Christian Parenti writes in _Lockdown America_:
***** While guards wield the power to kill and rape, they do not rule supreme. The fault lines of power in the big house are notoriously murky. Sociologists long ago noted that guards do not unilaterally control prisoners but, rather, broker control with inmates. As the prison population grows, average sentences become longer, and mega-prisons of 5,000 inmates become the norm, paramilitary prison gangs -- the secret, racialized, micro-governments of the inmates' world -- become all the more central to how penitentiaries function. In analyzing this form of jailhouse deviance it behoves us to recall Foucault's early thesis about the political uses of crime. Prison gangs organize much of the prostitution, drug dealing, rape, extortion, and general _sub rosa_ business activity that goes on inside. Thus prison gangs organize and regulate huge swaths of everyday life behind bars and also create violence and social pathologies which, while apparently disruptive, render penitentiaries governable and justify increased repression, surveillance, and control. Thus gangsterism and interpersonal violence in prison, as on the street, are forms of auto-oppression and should be treated as such.
...All of the gangs discussed above engage in the same set of activities: smuggling drugs, extorting weaker inmates, turning out punks, pimping, and launching self-destructive, super-violent wars against one another. Prison gangs are both a survival strategy for convicts and the organized expression of the predatory and parasitic class of prisoners....[P]risoners who embrace fratricidal warfare do much to keep themselves down. One African American prisoner -- serving double life in California's High Desert prison, a joint known for its racist staff and heavy NLR [Nazi Lowriders] presence -- summed up the situation as follows: "Let a white boy on the yard with me and it's on...I don't trust him he don't trust me. I'm afraid of him and he's afraid of me. Draw a barrier line and he knows where he's supposed to be and I know where I'm supposed to be...."
[V]iewed from the macro-level of collective long-term interests, prison gangs are political suicides. They are a form of organic, decentralized, self-fueling social control, a cultural system of indirect rule that simultaneously oppresses from the inside while justifying repression from the outside.
Of course all of the tyrannies discussed earlier -- loss of weights, restricted visiting, curtailed library access, bureaucratic hurdles blocking the way to court, official terror, the rape system -- fuel the boredom, fear, anger, and hopelessness that are the raw material of the dungeon race war. "They were teaching us not to get along and telling us it was OK not to get along," recalls former prisoner Marc Madow. "I watched men come in who were racially neutral but who left walking the walk and talking the talk of hatred and fanaticism."
Prisoners -- the unacknowledged experts on the politics of the cage -- see a logic behind this strategy: "Inmates dramatically outnumber guards, so [the prison] has a vested interest in keeping the inmate population divided against itself rather than [against] them. Guards need to channel any kind of unrest away from them and onto another group." Former prisoner Johnny Spain agrees: "When blacks and whites fought, guards turned the other way -- or worse, provided the white inmates with weapons. I realized that prisoners killing prisoners only made life easier for the guards." San Francisco County Deputy Sheriff Michael Marcum, a former prisoner who, quite amazingly, is now a jail warden, tells the same story about the utility of prison gangs:
It's important to understand that prisons are fearful, dangerous places even for staff. So a staff can -- if you're an officer and you've gotta supervise 200 people on a tier, it's a lot easier for you if that tier is split up into five bickering factions rather than having 200 people all looking at you as, "Gee, why should we comply with the rules and regulations he's putting out?" So there is also that sort of staff encouragement of this kind of thing in many institutions.
...The prison race war is by no means quarantined to the yards: the hate factory discharges 90 percent of its product back to the streets. (193, 204-5) *****
Yoshie