Cracking Gang Codes – by Eric Jankiewicz


Klivans assists prison gang units across the country when they have a hard time decoding a secret gang message. Klivans notes that although these various gang units try to decipher the codes themselves, sometimes they are just too overwhelmed but the rise in prison population to spend the amount of time a complicated gang code requires to break it…In prison, codes can be verbal or nonverbal, like a nod or a handshake. Then the written code, the stuff that Klivans deals with, takes on different forms. They borrow heavily from street language, or slang, and will put their messages into a cypher; meaning words in the English language are substituted by various symbols that often take the shape of bizarre symbols like scythe like character.


See transcript

Get the rest of the story

Print Friendly, PDF & Email