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Introduction

The Carceral Social Order

Frank went to prison the first time when he was twenty-one years old. Coming of age on the predominantly Chicana/o Eastside of Fresno in the early 1990s, he became active in its drug trade as a young man—he started rolling with Crips at fourteen, selling crack at sixteen, and by nineteen had moved on to robbing drug dealers. Then his daughter was born. Frank decided to quit gangbanging, leave the drug game, and make an effort to straighten his life out. “[I] started slowing down everything. Stopped hanging around with my cousins, just started working. Just doing the right thing.” But working in the formal economy was not making him enough money to get by and support his new family. As times got more desperate Frank turned back to what he knew made money—drug robberies. After one robbery his victims report him to police, and when the police come to investigate they find stolen property in his home. Frank is arrested and eventually sentenced to three years in prison.

As his bus pulls up in front of the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, he sees a collection of armed guards waiting. They pull him off the bus and march him and the others into the facility like cattle, past the large barking dogs that lunge and sniff at him as he passes by. His eyes catch hostile glances from everyone around him, both the prison staff and the other inmates. Once inside, nobody will talk to him. He gets nervous seeing everyone else around him start to clique up into small groups, but he stays by himself on a bench waiting to see what is going to happen to him. A corrections officer finally comes for him and escorts him to a large gymnasium lined with rows of double bunks and filled with hundreds of inmates. Not sure why he’s been brought here or who else is here, he sits on a bed feeling alone and unsure of what he is going to do. But hearing someone yelling behind him, Frank turns around and realizes something.

He already knows a lot of the men in here.

“[I hear] hey Frank! And I look. My heart was like thank you! I was like thank you God!” So many years later Frank would laugh as he remembers how relieved he felt in that moment, and how surprised he was to see so many familiar faces in the prison with him. “[W]hen I got there, to Jamestown, I knew practically everybody in there. From all the years I was growing up, all from the Eastside. [I knew a] lotta guys there.” Soon he hears more and more calls of “Frank!” “Hey man, what’s going on?!” “Frank!” “What’s up?!” Many remember him from high school as one of the students who always got good grades. “Man what are you doing here?” All he can think to tell them is “I got caught up.”

Frank finds several of the guys he grew up with in his neighborhood are already here, meaning that he won’t have to face the prison alone. Their presence helps him feel much less fearful about how the next three years are going to unfold. But with the unexpected support Frank finds with this group, being associated with them also exposes him to new tensions and conflicts, and in some cases violence.

Then I didn’t roll with the Crips. I told him I don’t wanna be gang-banging no more, I was just from Fresno. And so they just put me with the Fresno people but they were all Bulldogs in there, but they didn’t know me. I was just running with Fresno. Everybody asked me “Where you from?” “Fresno.” “Oh you a Bulldog?” “No, I’m just from Fresno,” but they would get it twisted sometimes. “Oh you from Fresno so you have to be a ‘dog!” but I was like “Naw, naw.” I had some problems with that, [had to] fight a few people over that.

Frank’s ability to find some support with the others from Fresno also subjects him to being associated with Bulldog gang members from Fresno. As Frank begins doing his time and acclimating to the prison, he starts to face challenges from other groups of inmates, some of which escalate into fistfights. But these do not start just because others suspect he is a rival gang member. Instead, he gets into fights for breaking the rules.

Not long after arriving at Jamestown, Frank joins a basketball game with a group of Black inmates one afternoon on the yard. He thinks nothing of it, but afterwards other Latino prisoners confront him about it. Latino inmates from Southern California flex their authority on the yard and tell him he can’t be hanging around with the Blacks. Frank reacts angrily to people he doesn’t know telling him who he can or cannot hang out with, but his friends quickly intervene. They tell him that even though the Fresno group doesn’t care about socializing across races, he should abide by the Southerners’ rules in order to keep the peace because they drastically outnumber them. Frank can’t believe it and protests: “You got me messed up dude. I don’t even know these people! I ain’t playing that!” But the others insist.

“No man, you just can’t. You gotta follow prison rules.”

The rules surrounding race that Frank has to learn to navigate are determined by a complex history of conflict between the powerful prison gangs in California’s system. In the late 1950s a group of Los Angeles-based Chicanos form La Eme, ostensibly to protect the few Mexicans inmates held in the then mostly White system. However, over time they begin preying on Latino prisoners from rural territories in Northern California, who some ten years later respond with their own group, La Nuestra Familia. Around this same time, shifting racial demographics in state prisons push White inmates to form the Aryan Brotherhood in response to losing their majority status to a growing population of Black and Latino prisoners, and compel George Jackson to form the Black Guerilla Family as a prison-based faction of the broader Black Power movement. For the next several decades these four groups compete with each other for control of the prison’s drug trade. Eventually the Aryan Brotherhood and La Eme create an alliance to help each other battle the Black Guerilla Family and La Nuestra Familia respectively. These latter powers create their own pact soon, thus establishing the racial politics that still govern prison life in California.

The “prison rules” Frank collides with following his basketball game are based in these same conflicts. Because La Eme is allied with the Aryan Brotherhood against the Black Guerilla Family, Southern California Latinos cannot socialize, trade, or share items with Blacks in the prison. When Frank is at Jamestown the Southerners are also able to impose these restrictions on his group from Fresno because of their fairly small presence there. Frank gradually learns these tenets, which he explains “was more jailhouse rules than [they] are actual guidelines that the prison sets.” However, the prison does have a hand in this; while the institution may not define the particular rules for each group, it does determine who is subjected to them. Prison authorities intervene in the conflicts between prison gangs through the implementation of racial sorting, following a logic that they can separate prison gangs by separating the racially defined populations that contribute members. But in institutionally grouping inmates by race and hometown, these officials have essentially established the system’s major prison gangs (and their rivalries) as not only the basis for segregation, but also for the identities that prisoners are now pushed to adopt in order to fit into this segregated system. Frank is sent to the housing unit he is precisely because correctional staff suspect that he would fit with the other men there. Despite never being a Bulldog—and not even Chicano like most of them are, but Puerto Rican—the fact that he is Latino and from Fresno is enough to categorize him with them. Now, regardless of if he bangs or not, because Frank is with the Bulldogs he is held accountable to their role in the racial politics of the prison.

