Doctoral Dissertation Research: Organizational Emergence in the Era of Racial Risk: The Black Guerilla Family and the Aryan Brotherhood in California

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Organizational Emergence in the Era of Racial Risk: the Rise of the Black Guerilla Family and Aryan Brotherhood in California This project will advance our understanding of the prison social system and its affect on prison gang development by focusing on inter-organizational relations and racial coercion within the prison environment. Using the development of the Black Guerilla Family and the Aryan Brotherhood in the California prison system as comparative case studies, the project will answer four interrelated questions: (1) How does social control in the prison organizational field coercively influence prison gang development? (2) What coercive processes propel conflict or cohesion between racial groups in prison and how does this impact prison gang development? (3) How does an organization?s relationship to prison staff affect their development? and (4) How do social, political, and economic changes in society affect the prison organizational field and its influence on prison gang development? Understanding the prison organizational field and its connections with prison gang development will provide support for improving prison conditions and reducing the discriminate use of extreme punishment techniques such as indeterminate solitary confinement. Study results will also contribute to our understanding of the consequences of deprivation and racial coercion on staff-prisoner and prisoner-prisoner relations, revealing how prisoner and staff efforts to mitigate risk and manage threats can actually lead to cyclical, racialized violence and fuel prison gang development. The project takes a comparative historical approach and uses 42 interviews and approximately 600 archival documents about the prison environment and prison gangs in Northern California, social and political movements in California, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The investigator will conduct 28 interviews to expand a preliminary dataset that consists of (A) 14 interviews with Black Guerilla Family founders and early members, formerly incarcerated men in Northern California, and social and political activists from the Bay Area and (B) archival documents and surveys collected from 8 archives: California State Archives, UC-Berkeley?s Bancroft Library, Stanford University?s Green Library, Golden State University School of Law Digital Archive, the Freedom Archives, Michigan State University Black Panther Archive, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Vault, and the It?s About Time Black Panther Archive. These documents include federal investigations, internal CDCR investigations and memos, California legislative hearings, prison incident reports, prisoner letters and private correspondence, prisoner newsletters, reports from social and political organizations, prisoner and prison staff memoirs, federal court case transcripts, and state court case transcripts. The additional 28 interviews will be conducted with members of the Black Guerilla Family, the Aryan Brotherhood, correctional officers, and formerly incarcerated men. The project is divided into three time periods to ascertain how these processes affect prison gang development over time. The time periods examined are 1961-1971, 1971-1990, and 1990-2000, which allow the study to measure organizational development across the turbulent social and political change of the 1960s, the war on drugs and the massive influx of prisoners in California in the 1970s and 1980s, and the effects of mass incarceration as seen in the 1990s.