This is the Unregistered Podcast, and I'm Thaddeus Russell.

This is a show about ideas, people, and behaviors that are considered inappropriate, out of bounds, or beyond the pale.

The things you're not supposed to talk about if you're a schoolteacher, a college professor, a businessman, a politician, a parent, a neighbor, or even a podcast host. These are the things you're not supposed to say or even think if you're a good liberal, a good conservative, or a good citizen. Each week, I'll interview a person who has something bad to say.

They might be a journalist or a professor, they might be a porn star or a drug dealer.

They might just be an ordinary person with an ordinary job who doesn't care about the rules of polite society.

I'm not interested in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker. I'm interested in people who break the rules of polite society. I'm not interested in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker.

I'm interested in people who break the rules of conventional thought

and to expand the scope of what is possible to say in our society.

I'm interested in people who make me think.

I have three speaking engagements coming up.

The first is October 12th in Denver, then November 19th in Des Moines, Iowa, and November 20th in Chicago, Illinois.

For more information, and to buy your tickets, go to Thaddeus Russell.com slash talks.

What happens when the government locks people away in cages and leaves them there?

My guest this week found a few answers to that question by looking at the history of prison gangs in America.

He is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, and he's an associate professor in political science at Brown University, but he is also the author of a remarkable book, The Social Order of the Underworld, How Prison Gangs Governed the American Penal System.

This is my interview with David Scarbeck.

So I'm here in Berkeley with David Scarbeck, who is the author of a fascinating book on one of my

favorite and least favorite topics, prisons, and how they are governed.

And the answer he has to how they are governed is surprising to many people,

which is that they are largely, or in large part, governed by the prisoners.

And he has a lot to say about that in this book, and he's working on a new book,

which asks the question globally about prisons globally both spatially

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