Some inmates first learn of these politics once they get to prison as Frank did, but many others are familiar with them long before ever going to prison. Throughout years of researching, volunteering, and working with criminalized youth, I have consistently met young people who were intricately aware of the racial politics at work in the prison and even identified with the same groups that inmates are categorized into by correctional staff. In this book I propose expanding discussions of the collateral consequences of mass incarceration—the cumulative costs and penalties individuals and their families incur as a result of a prison term (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002)—to consider how high-incarceration communities are impacted by socializing processes instilled in the prison. I argue that in their attempts to control gang violence, punitive facilities construct a “carceral social order” that divides the entire institutional population into a handful of conflicting gang-associated groups. Within this social order, one’s race, home community, and peer networks are interpreted as signs of potential gang affiliation. These criteria are then used to sort individuals into criminalized collective identities that are continually socialized and reinforced as they acclimate to the institution. Youth hear about these identities from loved ones who have been imprisoned, but also encounter the same social order within juvenile facilities that similarly give gangs the same power to determine who youth can socialize with. This social order consequently contextualizes some of the unanticipated consequences mass incarceration has for the communities targeted for imprisonment: the transmission of prison culture to the street, and the extension of the prison’s ability to define and construct criminality.

CONCENTRATED INCARCERATION, CONCENTRATED CONSEQUENCES

As the era of mass incarceration has made imprisonment a prominent feature of the American justice system, its implementation has closely followed race and class power structures.¹ Blacks and Latina/os are significantly more likely to be incarcerated than are Whites (Mauer and King 2007), but prison admission rates are most inflated among poor Blacks and Latina/os (Pettit and Western 2004). Because patterns of residential segregation effectively contain poor people of color to high-poverty, racially defined neighborhoods (Massey, Gross, and Shibuya 1994; Lipsitz 2012)—spaces in which residents are exposed to targeted policing and subsequently more likely to become ensnared in the justice system—incarceration rates are also spatially concentrated. For example, in mapping the geographical distribution of incarceration rates in Tallahassee, Florida, sociologist Todd Clear found that imprisonment was overwhelmingly concentrated in low-income Black neighborhoods (2007). Subsequent studies in New York City, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Wichita similarly found that the neighborhoods in these cities from which prison inmates are disproportionately drawn are those with the highest concentrations of poor Blacks and Latina/os (Spatial Information Design Lab 2008). Within these poor communities of color, a significant portion of young male residents experience imprisonment at some point in their lives (Pettit and Western 2004; Braman 2004; Simon 2007).

Mass incarceration is then something that predominantly and most severely affects specific neighborhoods: the residents of poor communities of color are disproportionately subjected to imprisonment (Clear 2007; Parenti 2000; Gilmore 2007; Mauer 2006) but are also overly exposed to its aftereffects, particularly the pains of prisoner reentry. Of the approximately 640,000 individuals released from prison every year (Carson and Golinelli 2014), most return to the same communities from which they were incarcerated (Petersilia 2003). Concentrated incarceration then subsequently also creates “central-city neighborhoods and inner suburban ring communities—where much of urban poverty is situated—[that] are playing host to the majority of inmates leaving jails, prisons, and detention centers” (Venkatesh et al. 2007, 9). Once released, parolees often struggle to find stable employment (Pager 2007) and housing (Lipsitz 2012), which can jeopardize their efforts to avoid reoffending. For former inmates with limited mobility, returning to neighborhoods with already high poverty and unemployment rates offers little opportunity for successful reentry (Sharkey 2013; Sampson 2012), which sends most parolees back to prison fairly quickly, most commonly within six months of release (Petersilia 2003).

But high rates of imprisonment and release also aggravate the structural inequalities these marginalized communities already experience (Lipsitz 2012; Clear 2007). Incarceration severely limits the employment options of former prisoners after release (Western 2006; Pager 2007), and the influx of workers with poor job prospects further strain weak labor markets (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999). The consistent removal and return of neighborhood residents also deteriorates informal social controls in the community (Lynch and Sabol 2004), producing a “tipping point” at which high incarceration rates actually raise crime rates rather than reducing them (Clear 2007). After this tipping point incarceration erodes the neighborhood’s collective efficacy (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997), and may even create a vacuum effect in destabilized drug markets in which many candidates compete to replace dealers who have been sent to prison. Additionally, the political disenfranchisement of convicted felons diminishes the voice of high-incarceration communities in electoral outcomes and reduces access to political representation (Marza and Uggen 2006).

But while mass incarceration magnifies the structural disadvantage of poor communities of color, the transmission of prison cultures into these communities also represents a significant but little-understood outcome of mass imprisonment. As concentrated incarceration establishes imprisonment as a frighteningly common experience in affected neighborhoods (Simon 2007; Western 2006), prison-based cultural styles or practices find their way into criminalized communities through a “growing hybridization and cultural interpenetration of prison and street” (Brotherton 2008, 63). This transmission is similar to how high rates of recruitment and participation in the military influence its cultural presence in rural communities (Krier, Stockner, and Lasley 2011), and even synchronize local understandings of masculinity with those constructed and valued in military training (Woodward 2000). Recognizing that inmates are socialized to take on the worldviews, values, and behaviors of the prison (Clemmer 1958), the cycling of so many community residents through the penal system may carry some of this socialization into the neighborhood. Within the emerging literature on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, the impact that identities socialized inside the prison may have on life outside the facility remains a largely unexamined area.

