Where Evil
Dwells
Inside the gangs that rule California’s prisons — and the men who dared to stand against them.
A reckoning with
the evil inside the walls.
Before the 1950s, prisoners learned a trade and counted the days to release. Then came the gangs — organizations built not for survival but for power, reaching through the walls to the streets, the cartels, and the next generation.
Where Evil Dwells traces the men who built them, and the task-force officers and reformers who refused to let the darkness go unrecorded. It is investigative nonfiction with a moral spine — a case file kept open on purpose.
- PUBLISHER
- Wadsworth
- GENRE
- True Crime
- FORMAT
- Paperback
- YEAR
- 2026
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A career spent where
the system meets the street.
Robert B. Taylor writes from the inside of a career few authors survive to recount. Over decades of service with the Los Angeles Police Department and later as Chief of the Los Angeles County Probation Department, he worked the corridors where policy collides with human wreckage — the same corridors where California’s prison gangs were forged and fattened.
He knew the figures in this book not as headlines but as names: officers on the early prison-gang task forces whose warnings went unheeded, and reformers like Father Greg Boyle, whose Homeboy Industries offered an off-ramp from the cycle. Where Evil Dwells is his record of that distance traveled — from the cold institutional logic of La eMe and the Aryan Brotherhood to the stubborn, human insistence that evil be brought to light.
It is a book about power, yes. But more than that, it is a book about the people who refused to look away.