It is one important means by which the gang's world view is sustained and propagated. In the mid to late-1 970's, when the gang was at its height, it functioned through an extensive secret bureaucracy within the prisons that appears to have mimicked the corrections department bureaucracy itself. It is as if the gang has studied and mastered the means by which corporate organizations maximize success by bureaucratizing to increase efficiency. Even today the tip's Education Department trains professional teachers who are under the command of each of the gang's regimental lieutenants. More recently, after serious court attacks and convictions almost destroyed it in the early 1 980's, the Norteno tip and its newer offshoot has reduced its paper trail considerably.
Members continue to have their in-prison lessons, though less is written down now.
By this means, among others, gang business goes on. Much of the original tip's Education Department remains intact in the education of its newer offspring, though it has been forced to take on an even more subterranean form and a less formal organizational structure. This change is no measure of the gang's demise. After members of the gang were convicted under the Rico racketeering statute in the 1980's, leaders decided to reorganize for the group's better protection. As a result of moving to this new organizational structure, the Norteno tip's education function has taken on less institutional, less formal means.