CRIMINALIZATION AS COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCE

Criminologists have long argued that as individuals enter the prison and begin to serve their sentences, they experience a process of prisonization (Clemmer 1958) in which they learn to adjust to prison life and are assimilated into an inmate subculture. But learning to fill this prisoner role is not a benign or uncostly socialization process. Michel Foucault (1977) argues that it is through such socialization that the prison ultimately defines and constructs criminality. Socializing people to be prisoners distinguishes prisonization as a criminalizing process, one that entrenches a criminal status by teaching the individual to embody it. This criminalization is often described as prisoners learning to refine criminal participation from other inmates (Foucault 1977), or being compelled to become gang members (Hunt et al. 1993; Skarbek 2014). But we must consider how criminality is shaped by the social status produced by incarceration—former inmates are not only readily recognized as criminal, making their deviance more visible (Chambliss 1973), but are also less able to access legitimate means of self-sufficiency precisely because they are former prisoners (Travis 2004). Foucault argues that this identification of former inmates as a criminal class is the central accomplishment of the prison (1977).²

Most important to Foucault’s point is that this status lingers even after release, so that it is in free society where one is identifiable as previously incarcerated and therefore criminal. The expansion of mass incarceration not only structures the consistent return of such-labeled “criminals” to poor communities of color in large numbers (Clear 2007), but also funnels them into a fairly small number of urban neighborhoods (Sharkey 2013). Concentrated incarceration effectively raises crime rates in subsequent years (Clear 2007), but the concentration of prisoner releases also reinforces the identification and subsequent policing of targeted neighborhoods as criminal. For example, when California’s prison realignment called for the release of many low-level offenders, law enforcement agencies across the state expressed concern that this would elevate local crime rates and that they would need more resources to combat the inevitable crime wave (Petersilia and Snyder 2013).

Intensified policing of poor communities of color is closely tied to the growing role of the prison in the management of social problems (Wacquant 2009; Gilmore 2007), but also to the close connection this reliance structures between the prison and “problem” communities. Loic Wacquant (2001) frames this as a meshing of prison and neighborhood in which the two increasingly resemble each other in terms of both form and function; while the prison takes on the ghetto’s task of racial confinement, the ghetto begins to resemble the prison in terms of everyday experiences with surveillance and social control. Within criminalized neighborhoods, law enforcement agencies increasingly embed themselves within local institutions such as schools and community centers, appropriating these sites as segments of a punitive justice system (Rios 2011; Kupchik 2010). But Wacquant (2001) goes on to argue that the prison and the ghetto essentially become extensions of each other; these sites collaborate to form a “carceral continuum” that effectively contains poor people of color and isolates them from socioeconomic mobility.³ The school-to-prison pipeline—a frequently traveled trajectory in which punitive school policies push poor youth of color into the criminal justice system (Wald and Losen 2003)—represents a dramatic manifestation of this relationship between penal and community institutions. Within this system, schools in poor Black and Latina/o neighborhoods treat students as criminal suspects by criminalizing their behavior (Hirschfield 2008; Nolan and Anyon 2004). Simultaneously, local governments establish systems of “alternative” or “continuation” schools that effectively exclude students from public school districts while keeping them under justice system supervision (Wald and Losen 2003). Youth growing up in the ghetto are resultantly more likely to enter the prison as young adults, only to return as felons to criminalized communities that continue their exclusion from civic and socioeconomic participation.

The reliance on crime control to address social problems (Gilmore 2007; Wacquant 2009) also presumes the prison as a place to which the perpetrators of social disorder can be sent following removal from the community. Youth criminalization is then the process of identifying who is to be sent—a personification of social disorder (Feldman 1991). Mass incarceration therefore structures the criminalization of poor communities of color in ways that situate young peoples’ experiences with criminal labeling. Sociologist Victor Rios (2011) contends that the era of mass incarceration intensifies both the scale and consequences of criminal labeling—as increased law enforcement involvement in community institutions drags more youth into the juvenile justice system, it tags them with stronger and more enduring labels that ensure an ongoing cycle of surveillance and punishment. But while mass incarceration intensifies the consequences of youth labeling, its concentration in poor neighborhoods of color also establishes a certain continuity between how residents are managed in the prison and criminalized in the neighborhood. For example, school-to-prison pipeline scholars have argued that poor students are already socialized for incarceration in prison-like school settings that feature metal detectors, security fencing, surveillance equipment, pat-downs and searches, in-school suspensions, and a constant presence of law enforcement that collaborate to define students as criminal suspects (Hirschfield 2008; Nolan and Anyon 2004). Furthermore, social theorists have argued that the prevalence of incarceration in Black and Latina/o neighborhoods has established it as a new stage in the life course of poor young men of color (Pettit and Western 2004; Comfort 2012), making the prison “a normal socializing institution for whole segments of American society” (Simon 2007, 472). In this sense, the prison’s connectedness to the neighborhood may then lead the prisonization process that acculturates inmates to the penal institution to appear in other criminalizing environments. But as I address in the next section, prisonization is also characterized by the construction of specific identities that are read as criminal, some of which now appear in poor and heavily-policed communities of color. Consequently, the cultural “meshing” or “hybridization” of prison and neighborhood (Wacquant 2001; Brotherton 2008) that results from the consistent churning of residents between these sites may align how community members are criminalized both inside and outside of the penal facility.

CONSTRUCTING CARCERAL IDENTITIES

Racial segregation and conflict is a significant aspect of the prison social order inmates acclimate to (Wacquant 2001), but in California this is directly structured by the state. Since the 1970s state facilities have divided entire institutional populations by race (Parenti 2000; Robertson 2006), ostensibly to control escalating violence between the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerilla Family, La Eme, and La Nuestra Familia (Irwin 2005; Spiegel 2007). California Department of Corrections (CDC)⁴ officials separated these prison gangs by racially categorizing all inmates as they entered the prison system (Irwin 2005; Goodman 2008) and sending them to facilities with clear spatial boundaries between groups.⁵ For male prisoners, being categorized as Black, White, Latino, or “Other” (Asians and Pacific Islanders) by correctional staff (Goodman 2008) not only shapes who they can bunk and socialize with (Lindsey 2009), but also exposes them to conflict with other racial groups (Parenti 2000; Robertson 2006; Spiegel 2007). These social dynamics push prisoners to internalize the race- and place-based identities created by this process.

