Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