Carceral Violence Inside and On the Outs
This chapter explores how the carceral social order structures criminalized residents’ experiences with violence, both inside and outside the punitive facility. The need for strong group identities controls some forms of gang and interpersonal violence in the institution, but it also dictates when violence is appropriate or even demanded. The socialized perception that racialized groups are threats to one another compels participants to use violence to themselves police the social order that the institution established—lashing out when group boundaries are threatened or forcing authorities to relocate them when they feel outnumbered. This chapter also examines how penal violence spreads into the neighborhood through secondary prisonization and institutional reproduction of the carceral social order, influencing the local conflicts that young residents must learn to navigate. Finally, I discuss how the expansion of carceral affiliations into local spaces shapes young peoples’ exposure to police violence carried out in the name of gang suppression.