But these identities are also legitimized by facility staff members who implement this sorting. Sociologist Michael Walker found that officers also learn to rely on racial segregation to manage and control imprisoned populations (2016). Consequently, correctional officers maintain this segregation by encouraging incoming inmates to see themselves as members of the groups they are sorted into, and by consistently presenting race as an important divide that organizes institutional conflict (Goodman 2008). Sociologist Phillip Goodman (2008) argues that this practice represents a race-making process that institutionalizes narrow and incompatible racial identities. But there is also an aspect of “place-making” work in prison sorting (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) that shapes how inmates learn to articulate local identities. After being separated from other racial groups, Latino inmates are also geographically categorized as Norteños (Northerners), Sureños (Southerners), and Bulldogs depending on if they are from Northern, Southern, or Central California respectively. This context established important regional identities and even allowed place to shape one’s racial identity, such that Chicanos from different parts of the state are recognized as distinct races in the prison. For example, in his study of a medium-security prison criminologist John Irwin (2005) found that Northern and Southern Latinos generally avoided interacting with each other and recognized institutional boundaries between them as they would with other racial groups.

Importation theories argue that prisoners bring street, neighborhood, or gang identities into the prison with them (Irwin and Cressey 1962). Similarly, Joan Moore (1978) argued that for Chicano gang members, barrio gang ties shape their identities in the prison just as they would in the neighborhood. However, the social order structured by racial sorting imposes new identities on inmates that are prioritized in this context. In this sense, many gang-involved prisoners see a disruption of street gang identities when they are incarcerated—neighborhood loyalties and feuds become secondary to the prison’s racial politics, and former gang rivals often must put their conflicts aside while imprisoned in the interest of cultivating a united racial group identity (Skarbek 2014). Inmates have a difficult time claiming identities that fall outside of the narrow framework presented to them in sorting (Goodman 2008) because their classification structures so much of their experience in the prison (Robertson 2006; Lindsey 2009), making it an essential situational identity in this space (Goffman 1961).

Finally, we must acknowledge the role that prison sorting has in ascribing criminal labels (Lindsey 2009; Parenti 2000). Social organization in the prison is defined by race, place, and the sorting process that uses these identifiers to categorize inmates (Robertson 2006; Spiegel 2007). But because this system is based in institutional efforts to control gangs (Irwin 2005; Goodman 2008), the resulting groups are themselves commonly framed as gangs (or extensions of gang) that dominate the prison’s social order (Hunt et al. 1993; Skarbek 2014). For example, researchers studying the racialized social order in California’s prisons in the early 1990s explained that “where previously prisoners made choices about joining a gang, membership has now become more automatic, especially for Chicanos. Today . . . if [an inmate] comes from south of Fresno, he is automatically a Sureño, if he is from north of Fresno, he becomes a Norteño” (Hunt et al. 1993, 404–5). Assuming that everyone who goes to prison is a gang member—or becomes one while incarcerated—fails to recognize the institution’s influence in shaping its own social order. What Hunt and his colleagues overlook is that while not all inmates are gang affiliated, they are all subjected to a sorting process that essentially marks them as such.

To be clear, the groups Hunt and colleagues refer to as “gangs” here (Norteños and Sureños) are not the same groups as prison gangs like La Nuestra Familia and La Eme. Rather, Norteños and Sureños are groups born from the prison’s efforts to control La Nuestra Familia and La Eme by separating Latinos into Northerners and Southerners. It is important to conceptualize the collectivities discussed here differently from gangs for two main reasons: first, many prisoners simply do not consider themselves to be gang members or see the groups they associate with as gangs (Irwin 2005; Parenti 2000). Second, these groups are fundamentally based in and maintained by processes that label individuals as gang affiliated—both in the prison through sorting practices that use race and place as proxies for gang membership (Lindsey 2009), and in the neighborhood through the expansion of criminalizing practices in community institutions (Rios 2011).

PARALLEL CRIMINALIZATION

Their similar function in isolating people of color generates a relationship between the prison and the neighborhood that fosters a cultural bridging between the two (Wacquant 2001). Within this cultural meshing, the identities constructed in the prison find their way back into the neighborhoods from which prisoners are disproportionately drawn. Sociologist Megan Comfort’s work on the families and partners of incarcerated men helps us conceptualize this by introducing “secondary prisonization” (2008). She uses this concept to explain how inmates’ partners are themselves subject to the restrictions and culture of the prison as “quasi inmates” (2008, 15). In California, secondary prisonization makes the racialized conflict and discipline that structure inmates’ day-to-day lives consequential for the families and communities of the incarcerated. For example, until 2014 California state prisons used race-based lockdowns (Spiegel 2007) that restricted all inmates of a given race to their cells anytime there was a security threat in a facility. These lockdowns in turn affected the ability of inmates’ families to visit them; when Black inmates were locked down and restricted from leaving their cells, Black families were simultaneously separated and restricted from coming into the visitation room (Comfort 2008). Prisoners’ families are therefore affected by the same race- and place-based sorting practices that categorize their incarcerated loved ones, as these families’ relationships with incarcerated members tie them to the identities institutionalized inside the facility.

These connections to the incarcerated expose prisoners’ families and high-imprisonment neighborhoods to prison socialization processes that mark their recipients as criminal. The appearance of Norteña/o, Sureña/o, and Bulldog identities in California’s poor Latina/o communities offers a compelling testament to this. In the neighborhood these identities exist as umbrella terms that several Latina/o street gangs claim simultaneously (Skarbek 2011), and that may also articulate ethnic, linguistic, and/or class divides within the community (Katz 1996; Mendoza-Denton 2008). But there is some debate as to why barrio youth have been appropriating these prison-based identities for the past several decades.

One common discourse claims that these identities mark communities in which prison gangs have recruited local street gangs into an expansion of their criminal enterprises outside the prison (Rafael 2007). Political scientist David Skarbek offers a more nuanced take of this argument, explaining that these identities function to indicate which prison gangs have the authority to mediate local drug trades (2014). Just as segregation allows prison gangs to dictate the racial politics for the entire car,⁶ it also gives them broad authority over any street gangs whose members are locked up and segregated alongside them. Imprisoned street gang members may be used by prison gangs to attack rivals or maintain order inside, but they are perhaps most valuable as collateral for extorting drug revenue from gangs in the neighborhood. Prison gangs are able to impose “taxes” on street gangs by threatening to hurt incarcerated street gang members if they are not paid. Therefore, if gang-involved dealers (or gangs who themselves extort local dealers) want to protect their incarcerated homeboys—and recognize that they may be incarcerated themselves someday—then it becomes in their best interest to appease the prison gang (Skarbek 2014).

