Busted: The Micropower of Prisons in Narco-States - CSS

Center for Security Studies
Busted: The Micropower of Prisons in
Narco-States
14 Dec 2016
By Paul Rexton Kan for Small Wars Journal

As Paul Rexton Kan sees it, the importance of prisons beyond their role as sources of
punishment is especially relevant when trying to understand their function in narco-states.
In these nations, incarceration often translates into empowerment; governance comes as
much from the “big house” as the statehouse; and the “micropower” that’s wielded yields
both order and disorder.
This article was originally published by the Small Wars Journal (SWJ) on 5 December
2016.
The 2015 prison escape of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman demonstrated the degree to
which Mexican drug cartels have penetrated a key institution of state control. A mile long
tunnel was constructed beneath Mexico’s maximum-security prison compound; included
in the tunnel was a motorcycle on a rail to hasten El Chapo’s escape. Prison officials
and corrections staff were complicit in his escape; they ignored the construction noise
underneath El Chapo’s cell and refrained from watching his movements. At the time of
his escape, the prison guards responsible for monitoring El Chapo were playing computer
solitaire while their other computer screens linked to the closed-circuit cameras were turned
off.[1] In his empty cell, investigators also found a dead sparrow; it was apparently used to
test the air quality of the tunnel before El Chapo descended through its opening beneath his
shower.
In another case from Mexico, members of Los Zetas drug cartel used Piedras Negras
Prison in Coahuila as an execution center and mass grave for rivals. From 2010-2012, the
drug cartel dispatched approximately 150 victims on prison grounds by burning their bodies
and dumping the remains in a nearby a river. Astonishingly, the victims were not fellow
prisoners who were incarcerated with Los Zetas. Rather, they were either snatched from
cities and towns, then brought to the prison to be killed or were killed outside the prison
walls, and their bodies brought to the prison to be disposed of.[2]
El Chapo’s daring escape and Los Zetas’ extraordinary use of Piedras Negras Prison serve
as reminders of what Michel Foucault argued in his seminal work, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison—prisons must be studied “as social phenomena that cannot be
accounted for by the juridical structure of society alone, nor by its fundamental ethical
choices; we must situate them in their field of operation, in which the punishment of crime
is not the sole element.”[3] The importance of prisons as social phenomena beyond their
role as institutions of punishment is especially relevant when attempting to understand their
place in narco-states. Instead of the prison being emblematic of state control (restricting a
citizen’s autonomy through application of the law), it has become a powerful institution that
undermines governmental authority in countries where drug trafficking is pervasive. In a
narco-state, incarceration often translates into empowerment; governance comes as much
from the “big house” as a statehouse.
To better understand the social phenomena of prisons in narco-states, Moises Naim’s
concept of “micropower” provides additional clarity.According to Naim, micropower
emanates from smaller, largely overlooked actors that were once negligible; micropower
thwarts large bureaucratic organizations that previously controlled their fields.[4] Micropower
is “unburdened by size, scale, asset and resource portfolio, centralization and hierarchy”
and outflank larger, more established actors.[5] The micopower emanating from prisons has
transformed them into significant sites of both order and disorder in narco-states, affecting

