially segregated, like men’s prisons either, they rely on a set of norms about respecting people’s property and space and behavior. They do sometimes, although certainly not always, form what they call “play families”, they’re sort of reproducing the traditional nuclear family. There’ll be a woman who takes on the role as the mom and the dad, sometimes they’ll adopt kids, there’s aunts and uncles, but these are not organized like gangs are. There’s not a lifetime membership, they’re not racially segregated, they’re not primarily in charge of the economic activity of women’s prisons. So it’s providing a similar source for some gangs for the women in providing community and friendship and camaraderie, but it has a totally different organizational structure and that’s because in these small prisons, you don’t need to invest in the more elaborate structures that men’s prison gangs often do.

0:41:35.2 Trevor Burrus: It seems that if there’s… As you pointed out in the conclusion, the normative claims that you can make, again, it’s a difficult area to study with really hard data, but the normative claims that you can make about what seems to cause better functioning of extra­legal governance in size is one of them, as you pointed out in women’s prison and also in the English and Welsh prisons. Does homogeneity seem to matter in terms of both, whether it’s ethnicity, religion, any other sort of factor?

0:42:06.0 David Skarbek: Yeah, I would think… So speaking in a very multi­faceted, multi­ dimensional way, the sort of… In sociology, we talk about this as social distance, and if you have low social distance, maybe you share a culture, a world view, an ethnicity, a religion, a community. For a variety of reasons, multiple reasons, when we have low social distance, we tend to get along with each other better, maybe we all agree on what’s acceptable behavior, what constitutes a deviation from that behavior, and with the appropriate punishment is, for example, but as we become more different in these various and vast types of ways, there’s less consensus, there’s less other­regarding behavior, there’s less ability to rely on shared traditions and world views and religious beliefs, and so it becomes more difficult to organize. And so across the two books and the many cases that I’ve studied, that seems to be important. It seems to be most important in large prison populations, so the ethnic diversity in men’s prisons in California increased substantially during the period that gangs were forming. Interestingly, in the women’s prisons, there is an equal increase in the diversity of people incarcerated there, but because the prison population was so small, they were able to overcome what might have been some frictions to cooperation in that greater social distance.

0:43:23.7 Aaron Powell: So what are some of the broader lessons we can draw from this, even potentially outside of the context of prisons themselves? Because libertarians are very interested in self­governance and the way that governance can emerge organically, particularly anarchist libertarians. So what can we learn for how to do that well in the world outside of prisons from the information in your book?

0:43:49.4 David Skarbek: So I’ve thought a bit about this, and I think there’s maybe a few different lessons, some more and less may be helpful. The first is that there’s been a lot of studies of self­ governance amongst pretty privileged communities, people who are highly educated, who are very rich, have access to modern, effective modern institutions. So I’m thinking of things like diamond traders in New York who don’t rely on written contracts, for example. This is a very highly selective and effective, if it’s gonna work somewhere would probably work in these really religiously homogenous communities. For the most part, people who are incarcerated, lack all of these privileges and resources. They’re not educated as well, they don’t have access to financial resources, they don’t have the social capital, and so one lesson would be maybe some claim along the lines of even in this less expected context, sometimes only sometimes, but sometimes, they can effectively provide extra­legal governance in a way that rivals or approaches what we see in these sort of more privileged cases. Another example would be the stock exchange, the early stock exchanges where you weren’t allowed to legally enforce a contract for short sales, but a market for those things proliferated because of a variety of club good incentives. So that’s like a… The best possible scenario, the best… The most welcoming context to do that.

0:45:11.4 David Skarbek: So I think that we should expand to some degree our understanding about the robustness of the ability to organize with the caveat, which is about a lot of the organization is not very pretty. A lot of what prison gangs do is very undesirable. There’s no rule of law in gangs, they don’t conform to general notions of morality. They exclude certain types of prisoners, former police officers, sex offenders, and they elevate the people that we may not think in sort of… That we want elevated, the people most willing to use violence, the people most motivated by money, and it also just doesn’t always work. The Andersonville case is a case study of failure. So it’s about trying to figure out, well, what are the basic conditions in which we think this might emerge and not be horrible, and others in which it actually might be real bad.

0:46:11.1 Trevor Burrus: Does it imply as you… In your general theory of the book that we will almost always see? The two things that really interest me coming out of your book for broader lessons is, one, the state capacity argument because there are some things that the state simply doesn’t have the resources to do, or we don’t want to put the resources into that, and then the other question is, is whether or not it’s inevitable that if the government comes in with a huge heavy hand… And let’s say they just put a ton more resources into police so there are police on every corner, so you would have a withdrawal of the kind of social institutions that might be good for mitigating crime, like you mentioned, to the gangs for a drive­by. Is it always a give and take there for between how much attention the government pays to something and resources and how much we can govern ourselves?

0:47:00.8 David Skarbek: And I’m sure it’s much more complicated than that. And in part, if we go back to thinking about whether prisons are effective or not is… Even if we think prisons should exist to reduce the cost of crime, there’s multiple ways that we can reduce the cost of crime, and so at a minimum, we have to think, “Okay, well, what about prisons? What about policing? What about mental health services? What about social programs, after­school programs, all the different things that exist out there?” That’s one big question, is which… Where are we getting the most bang for our buck across those things, and then how is that gonna affect the extra­legal governance that exist within prisons already? So if you changed the severity of the war on drugs, you might get a systematically different set of people in the prisons, which might generate better or worse extra­ legal governance problems on its own. So I think I agree, it’s absolutely very much a complicated project, which is in part why I sort of punt on it in the book, that this is way too big a question for me to be able to take seriously.

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0:48:11.6 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.