However, it is important to consider the institutional role in this relationship. For example, the ability of Chicano prison gangs to extort Chicano street gangs in this way is in the least facilitated by—if not outright dependent on—penal policies that force all Chicano prisoners to be housed together by positioning them against other racial groups. Additionally, these ties between prison and street gangs may also have their limits. La Eme and La Nuestra Familia have conspired with street gangs in a handful of well-publicized drug trafficking cases (Rafael 2007; Blatchford 2008; Skarbek 2014), but it is impossible to know if similar arrangements exist with all such affiliated neighborhood cliques. Consider that not all neighborhood gangs who claim Norteña/o or Sureña/o identities necessarily sell drugs or have access to sizeable drug markets; some are in towns with barely a few hundred residents. If there is little drug money to offer, how then are these identities distributed? Differing from this top-down view is Robert Durán’s (2013) explanation of how Sureña/o identities reached the states of Utah and Colorado. In his account, Mexican youth excluded from the existing Chicana/o gangs in their communities simply adopted Sureña/o identities they saw sensationalized in antigang media as an act of oppositional resistance against the racist social order they lived in. Not coincidentally, Southern California’s Sureña/o identities came to be a locally recognized form of criminality as LAPD-based gang experts consulted local police on how to identify gang youth (Durán 2013).

In recognizing law enforcement’s ability to name and identify criminality, it is important to remember the increasing role the prison has in this process. In California, the state in whose prisons these identities were originally born and where they first appeared in Latina/o communities, the neighborhoods they appear in generally correlate with how residents are sorted inside the prison.⁷ Within the prison these identities are ascribed in a mandatory sorting process and encouraged as legitimate identity categories around which social life is organized (Lindsey 2009; Goodman 2008). But within the poor communities of color that host parolees released from detention (Clear 2007), law enforcement agencies read these same identities as evidence of criminal gang membership (Katz 1996; Mendoza-Denton 2008). As such, parolees are often sent back to prison for violating gang stipulations of their parole based on actions such as socializing with similarly labeled peers or possessing anything that officers see as promoting this “gang” identity.

Criminalizing the very identities that the prison demands of its inmates never lets parolees shake their criminal status; this is the essence of Foucault’s (1977) delinquency. But these Norteño, Sureño, and Bulldog identities also come to inform how criminality is articulated in the neighborhood; they comprise the labels law enforcement ascribe to youth in gang validation processes (Rios 2011), as well as the identities neighborhood youth subsequently embrace to signal their resistance to local social hierarchies (Durán 2013; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Rios and Lopez-Aguado 2012). The policing of prison-based identities in neighborhood contexts represents an important extension of the prison’s ability to designate criminal status to the families and communities of the incarcerated. In these identities we can see how the prison produces meanings of criminality that increasingly define poor people of color and their neighborhoods as the appropriate targets of mass incarceration by labeling them as gang affiliated. This production by prisons pushes us to consider how “gangs” operate as a social construct—one that is part of a hegemonic master narrative of crime (Brotherton 2008; Ewick & Sibley 1995) that rationalizes not only perpetuating mass incarceration but also concentrating it almost completely in poor communities of color (Clear 2007).

WHERE PRISON AND FRESNO MEET AND MESH

The details are blurry, as they usually are with these kinds of stories, but people seem to agree that it happened sometime in the mid-1980s. Fresno was already an important dividing line in the prison for corrections officers separating Northern and Southern Hispanics; it was the southern frontier of Norteña/o street culture and one of largest cities from which La Nuestra Familia could extort drug market revenue. For at least the previous decade local street cliques on Fresno’s expansive Eastside had acknowledged this affiliation through the shared name of Fresno 14 (or F-14). But in the mid-1980s, members of F-14 incarcerated in San Quentin convened and decided that they would no longer “follow orders” from La Nuestra Familia. Some say that they were tired being used to attack La Nuestra Familia’s rivals, but most importantly this signaled that F-14ers active in the drug trade were now refusing to pay the prison gang any shares from local drug market earnings, instead now keeping all profits for themselves. These homeboys subsequently broke rank with other Norteña/o gangs and began calling themselves Bulldogs, a regional designation emanating from the marketing strategy to represent Fresno State University’s sports teams as being from “the Valley.” Word of this split soon spread through to the state’s other prisons, the California Youth Authority facilities, and back to the streets of Fresno where F-14 was soon “retired” and many young people began claiming Bulldogs for themselves. Decades later, young teenagers calling themselves Bulldogs still vaguely reference this event in local street mythology through regular proclamations of “We don’t take any orders!”

The story of the Fresno Bulldogs is generally understood as one of gang formation, or perhaps secession. But this story has had consequences for scores of local youth and adults who don’t consider themselves to be gang involved, and in many cases have explicitly avoided gangbanging throughout their lives. Gang politics affects what happens to everybody inside the prison, but this influence eventually trickles out to impact the “quasi-inmates” back home too. Part of why word spread so quickly and effectively is because the CDC began removing everyone from Fresno from Northern yards and segregated them into different housing assignments. Over time Fresno County Latinos came to be segregated as their own racial group in the prison, and for the most part even sent to the same facilities.⁸ Now people in Eastside Fresno knew that if they got locked up they were doing their time with Bulldogs, regardless of if they banged or not. What started as a dispute between a handful of Fresno-based gang members and the prison gang they formerly paid tribute to soon changed not only how all Fresno Latinos are categorized but consequently also the collective identities that traveled back home.