their stability and durability. The far-reaching implications for narco-states requires new
ways to tackle the role of prisons in these fragile countries.
“Hangin’ and Bangin’,” Predation and Welfare
The micropower of prisons emanates from the activities and interests of incarcerated
members of criminal organizations like gangs. In narco-states, drug trafficking activities
have increased corruption and impunity, weakening state institutions and leading to
prisons that are often “self-governed” and autonomous. For example, a 2012 study from
the Mexican Human Rights Commission found that gangs and drug cartels controlled
approximately sixty percent of the nation’s correctional facilities.[6]
Prison gangs like those in Mexico and elsewhere are notoriously difficult to combat. Prison
gangs comprising incarcerated members of established street gangs like El Salvador’s
Mara Salvatrucha-13 and Barrio 18 and Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and
Comando Vermerlho (CV) are distinct from other types of armed groups because they can
thwart and disrupt traditional state actions to repress them. A Brookings Institution study on
the power of prison gangs described the state’s conundrum:
Unlike traditional armed groups though, prison gangs cannot be directly neutralized through
repressive force, since most of their leadership is already incarcerated. Indeed, common
hardline state responses like aggressive policing, anti-gang sweeps, and enhanced
sentencing can inadvertently swell prison gangs’ ranks and strengthen their ability to
coordinate activity on the street. Breaking up prison-gang leadership has proved particularly
counterproductive, often facilitating prison gangs’ propagation throughout state-and
national-level prison systems. Alternative approaches like gang truces that exploit prison
gangs’ capacity to organize and pacify criminal markets…are politically dicey (and hence
unstable), and ultimately leave the state partially dependent on prison gangs for the
provision of order, both within and beyond the prison walls.[7]
The micropower of prisons is also generated by the degree of insulation and protection
that prisons give to incarcerated gang members. First, imprisoned gang members are
already subjected to harsh penalties meted out by the state. Short of torture and death,
there are only a few additional levers—such as revocation of specific privileges, transfer to a
higher security facility or placement in solitary confinement—that the state can use against
an inmate to gain compliance. However, the degree of corruption and lack of adequate
resources in narco-states limits the employment and effectiveness of these tools. Second,
not only are there limits on how the state can further control incarcerated gang members,
there are also limits on how their associates on the outside can affect them. Prison walls
and guards protect incarcerated gang members from the possibility that any disaffected
non-incarcerated associates might organize and attack them en masse.[8]
The micropower emanating from prisons is more than the ability of gangs to disrupt and
thwart state authority; micropower is also the ability of prison gangs to develop interests and
conduct activities that meet those interests inside and outside jailhouse walls. Mike Davis
views the interests of gangs as combining “elements of both predation and welfare,” where
gangs act as “vampire-like parasites on their neighbors” to earn money and respect while
in other instances they “play Robin Hood” by bolstering needy communities through the
provision of certain services in the areas where they operate.[9] To meet these interests,
gang activities center on extortion, protection rackets and acts of violence as well as
socializing with each other, managing internal gang relationships and generating support in
the larger communities where they operate. In other words, gang members’ activities are as
much about “hangin’” as they are “bangin’.”[10]
The interests and activities of prison gangs can be depicted along two different axes as a
way to provide a fuller spectrum of how prison micropower is manifested (see Graph 1).
The horizontal axis of interests ranges from predation (the illegal exploitation of people and
resources) to welfare (the provision of goods and services to the community inside and
outside prison). The vertical axis of activities ranges from hangin’ (internal cohesion) to
bangin’ (the use and threat of violence).

