Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