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
