Violence makes safe in South African prisons Prison gangs, violent acts, and victimization among inmates Marie Rosenkrantz Lindegaard and Sasha Gear Abstract: That gangs have a prominent place in South African prison violence— like in many other geographical contexts—has become increasingly clear. Based on qualitative research among South African inmates and ex-inmates, we propose that prison gangs be considered adaptation strategies to the extremely coercive and oppressive environments of prisons. We focus on the relationship between gang involvement in prison, violent acts among inmates, and the risk of being sub- jected to violence during incarceration. By providing emic perspectives, we aim to demonstrate how inmates negotiate three types of social roles, largely defined by their ability and willingness to use violence: franse, gangster, and wyfie. Our find- ings suggest that prison gangs may jeopardize the personal safety of inmates, but can also paradoxically offer some inmates the opportunity to establish a sense of safety and agency by avoiding random violence. Keywords: adaptation strategies, inmate culture, prison gangs, prison violence, safety, sexual violence Violent acts among inmates have largely been associated with prison gangs. Prison gangs have been found to be a key source of violent crimi- nal acts and other acts of noncompliance inside prisons in the United States (Drury and DeLisi 2011). For example, Fischer (2001) noted that prison gang members were two to three times more likely than nongang inmates to commit serious disciplinary violations. Using two sam- ples of youths paroled from California Youth Authority institutions in the United States, MacDonald (1999) found that gang members were 30 percent more likely to commit assorted acts of prison violence. Gaes et al. (2002) like- wise showed that among sentenced male in- mates in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in United States, gang affiliation, inde- pendent of other variables, increased the likeli- hood of inmate misconduct. In a study of mis- conduct in 298 medium- and maximum-security facilities in the United States, Reisig (2002) re- ported that facilities with a higher percentage of gang members experienced significantly higher rates of inmate homicides. Misconduct in prison has been explained as the consequence of high concentrations of lower-educated young men with a criminal history (Berg and DeLisi 2006); as the result of the pains experienced by Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 68 (2014): 35–54 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2014.680103