This schema can be used to group the actions of various prison gangs and how they
affect narco-states. In the northwest quadrant of the graph (hangin’ and predation), prison
gangs focus on defining certain areas of the prison to place under their control, such as
commissaries, kitchens and specific common areas. They will also engage in “taxation”
of inmates and collude with guards and staff for favors and access. By establishing such
control, a prison gang also earns taxes from non-incarcerated members by promising to
protect them and provide for their needs if they enter a correctional facility under the gang’s
authority. To demonstrate their loyalty to the gang, members who still run the streets will
make deposits in the commissary accounts of their imprisoned associates and/or take care
of their families on the outside.
In the southwest quadrant (hangin’ and welfare), prison gangs organize methods of prison
governance, including the composition of “constitutions” that delineate the roles, rights
and responsibilities of membership. Some prison officials will encourage such informal
governance structures to ease the pressure on guards and staff.[11] Gangs also construct
informal prison economies that distribute contraband to loyal members and followers as well
as to those who pay them for access. Prison gangs can do more than offer protection and
provide for the needs of the members. They can also convey upon an individual a type of
status in the gang. A tenure in prison can produce certain bona fides for a gang member
that will allow him to rise in the ranks of the gang and grant him greater credibility in the
streets when he is released.
Just as prison gangs can use the possibility (or even the anticipation) of their non-
incarcerated members entering a penal institution to provide incentives for compliance,
they can also use the same possibility to coerce their members.[12] Without the protection
and accommodation of a prison gang, a new inmate has very few resources to defend
himself in a confined and hostile environment. A prison gang can withhold its services,
leaving a new inmate defenseless and deprived of resources that may make his sentence
more bearable. A gang may also actively seek to harm a disobedient new inmate. This
knowledge among non-incarcerated gang members creates an important way for prison
gangs to “discipline the workforce” beyond the prison walls. As one gang leader in Rio de
Janeiro put it, “Whatever you do on the outside, on the inside you’ll have to answer for
it.”[13] Disciplining the workforce stands roughly in the center of the axes as it is key to
developing interests and coordinating the activities of prison gangs.
The ability of prison gang to determine how comfortably and safely a new inmate from the
gang spends his time behind bars functions as an important source of the micropower of
prisons in narco-states. Because narco-states are institutionally fragile, a prison gang’s
ability to control their non-incarcerated members allows them to extend their authority
beyond prison walls. They can issue orders to coerce and attack rival gangs, state agents
and citizens on the outside as well as to direct the provision of goods and services to
communities where the gang operates. This capability in tandem with the prison gang’s
ability to control the prison environment through intimidation of guards and officials is a
potent combination. In fact, the micropower of prisons in narco-states is more apparent
in the shaded area of the northeast quadrant (bangin’ and predation) and the southeast
quadrant (bangin’ and welfare) of Graph 1. In the northeast quadrant, for example,
coordinated prison riots occurred in Brazil to force the government to provide better living
conditions for gang members.[14] In another example that demonstrated the ability of
prison gangs to coerce prison personnel to assist them in their external criminal enterprises,
gang members forced guards at Gomez Palacio Prison in Mexico into releasing them at
night and provided them with prison vehicles and weapons to kill rivals in a different city.
[15] In more extreme cases, the PCC and CV prison gangs in Brazil directed campaigns
of violence aimed at the state and society to force politicians and police to end their more
heavy-handed approaches against their members. In May 2006, the PCC coordinated a
multiday attack against nearly 300 sites across Sao Paulo as a way to force police to end
their repression in neighborhoods where they operated and to prevent the transfer of over
700 gang members to maximum security prisons.[16] Police stations, transit centers and
governmental institutions were targeted, killing 261 people.
Prison gangs are also able to direct their violence in ways that provide goods and services
for communities where their membership continues to operate. In the southeast quadrant,
prison gangs continue to view themselves as community protectors and providers. Because
law enforcement and the courts are viewed as corrupt in many narco-states, citizens will
turn to local gangs to seek justice. The PCC, CV and MS-13 have their own “courts” to
settle domestic disputes, enforce property rights and even adjudicate small claims cases.
[17] Prisons have also been important sites for gang truce negotiations in Honduras and El
Salvador. The most notable was the 2012 MS-13 and Barrio 18 gang truce in El Salvador
that was negotiated in Zacatecoluca Prison. In return for better prison conditions and jobs
programs, the imprisoned gang leadership directed their members on the street to limit their
use of violence and restrict their recruitment in schools. As a result, the homicide rate in the
nation plummeted, demonstrating the ability of prison gangs to control the levels of violence
in a nation.
The Implications of the Micropower of Prisons
Hangin’ and bangin’, predation and welfare demonstrate how prison gangs are able to
construct, exercise and extend a type of “carceral sovereignty” by virtue of their control of
prisons. The governments of narco-states treat prisons as “human dumping grounds”[18]
and are merely content to have some gang members and leaders removed from the streets.
The imprisonment of violent gang members, even in dysfunctional correctional facilities, is
one mechanism to ameliorate public perceptions of governmental ineffectiveness. However,
once behind bars in prisons that are under-resourced and permeated by corruption,
gang members adjust the dimensions of their incarceration to produce authority over the
institution and society, rather than the state being able to use the institutional authority of
the prison to adjust the dimensions of gang activities.

