The Carceral Social Order and the Structuring of Neighborhood Criminalization

This chapter explores how the carceral social order has become an authoritative framework for labeling poor youth of color as criminal gang members. As punitive institutions rely on this system to organize the facility, it structures a prevailing assumption that youth are involved in gangs and that the forms of creative expression that they practice are examples of gang activity. But this system also shapes how police label youth in the neighborhood. In instances of “polarized labeling,” in which young people are assumed to be loyal to one side or the other of local rivalries, the sorting process essentially begins the first time youth are stopped in the street by police. Within the context of a neoliberal California, this criminal labeling functions to frame youth, their families, and communities as economic burdens and social threats who need to be punitively managed. I argue that this rationalizes the mass incarceration of poor communities of color by defining these spaces as “gang-infested” neighborhoods that require aggressive policing and surveillance, subsequently marking residents as appropriate targets for imprisonment.

Stick Together and Come Back Home

This book focuses on the spillover of carceral identity into poor communities of color as a collateral consequence of mass incarceration. Analyzing fifteen months of ethnographic research in two juvenile justice institutions and interviews with seventy paroled adults, probation youth, and institutional staff, I argue that punitive facilities institutionalize and enforce a “carceral social order”—a system of social organization in which authorities divide people by race, home communities, and peer networks into gang-associated groups. This social order is rooted in the prison, where racial sorting shapes day-to-day life and relationships for the incarcerated and where prisoners use the resulting collective identities to navigate the segregated institution. But this social order also seeps back into the neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration. Local youth learn about it through the experiences of imprisoned loved ones, but they also encounter it themselves as it is reproduced locally in juvenile justice facilities that adopt the prison’s sorting practices. This book focuses on understanding how the institutions of the justice system shape the identities that we commonly recognize as criminal, as well as on mapping how this influence extends from the prison to the neighborhood. Through this analysis, we can see how local communities are impacted by the socializing power of the prison system, how this influence exposes residents to ongoing criminal labeling and violence, and how the fallout of this spillover is experienced across generations.