Fresno is a city of about a half million people, over a quarter of whom (28.9%) fall below the federal poverty line (Census 2015). Additionally, over half of the city’s poor residents (50.9%) live in high-poverty neigh-borhoods, giving Fresno the fourth highest rate of concentrated poverty in the nation (Kneebone 2014). These neighborhoods with poverty rates exceeding 40 percent are mostly confined to the communities south of McKinley Avenue⁹ in which 75 percent to 99 percent of residents are people of color. These are the same communities we see disproportionately affected by mass incarceration. Fresno’s problems with poverty and unemployment, coupled with a notoriously aggressive police department (see Parenti 2000), have left its communities of color particularly vulnerable to criminalization; while people of color represent 57 percent of all county residents, they account for 69 percent of all arrests (Benjamin 2015). But the disproportionate investment of public funds in crime control over community support also pushes poor criminal suspects into confinement. For example, despite California State Bar guidelines recommending parity in the resources available to prosecutors and public defenders, in 2009 the Fresno County Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution to finance the Public Defender’s Office at 61 percent of the funding made available to the District Attorney.¹⁰ This disparity has led to a Public Defender’s Office that is grossly unequipped to meet the local demand for its services; individual public defender attorneys average 612 felony cases and 1,462 misdemeanor cases every year, over four times what the American Bar Association recommends. Faced with such overwhelming caseloads, public defenders can do little more than advise their clients to plead guilty so as to avoid more serious charges or longer sentences. As a result, only 0.19 percent of the cases brought to the Fresno County Public Defender’s Office ever actually go to trial.

Fresno’s place as a borderland between regions of the state dominated by rival prison-based subcultures, and a county with higher incarceration rates than the Bay Area or Los Angeles (California Sentencing Institute 2017), make it an important site to examine how the prison’s social order spills into the community. In this work I focus on three points of contact at which the neighborhood intersects the carceral system, sites where residents pass from one to the other at different points in the life course—the juvenile hall, a continuation high school for youth on juvenile probation, and the prisoner reentry center. By incorporating multiple sites that impact criminalized youth into my analysis, I was able to track youth across institutional settings and observe how the social orders they encountered in each were related. In the reentry center I sat in on group meetings with parolees and interviewed them individually about their experiences both in the prison and the community.¹¹ This ethnography includes seventy-nine in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with parolees and probation youth in Fresno. While I collected this data I lived on the Eastside for over fifteen months, blocks away from many of the participants that I would get to know during this time.

Juvenile Detention Facility

Just south of the city limits, where the railyards and industrial warehouses finally give way to the surrounding farmlands, a large complex of two-story gray cement boxes with color-coded doors and paneling sits alongside the highway. Rather than being built up as one monolith structure, Fresno County’s Juvenile Detention Facility (JDF) is sprawled out across a large property. It actually includes two separate campuses—each capable of incarcerating up to 240 youth—that span out on either side from a central courthouse; one is for “detention housing” for youth awaiting trial or transfer to a state facility, the other for “commitment housing” for youth already sentenced by a juvenile court. JDF opened in 2006 at a cost of $145 million, making it the largest capital project in the county’s history. But this facility is actually just the first stage in Fresno County’s original master plan for the site; at the time of this research planned future additions included three more 240-bed confined housing wings, a boot camp, group homes, a continuation school, a reporting center, and more law enforcement offices to fill the 220-acre site that the county has already purchased. These additions would bring the total capacity of JDF to over 1,440 youth by 2040, making it the largest planned juvenile justice facility in the nation. In a county that currently has a population of less than one million, only the tenth largest in the state.

When JDF opened, the county boasted of it as the future of youth corrections, and it became an explicit representation of the county’s investment in punitive justice. By 2008, two years after the facility’s opening, the number of youth booked into juvenile hall rose by over a thousand to 5,331 juveniles. By far the largest increase was in the number of youth brought in for simple probation violations (VOPs)—citations given to youth who are already on probation for minor offenses such as truancy or tardiness at school, failed drug tests, or possession of “gang paraphernalia.”¹² The expanded space afforded by the new facility made it possible to detain far more young people, resulting in a doubling of the number of youth booked for VOP to over 1,200. In the years since the county has struggled to finance the large facility, even closing pods and losing almost 20 percent of its juvenile corrections officers (JCOs). The unviable costs of funding such a large facility combined with dropping juvenile crime rates have now put some of the county’s ambitious plans for the site in question. Still, JDF currently provides the necessary infrastructure to incarcerate a great number of local youth.

I came to JDF through the Fresno Youth Network (FYN), an outside agency who helped me find my way in, both figuratively and literally. Exiting from the freeway, a manicured, tree-lined road leads around the courthouse to the “commitment side” of the facility where FYN has a clubhouse for the youth inside. Standing alone in the dry, hot openness of the San Joaquin Valley, JDF is surrounded in each direction by flat fields that stretch out to the horizon, filled only with the noise of the highway and warm, unmitigated winds that carry the smell of tilled soil. It just makes coming in or out of the facility feel that much more dramatic. The glass door at the entrance is locked, as it often is. There’s a reception desk just inside, but when they’re short-staffed you have to just wait for someone free to come let you in. Sometimes it can take a while. I push the button on the metal intercom next to the door and a voice comes in asking “Can I help you?” I glance up to the round black camera bulging from the overhang ceiling and explain that I volunteer with FYN inside. They have hundreds of the same camera throughout the facility, above every doorway and down every hall. “Alright someone will be there in a few minutes.” While I wait for them to let me in a pair of rabbits chase each other around nearby, in the field between the parking lot and the cement wall of one of the pods.

After about ten minutes one of the JCOs finally gets to the door and lets me in once I show them the ID card the agency gave me. I store my wallet and cell phone in one of the lockers built into the opposite door, pass through the metal detector next to the reception desk, then wait until I hear the door buzz and the handle click open before going into the waiting room on the other side. I turn left in the waiting room and pass through a double set of security doors, the kind with a small room between them where the second won’t open until the first one is closed again. I push the same metal intercom button to open the second door and wait for the staff controlling the door remotely to inspect me over the camera again. This is why I keep my ID out. Eventually the thick steel bar locking the second door begins to slide open and I proceed into the visit room. I pass by the rows of lunch tables to another set of double security doors on the other side. These doors open into a long gray hallway with a concrete floor and walls, and more black camera bulbs every so many feet along the ceiling. The sound of the door closing echoes down the hall, and I walk to the end through one more door, this one leading to the grass quad outside. Outside is a soccer field with all the pods built into a circle surrounding it. I walk along the outside wall of the gym until I reach the door to the rec room, where I knock so the FYN staff will let me in.

