When is a prison gang not a prison gang: When it’s an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang

Communities everywhere have experienced the negative effects of street gangs, whose members commit crimes, and often end up in prison. Other gangs form in prison, and their influence often extends to the streets. The presence and influence of prison gang members in the community increases the threat of violence to citizens. Research on prison gangs has been conducted regularly since the mid-1980s. At that time, a thorough survey of the U.S. prison gang climate was conducted. That research included a brief reference to the Gypsy Jokers as the first U.S. Prison gang in the Washington State Penitentiary, in 1950. No original source of that information was identified. Since then, a handful of scholars have recited the same information, sometimes identifying the 1985 work, and at other times, identifying secondary sources. The Gypsy Jokers are, and have been, a motorcycle gang, and are considered an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMG) by law enforcement. They have consistently identified their origin in San Francisco, CA, in 1956. They are not, nor have they ever claimed to be, a prison gang, and their first presence in Washington State was in the 1960s. This article was developed with research included in a paper submitted to the Journal of Gang Research and a textbook on gangs that is pending publication (Knox, Gilbertson, Etter, and Smith, 2016).