Dissertation: "The Economics of Prison and Street Gangs"

Committee: Peter J. Boettke (chair), Peter T. Leeson, & Virgil H. Storr


My dissertation examines the mechanisms that California based prison gangs devise to operate effectively without the aid of state-enforced contracts. For evidence, I rely on confiscated internal gang documents, court reports, internal law enforcement reports, and federal indictments against some of the state's most notorious gangs.

In my job market paper, I argue that the internal governance institutions found in the written constitution of the Nuestra Familia prison gang provide a system of checks and balances that reduces internal predation and misconduct by providing each member of the gang with the ability to monitor predation, an incentive to stop it, and a mechanism for doing so.

In my second paper, I investigate what a prison gang can do once they have overcome the organizational problems unique to their environment. I argue that the prison system facilitates prison-based extortion of Southern-California street gangs by the Mexican Mafia prison gang. With fewer than 200 members, the Mexican Mafia systematically extorts nearly 21,000 non-incarcerated gang members because they anticipate future incarceration and the prison gang controls Los Angeles jails.  

Understanding how institutions coordinate people's desires and resources is a prominent theme in economics. This dissertation examines how people of a systematically biased agent type, lacking access to important formal institutions like courts, and facing high costs of communication because of incarceration are still able to devise mechanisms to achieve cooperation.  I identify the mechanisms and conditions under which self-enforcing exchange is possible. This research contributes to our understanding of organizational problems and the role of -- and substitutes for  -- formal institutions.