Nexum VIII - Prison Gangs: Gang culture dominates most of Nexum's prisons. In every Imperial prison, those brutal enough to exploit the weakness of their fellow prisoners rise quickly within the veiled hierarchy of the various work camps, sacrificing their Humanity in order to survive.Even those born and raised here, who under Nexene law inherit their parent's sentences, throw off familial connections if it means greater power within an inmate faction. On Nexum, where the walls between the Warp and realspace are thin, sacrificing one's Humanity can be a far more literal experience than elsewhereTo those who can perceive the currents of the Warp, Nexum's prisons are hellish places. The anger, despair, and yearnings of the incarcerated are tangible forces that bleed into the very fabric of the facility, tainting it more and more over time.This process has somehow changed and warped the psyches of many inmates. In recent years, warders have reported explosions of violent gang activity of various peculiar strands within Nexum's prisons; few months now pass without spontaneous murders of the vilest kind.In Camp Takkrid, a Departmento Munitorum-run facility that processes both disgraced guardsmen and physically gifted civilian psychotics into Astra Militarum Penal Legionaries, there have been hundreds of murders within the past year, far above the average.Many of the victims have been decapitated; others show signs of having participated in ritualised combat to the death. This has not, though, stopped new platoons of Nexene regiments every several solar decades who go off to fight and die (and even sometimes manage to escape) on worlds across the sector.In the medical wing of Nexum's largest prison, General Population Processing I, a respected physician of over forty years' service was caught injecting patients with horrid chemicals of his own devising. Subsequent investigations linked him to seventy deaths over the course of his time on the planet.Many of these peculiar happenings are attributed to "snake," a sinister prison-brewed narcotic that appears to have its origin on the planet. First encountered three Terran years ago in the Moral Deviant wing of the High Security isolation prison Camp VI, this drug appears, horrifically, to have been created from the harvested adrenal glands of prisoners subjected to bizarre tortures in their final hours by their as-yet-unidentified murderers.Snake is highly addictive, and its use is known to be gradually spreading across the surface of the planet and even to other worlds.Other guards discount snake as the cause of the recent upswing in anomalous violent activity, citing instead the appearance of a new Emperor-worshipping mystery cult which appears to have spontaneously manifested overnight among the notoriously superstitious deep-excavation prisoners of the Low Gulag.Known as the Servants of the Iridescent Aquila, these cultists are ostensibly fanatical in their worship of the God-Emperor, but are known to scheme incessantly against other prison congregations; there are rumours that their doctrinal differences have occasionally spilled over into outright violence.Finally, the Turnkeys, Nexum's interrelated fraternity of hereditary guards and Enforcers, have not been immune to the growing violence. This traditionally tight-knit and insular society has for centuries policed the planet, herding prisoners from bunk to mine with a flick of the chain-whip.However, their social cohesion is now breaking down in the face of escalating gang violence, and more and more of the deaths on Nexum can be attributed to heavy-handed and brutal policing of the worst kind.