It’s behavior.
Gangsta behavior/prison/gansta behavior
I think that may explain part of it, but I haven't seen citations supporting it with hard data. I wonder if it has to with chemokine(sp?) coreceptors ccr5 or cxcr4.
I entered (ccr5 or cxcr4) and bubonic plague into PubMed's query box. That was one of 16 hits involving CCR5.