The article describes the social and cultural dimensions of prison gangs conceived as adaptive systems that organize legitimate and illegitimate developmental resources in austere circumstances and thrive on adversarial relations with rival gangs and with authoritarian social control agents such as prison officials. It illustrates that relations between prison gangs, viewed collectively, and prison administration significantly influence the nature of social organization inside the prison. The article describes recent gang control and "social organization enhancement" policies designed and implemented by the Illinois Department of Corrections, which adapted the "broken windows" theory/policy for application in prison facilities statewide. Altering the physical environment and the physical expressions of prison gang networks to produce a desired change in human behavior is the major premise of the broken windows theory as adapted for the prison setting. Non-gang inmates feel more secure and perhaps behave accordingly and prison gang members, in the best case, reduce the frequency of their offending. In addition, such environmental cleanups may have the added effect of improving the morale of prison guards, who interpret the prison's actions as support for the work they do. References, notes, bibliography