I’ve been collecting articles on police forces, gangs and prisons over the last while.

I don’t have any great insights, and as someone who has not studied sociology at any length, I don’t have much confidence in any conclusions I might make from reading such a list.

I still believe that you cannot have a society without an effective armed authority (e.g., a police force) and some form of exile (e.g., a prison). The challenge I see is most societies do not do a good enough job with their armed authorities or their forms of exile, perhaps because most citizens in a society don’t care what happens to people who run a ground with the police or prison. Only recently in America, with Trump and his desire to use authorities like ICE to capture and ship people to prison in El Salvador, have citizens (mostly white, I suspect) turned to paying attention to this again.

You can read the articles I collected here and form your own conclusions:

• Here’s a story about how police can just stop doing their job and become ineffective: For 8 Months, Traffic Enforcement on New Jersey’s Highways Plummeted.
• Here’s a story of how police can turn into a vicious gang themselves: A fourth former Mississippi law enforcement officer who pleaded guilty to torturing two Black men was sentenced to 40 years in prison Wednesday, as accounts of the horrifying brutality of a self-styled “Goon Squad” of deputies gripped a federal courtroom. Relatedly, there is a good site mapping American police violence here.
• This is about how there was a surge of gang violence in Haiti that forced out U.N. Workers. The superior organization and firepower of the gangs overwhelmed the police and rendered them ineffective.
• Gang violence is not just a Haitian problem: it’s in Ecuador too. In fact, it’s a problem in many countries from Mexico down throughout central and South America.
• With the destruction of everything in Gaza, it’s not surprising there was a breakdown there and you had looting. There was no effective armed authority for the people of Gaza once the invasion occurred.
• Danish hippies had to resort to a police force (shown above) due to gangs of drug dealers taking over. (More on Christiania, Copenhagen here). They would have preferred to have neither the police nor the gangs, but in the end they had to choose one over the other.
• A classic study of resorting to an effective armed authority over gangs occurs in the film The Seven Samurai, where farmers hire outside warriors to take on thieves who swarm their farms every year.
• A problem in the American justice system is bad prisons. This is a story of a California youth detention center with gladiator like fights that were supported by the officers there. More on bad prisons run by gangs, here.
• It’s not impossible to have better prisons. Evidence of that can be seen in this story of farm to table prison food, here.
• More on the topic, by me, here.