War on the Prison Insurgent
Chapter 10 reinterprets how the prison responded to the Ruiz victory with a new regime of militarization dedicated to waging war on what it considered to be the new class of prisoner insurgent. In the militarized climate, the new development of prison gangs erupted from the challenges of prison-made civil rights and racial struggle to initiate a new era of political assassination within the prison that constituted a carceral version of 1980s outsourcing and violence. The formation of the neo-Nazi and KKK white gangs attempted prison assassinations for radical white supremacist ends as an effort to stem the victories of civil rights in both the courtroom and the prison courtyard. This chapter contends that the new prison violence was due to mass incarceration, overcrowding, an attempt to reassert white privilege through gang outsourcing, and the militarized prison where gangs functioned as prison insurgents and correctional officers became counterinsurgent forces. As such, the final chapter reconsiders the sociological “paradox of reform” and “authority as good social order” argument by demonstrating that the shift from prison mobilization for prisoners’ rights to racialized balkanization must be understood within the onset of mass incarceration.