Thanks to all my subscribers! I appreciate your interest! Here are some links grouped roughly into topics.
On Crime
Prison Gangs: At Anarchonomicon, Kulak shares observations from David Skarbek’s Social Order of the Underworld on the structure of modern prison gangs. They’re a product of the scale of modern incarceration:
The modern super prison exceeds the Dunbar number by an order of magnitude, sometimes close to two. With 5-10k inmates in a single prison even knowing what’s going on or who the major players are becomes a nightmare….This is the major cause of the rampant racial segregation: its a natural division that can’t be faked…This naturally allows the number of people an individual prisoner might have to track to be reduced from all 5-10k prisoners, to maybe 1/4th or 1/5th that…
There’s a constant flow of gang members into prisons, such that anyone in the criminal underworld on the outside can expect to wind up on the inside at some point, and probably has relatives and friends already on the inside. Combine this with the fact that the security of prisons makes it harder for those on the outside to orchestrate violence against those on the inside than vice versa, and you get prison gangs controlling the street gangs:
Vast swathes of American crime are functionally ruled by the prison gangs, and far from the dreams of the 80s, the decimation of the mafia and mass incarceration might have, if anything, centralized crime.