It’s not uncommon for large groups of people confined to depressing institutions where their every move is monitored and their freedoms are limited to divide up into splinter factions where each group’s solitary unifying factor is either their race, gender, nationality, heritage, lifestyle choice, or their desire to survive to see another sunset, and I’m not just talking about high school.

One of the basic rules of survival when you end up spending an extended amount of time behind bars is to join a gang, something that the brilliant television series Oz taught me.

Check out this infographic here below called A Look At The Gangs In Oz which breaks down every gang on Oz, listing the leaders, along with the criminal statistics of the gang members.

The show that ran on HBO for six seasons beginning in 1997 was a harsh and unrelenting look at life inside an experimental prison ward called Emerald City and featured a solid ensemble cast that included J.K. Simmons (Burn After Reading), Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), Harold Perrineau (The Matrix Reloaded), Dean Winters (30 Rock), Ernie Hudson (The Crow), Eamonn Walker (Unbreakable), B.D. Wong (Jurassic Park), Lee Tergesen (Wayne’s World), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra), and Rita Moreno (Singin’ in the Rain), among many others. It was brutal, violent, disturbing, and uncompromising in its portrayal of the actions of its characters. Like most great TV series Oz wasn’t always at its best, but when it was on top form it was like no other show ever broadcast.

Fans of the series will enjoy this infographic a lot. Everyone else, I maybe not. But the uninitiated will likely be fascinated to see what Evan Seinfeld was doing with his time between playing with his band Biohazard and doing porn with his wife Tera Patrick. Plus it makes for a fun game of “Hey I Know That Guy”. I could see an Oz-themed role playing game emerging from this.

Infographic

Via: Criminal Justice Resource