if I understand correctly, this is a (relatively) new trend; these guys getting out of prison and organizing into pseudo organized gangs. Through the mid 80's to late 90's, political groups that were often characterized as "neo-nazis" and/or "white supremacists" did little in the way of actual crime. Mostly they were just a bunch of ignorant dipshits that liked to blame their problems on jews and other minorities.

10-15 years ago most "aryan gangs" were mostly just a bunch of angry skinhead teenagers drinking beer and listening to shitty music. I'm even hesitant to call anything they did "nazism", there's so little resembling an actual political ideology that it really was/is just senseless hate for the sake of senseless hate. most of these knuckleheads wouldn't have been able to explain the tenants and beliefs of the German national socialist party despite the abundance of nazi imagery tattooed on their bodies.

I was heavily involved in the punk scene as a teenager, and there is often an overlap between the punk and skinhead genres/scenes thus I was quite often exposed to these people. It's a story I've seen repeated a hundred times. Most of these guys eventually grow out of it, truth be told. The truly bad apples in these counter-cultural "movements" go to jail, become career criminals, get out and establish the only stabilizing structure they now know: gang life. At that point it ceases to be about a perceived political ideology and entirely about making money and engaging in the same behaviors that made them hate those minorities (from their perspective). Ultimately prison and prison culture become self fulfilling prophecies of recidivism.

Point being, yes, for most of their history the AB's control and organization were pretty much limited to state and federal prisons but that is changing. There is an emerging gang culture cultivated from returning parolees, especially now in California that the prisons have reached maximum capacity and are beginning to let a lot of former "lifers" out.