As a result of the adaptability of prison gangs, prisons in narco-states have emerged as
important sites of order and disorder. On the one hand, prisons enable gangs to create
order in specific communities by providing useful services. In addition, gang truces
negotiated in Salvadoran and Honduran prisons stand as testaments to the centrality of
these institutions to reduce homicides in their societies. On the other hand, prisons are a
source of disorder by permitting gangs to increase the levels of violence on the street as a
way to coerce the state. The CV and PCC attacks coordinated from prisons demonstrate
their role as command headquarters for directing high levels of lethal violence in cities. So
intimate is the order and disorder nexus, the micropower of prisons may be best described
as the ability to generate “dis/order” in a narco-state.
The implications for narco-states are far-reaching. Governments compete with the shadow
sovereignty emanating from prisons. Politicians in narco-states must calculate how prison
gangs might react to policy choices that might negatively affect their interests. Some gang
leaders have public profiles, giving them an additional degree of political power. These
implications leave citizens uncertain about whether their interests or those of criminal
groups guide the formation and implementation of public policy that affects their daily lives.
Because of the micropower of prisons, the following recommendations should be explored
to reduce its implications for narco-states:
Prisons should be considered as more than peripheral institutions, but as part of the sinews
of narco-states. Prisons have become strategic spaces for gangs in narco-states. Prisons
do not serve to disrupt gang violence, but act as a way for gangs to export their authority.
All states struggle with the interests and activities of prison gangs, but narco-states are
especially susceptible to their capacity to harm the legitimacy of governance. Each prison
should be viewed through the lenses of the culture and history of the narco-state where
they exist. Mexican prison gangs are linked to powerful drug cartels while El Salvadoran
gangs find some of their roots in the nation’s civil war. Brazil’s CV is rife with leftist political
rhetoric and the PCC traces its origins back to the 1992 prison massacre at the Carandiru
prison complex. Gangs are not monolithic; the connection between prison gangs and their
comrades on the street is not always solid. Many gangs are federated entities or even
franchised. Exploiting these gaps in the continuum of gang governance requires a deeper
investment in intelligence capabilities that focus on the dynamics of criminal gangs. A
system of “mentor prisons” should be established. Keeping in mind the unique history and
culture of each country, a mentor prison system would resemble the “sister city” program,
but with added emphases on how successful prisons around the world can work with
struggling prisons in narco-states to transmit their best practices in reducing the power of
prison gangs.
Understanding the micropower of prisons in narco-states must be an essential first step
in building policies and strategies that curtail the capacity of gangs to affect democratic
governance.
The views expressed do not represent those of the US government, the US Department of
Defense or the US Army.
End Notes
[1] Joshua Partlow, “Chapo Guzman’s Prison Guards Reportedly Played Solitaire While
He Escaped,” Washington Post, October 6, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/
worldviews/wp/2015/10/06/chapo-guzmans-prison-guards-reportedly-played-solitaire-
while-he-escaped (accessed December 3, 2015).
[2] Arron Daugherty, “Zetas Turn Mexico Prison into Mass Grave,” insightcrime.org, January
27, 2016 URL: http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/zetas-turned-mexico-prison-
mass-grave.
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979), 24.
[4] Moises Naim, The End of Power (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 51.
[5] Ibid, 52.
[6] “Mexican Report Describes Out of Control, Self-Governed Prisons,” Christian Science
Monitor, September 24, 2012 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-
Wires/2012/0924/Mexican-report-describes-out-of-control-self-governed-prisons.
[7] Benjamin Lessing, “Inside Out: The Challenge of Prison-Based Criminal Organizations”,
Brookings Institution, September 2016, 1.
[8] David Skarbeck, “Governance and Prison Gangs,” American Political Science Review
105, no.4, (2011): 715. However, while storming the prison to attack their incarcerated
brethren is difficult, there have been “coups” where members on the street have colluded
with the government to place their own incarcerated gang leaders in solitary confinement
or move them to more distant prisons. The state agreed to these actions in exchange for
limiting gang activity in certain areas and reducing street violence. Doug Farah, “Gangs
as Transnational Criminal Organizations,” Gangs and Drug Trafficking in Central America
Conference, University of Pittsburgh, October 22, 2015.
[9] Mike Davis, “Foreword,” John Hagedorn, World of Gangs (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2008), xi.
[10] Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson, Street Gang Patterns and Policies (New York;
Oxford University Press, 2006), 69.
[11] Lirio Gutierrez Rivera, “Gangs and Cities in Honduras, “ Gangs and Drug Trafficking in
Central America Conference, University of Pittsburgh, October 22, 2015.
[12] Skarbeck, “Governance and Prison Gangs,” 705.
[13] Lessing, 6.

[14] “Eight Killed in Brazil Prison Riots,” BBC News, February 19, 2001 URL: http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1177738.stm.
[15] “Mexican Officials: Prison Inmates Released to Commit Killings,” cnn.com, July 25,
2010. URL: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/07/25/mexico.killings.prison/.
[16] John Bailey and Matthew Taylor, “Evade, Corrupt or Confront? Organized Crime and
the State in Brazil and Mexico,” Journal of Politics in Latin America 1, no.2 (2009), 15.
[17] Lessing, 12-13.
[18] Jonathan D. Rosen, Marten W. Brienen, Astrid Arrarás, Prisons in the Americas in the
Twenty-First Century: a Human Dumping Ground (New York: Lexington Books, 2015).
About the Author
Paul Rexton Kan is currently an Associate Professor of National Security Studies and the
Henry L. Stimson Chair of Military Studies at the US Army War College. He is also the
author of the book Drugs and Contemporary Warfare (Potomac Books, 2009). He recently
completed field research along the US-Mexico border for his forthcoming book, Cartels
at War: Mexico's Drug Fueled Violence and the Threat to US National Security (Potomac
Books).

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