The recreation room FYN runs inside JDF is a stark contrast to the rest of the facility. The white walls are covered in posters and artwork created by the youth who come in. The room features a pair of TVs with Xboxes; some beanbag chairs and a couch; ping pong, foosball, and air hockey tables; and a stereo for them to play music. Ten youth from each pod are allowed to come into the rec room for one or two hours every two to three days. The pods use a point system developed to monitor behavior to determine which ten get to come. FYN brought me in to facilitate a violence prevention program in which I asked youth a great deal about their communities, their ambitions, and their perceptions and experiences with the justice system. But more than anything the room serves as a place that just lets them get out of the pod for a little bit, which they greatly appreciate. Consequently much of my time here was spent hanging out with the youth as someone to play cards, video games, or just chat with. I jotted notes on their conversations and interactions during break periods between pods. Additionally, many of these youth were required to report to the San Joaquin Educational Academy (SJEA) upon their release from custody, which gave me the unique opportunity of stay in touch with them as they moved between these settings.

San Joaquin Educational Academy

Hidden from the main streets among rows of apartment and office buildings, few people know that SJEA is there, or even exists at all. The county runs the small continuation high school out of a converted AT&T call center that is surrounded by barbed wire fencing, the only opening a gate with a metal detector and stationed guard who searches students as they enter, confiscating keys and cell phones they forgot to leave at home or hide in the surrounding shrubbery. There are about 100 to 150 students enrolled at any given time, most of them (usually about 85%) boys. The racial makeup of the school was fluid during my twelve months there, but most of the time about two-thirds of the students were Mexican or Chicana/o, about a quarter of them were Black, and the remainder comprised of a mix of White, Native American, and Asian students. All of SJEA’s students are on juvenile probation, and most are ordered to attend the school upon their release from JDF. The drug treatment and mental health programs that many of the youth are required to complete as conditions of their probation also have their offices on campus, as do five probation officers (POs) who supervise most of the students at the school.

The county established SJEA to provide transitional education for probationary youth that would allow them to catch up on the credits missed during incarceration and transfer back into the public school district. Students earn credits faster here than they would in public school, which helps make up for lost time and catch up to their grade level, but surveillance at the school keeps most of the youth on probation. Few students actually transfer back to public school from here, as only a small number complete their minimum stay at SJEA before violating probation, and even those who do stay on track may see their transfers denied by a district that refuses to take them back. Instead, SJEA essentially functions as part of a system of continuation schools throughout Fresno that isolates criminalized youth from the rest of the district. While the school’s faculty and staff work well with the students and are genuine in their desire to help them graduate high school, the way SJEA is structured “helps” students through punitive discipline, pushing them deeper into the justice system and making it difficult for them to attain a standard education. Most students have their PO on site, and can be incarcerated for violating their probation based on discipline problems at the school. Even excessive absences can be enough to send them back to juvenile hall. Most of the students I met in my time here were at some point reincarcerated, many based on something that happened while they were being monitored at the school.

I originally came to SJEA as an intern shadowing a counselor who worked onsite, but was fairly quickly asked to contribute as a tutor for disruptive students, which came to be how I spent most of my year. Three days a week I would pull students out of class and help them with assignments, either individually or in small groups. Teachers often gave me the students who gave them the most trouble, but these students were usually able to focus and complete their work once they were taken out of class. Oftentimes they simply acted out because they didn’t like their teacher, but usually enjoyed getting out of class and were willing to do their work once I took them. Taking four to five students out at a time gave me the opportunity to get to know many of the students at the school, to hear their stories, and to listen to them talk with each other about the school, their weekends, their neighborhoods, who had been arrested or released, and other topics relevant to their daily lives. These conversations also gave me a chance to explain my research and recruit students for interviews after school. I also frequently sat out with students in the hallways and outside of offices when they got in trouble, which helped me learn more about conflicts at the school and hear students’ concerns about violating probation or returning to juvenile hall. Some students initially suspected that I worked with law enforcement, but sharing so much time with them and most importantly not “snitching” on them for minor things like tagging in schoolbooks helped them trust me as someone at the school they could speak candidly with without getting into trouble. At times this created some tension with a few faculty members and administrators who expected me to cooperate with their surveillance and discipline of students, and I had to negotiate this so as to maintain access to the school while also protecting the students’ trust. However, most staff respected that helping them monitor and discipline students was not my role at the school.

I conducted interviews with thirty-six of the students from the continuation school that I had gotten to know in my time volunteering at the school as a tutor, as well as with two security guards and the school principal. These interviews focused on youths’ experiences with street cultures in Fresno and how they felt the justice system impacted their lives and communities. These interviews provide a deeper context for the observation fieldnotes, particularly regarding the identities the youth perform and how they interpret the roles street culture and incarceration play in their day-to-day experiences. Participants were recruited for interviews from the groups of students I pulled out for tutoring,¹³ as well as through snowball sampling. Youth were asked if they would be interested in being interviewed and contributing their stories after I explained the focus of my research.¹⁴ Although I was unable to conduct any interviews at JDF, many of the students I met there eventually attended SJEA and participated in interviews once they were enrolled there. Interviews were conducted and digitally recorded in private offices on the school grounds at the end of the school day.

Attempting to make my sample of student interviewees roughly representative of the racial demographics of the school, I interviewed twenty-four students who were Mexican or Chicana/o, eight Black students, five White students, two Native American students, and one Asian student. Four of the students I interviewed identified with more than one racial group when asked about their background, but at the school primarily socialized with one racial group of students. Student interviewees ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen, and of these thirty-six participants, ten were girls and fifteen self-identified as gang members.¹⁵ Finally, in approaching students for interviews I also made an attempt to be inclusive of the different cliques present at the school¹⁶ and more or less mirror their share of the overall student body.

