In economics, commitment devices are often seen as clever solutions to self-control problems—ways people can tie their future hands to avoid giving in to temptation. A smoker throws away their cigarettes, a dieter pays in advance for healthy meals, a student announces a deadline publicly so they can’t back out. The idea is that by limiting future choices, a person can force themselves to stick with a preferred long-term strategy. But commitment devices also show up in places far removed from personal productivity—and in some cases, they carry bad unintended consequences when the strategic landscape shifts.

Consider the case of gang tattoos, especially those associated with MS-13. For years, highly visible tattoos served as a powerful way to demonstrate loyalty to the group. These tattoos—sometimes covering the face, neck, or arms—weren’t just aesthetic. They signaled that the individual was fully committed to the gang. In economic terms, they functioned as a high-cost, hard-to-fake commitment device. By making oneself easily identifiable as a gang member, a person burned bridges to legitimate employment or life outside the gang. That might seem irrational at first glance, but it was often a rational decision in context. Within certain neighborhoods or prisons, that signal provided protection, status, and trust among peers. The visible commitment reduced the gang’s uncertainty about who was loyal and who might defect.

But the rules of the game changed. In March 2022, El Salvador launched an aggressive crackdown on gangs following a sharp spike in homicides. Under a sweeping “state of exception,” authorities suspended constitutional rights, arrested tens of thousands of people, and expanded prison capacity dramatically. Tattoos quickly became one of the easiest ways for police to identify and detain suspected gang members. News reports describe men being pulled from buses or homes not for current criminal activity, but simply because of the ink on their skin. In many cases, the tattoos were from years earlier—when the wearer had been young and immersed in a world where signaling loyalty felt necessary for survival. Now, those same signals serve as evidence in court or grounds for indefinite detention.

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