Constructing and Institutionalizing the Carceral Social Order

This chapter describes how punitive facilities structure, socialize, and reinforce the carceral social order within the institution. I argue that in their efforts to prevent institutional violence by separating rival gangs, the prison, the juvenile detention facility, and the continuation high school instead construct a consistent social order that is based in gang rivalries—one in which everyone in the facility is compelled to participate. Within these facilities, staff members construct this social order by using race, home community, and peer networks to categorize entire institutional populations into gang-associated groups. Staff members then routinely maintain these categories as distinct groups by policing the spatial boundaries between them, as keeping rival groups separated is perceived as necessary for ensuring institutional security. The relationships and conflicts that are structured by these sorting and segregation practices ultimately socialize this carceral social order as a dominant, “common sense” logic for both managing and navigating punitive facilities.

“The Home Team” at the Intersection of Prison and Neighborhood

This chapter looks at how carceral affiliations come to connect the prison and high-incarceration neighborhoods. For incarcerated residents, affiliations serve as important ties to home and as sources of support in unpredictable settings. When these community members return home with little formal or material reentry support, many hold on to these identities—both because they may supply the only help that parolees do find and because these residents can never be certain that they will not be locked up again. At the same time, local youth learn about these affiliations from previously or currently imprisoned friends, relatives, and neighbors, informing how they imagine they will need to survive their own potential experiences with incarceration. This not only proliferates carceral affiliations in local spaces but also contributes to an understanding of poor black and Latina/o neighborhoods as pathological that many young residents internalize.

Conclusion

This chapter outlines the implications of the book and makes recommendations for future research and policy considerations. I argue that relying on identifying and separating gang members not only fails to prevent violence in carceral institutions but also has serious consequences for those who are processed through these facilities. Namely, this practice positions individuals into rivalries between criminalized affiliations—exposing them to confrontation and violence and ultimately ascribing them with criminal labels that keep them cycling through the justice system. This chapter also explores alternative models, discussing instances both in this research and in previous studies in which criminal justice facilities desegregated their institutions. Finally, I argue that establishing a more just and effective criminal justice system requires reducing the emphasis institutions place on identifying and controlling gang membership.

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.

Negotiating and Resisting the Carceral Social Order

This chapter discusses how affiliated identities are performed within a context in which individuals must read each other’s position in the carceral social order. Specifically, I examine how participants use space and style to signal one’s ties to the racialized groups institutionalized in punitive settings. Additionally, this chapter explores how individuals attempt to negotiate and resist the prevailing carceral social order when they do not fit neatly into the system’s organizational schema. Participants who have a mixed-race identity or who have family members in rival gangs have to figure out how they will navigate a divisive environment in which their position is not immediately clear. In these instances, individuals have to choose one affiliation over another or, in some cases, attempt to exclude themselves from the carceral social order altogether by refusing to affiliate with anyone.

Carceral Affiliation and Identity Construction

This chapter discusses how the parolees and probation youth learn to understand the identities that are created and instilled in the segregated facility. Probation youth and parolees see their own racial and neighborhood identities—rearticulated in this context as carceral affiliations—as valuable resources for protecting themselves inside punitive facilities. But while these affiliations are often framed as criminal gangs by authority figures, I argue that developing a critical analysis of the carceral system’s socializing power requires acknowledging how participants distinguish the differences between affiliations and gang identities. As participants are socialized to identify with carceral affiliations, this process shapes how they learn to understand their own racial, gang, and gender identities, as these are each molded to help one fit within the social order of the punitive institution.

Introduction

This chapter establishes the context for the research explored throughout the book and introduces the “carceral social order” as a concept for understanding the identities and relationships that are socialized by the punitive facility through the sorting and segregation of its charges. In focusing on the prison as a socializing force, I propose that what happens inside the institution has consequences outside it as well. Specifically, I argue that we can recognize the racial sorting of prison inmates in California as a process that has had clear and visible implications for the state’s criminalized communities of color. I contextualize this analysis within existing literature on mass incarceration, the geographic concentration of imprisonment, collateral consequences, and secondary prisonization. This chapter also introduces the research sites that are examined in this work, explains the means used for data collection, and contains an outline of the rest of the book.

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.