Fresno Job Placement Center

On a wide but quiet street in downtown Fresno, among buildings for city bureaucracies and public utility companies, a small office building houses a prisoner reentry center. The Fresno Job Placement Center (FJPC) is a nonprofit agency in which counselors help people returning from prison find housing and job opportunities. Outside, a small group of parolees gather for a smoke before heading in. After wrapping up they go in through the center’s computer lab and past the whiteboard that announces this morning’s meeting. They continue into a room with about a dozen folding chairs arranged in a circle, grabbing a cup of coffee from a table in the corner before sitting down.

Every Friday morning, the FJPC hosts mentoring meetings for all new clients entering the program. These meetings last for about an hour and average about ten to twelve people in attendance. In these meetings parolees discuss their experiences returning to Fresno, offer each other support and encouragement, and share strategies for searching for and applying for work. The agency’s staff invites me to attend each week, allowing me to introduce myself to those in attendance and explain why I am interested in their stories. After the meeting, I conduct and record interviews with anyone interested in contributing their story in a private office.

Thirty-one of these formerly incarcerated men and women eventually volunteer to be interviewed for this research. In these interviews participants talked about their personal histories with the justice system, and discussed how they learned of and navigated the prison’s social order. The parolees interviewed in this work described being categorized as Blacks, Whites, Northern Hispanics, Southern Hispanics, Bulldogs, and Others. All but one of the participants were on parole or probation at the time of the interview. Most had been released from custody in 2010 or early 2011. Interviewees ranged in age from twenty-seven to forty-nine. A small number of participants were also contacted through an inpatient drug treatment center near downtown Fresno.¹⁷

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

The first half of this book primarily takes place inside the punitive institution, focusing on how the carceral social order is created and understood in these settings. In chapter 1 I describe 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 peer groups by policing the spatial boundaries between them, as keeping rival groups separated is perceived as necessary for ensuring institutional security. I conclude this chapter by discussing how 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.

Chapter 2 discusses the identities that are constructed by and instilled within the segregated carceral facility, as well as how the parolees and probation youth learn to understand them. Racial and neighborhood identities come to be rearticulated as carceral affiliations inside the institution, and incarcerated residents learn to see these affiliations as valuable resources for protecting themselves while navigating the punitive facility. But while carceral affiliations are often framed as criminal gangs by authority figures, participants used and understood these identities differently, and I argue that developing a critical analysis of the carceral system’s socializing power requires recognizing this difference. Additionally, I use this chapter to examine how the sorting process not only creates carceral affiliations as collective identities but also influences how individuals understand aspects of their own personal identities. As participants are socialized to identify with carceral affiliations, this process also 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.

In chapter 3, I examine 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 the facility, and to interpret who others are affiliated with as well. I also use this chapter to explore 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 were mixed race, had family members in rival gangs, or who affiliated with a different racial group had to figure out how they would navigate a divisive environment in which their position was not immediately clear. In these instances, individuals had to choose one affiliation over another, or in some cases, attempt to resist the carceral social order entirely by refusing to affiliate with anyone. In this chapter I explore these participants’ experiences, outline how and why they came to occupy the positions they did, and describe what obstacles they faced.

Chapter 4 begins the second half of the book, which focuses on how the carceral social order ties high-incarceration neighborhoods to the prison, and details some of the implications that this has for local residents. This chapter specifically looks at how prison-based affiliations come to appear in local communities, where they are learned and reproduced among criminalized youth. I argue that this spread of carceral identities is shaped not only by the institutional appropriation of penal sorting practices, but also by the effects of concentrated incarceration. For incarcerated residents, affiliations serve as important ties to home and as sources of support while confined 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, but also because these residents could never be certain that they would not be locked up again. At the same time, young people in the community first learn about these same affiliations from previously or currently imprisoned friends, relatives, and neighbors, informing how they imagine they would survive their own potential experiences in the prison. This close relationship between carceral affiliations and neighborhood identities shapes residents’ experiences with criminalization and violence, but it also contributes to a public perception of poor Black and Latina/o neighborhoods as pathological spaces, one that many local youth internalize.

Chapter 5 explores how the carceral social order structures the parolees’ and probation youths’ experiences with violence, both inside and outside of the punitive facility. The need for strong group identities controlled some forms of gang and interpersonal violence in the institution, but it also dictated when violence was appropriate, or even demanded. The socialized perception that racialized groups were threats to one another compelled participants to use violence to themselves police the social order that the institution established—lashing out when group boundaries were threatened, or to force authorities to relocate them when they felt outnumbered. In turn, institutional staff generally used these instances to confirm their perspectives that probation youth and prisoners needed to be separated. This chapter also examines how penal violence spreads into the neighborhood through secondary prisonization and the institutional reproduction of the carceral social order, influencing the local conflicts that young residents must learn to navigate. Finally, I use this chapter to discuss how the expansion of carceral affiliations into local spaces also shapes young peoples’ exposure to police violence that is carried out in the name of gang suppression.

In chapter 6, I explore how the carceral social order has become an authoritative framework for labeling poor youth of color as criminal gang members. The affiliations that the prison institutionalizes through the systematic separation of inmates are socially constructed as ties to criminal gangs. As juvenile facilities rely on this same separation to organize the institution, it structures a prevailing assumption that youth are gang involved, and that the forms of creative expression that they practice are examples of gang activity. But this system also shapes how police label youth as gang members in the neighborhood; similar to correctional officers sorting incoming prisoners, local police deploy a process I term “polarized labeling” in which young people are racially categorized, then assumed to be loyal to one side or the other of a rivalry between criminalized affiliations. In such instances, the sorting process essentially begins the first time youth are stopped in the street by police, long before ever reaching a prison. The extension of this sorting process from the punitive facility to the community represents a frightening capacity for the prison to produce criminality far beyond its own walls. But within the context of a neoliberal California, this criminalization also functions to frame youth, their families, and communities as economic burdens and social threats who need to be punitively managed rather than supported. 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.

Finally, in the conclusion I outline the implications of the book and make 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. I also use this chapter to explore alternative models, discussing instances both in this research and in previous studies in which criminal justice facilities desegregated their institutions, and argue that establishing a more just and effective criminal justice system requires reducing the emphasis institutions place on identifying and controlling gang membership.