Stick Together and Come Back Home

Abstract

This book focuses on the spillover of carceral identity into poor communities of color as a collateral consequence of mass incarceration. Analyzing fifteen months of ethnographic research in two juvenile justice institutions and interviews with seventy paroled adults, probation youth, and institutional staff, I argue that punitive facilities institutionalize and enforce a “carceral social order”—a system of social organization in which authorities divide people by race, home communities, and peer networks into gang-associated groups. This social order is rooted in the prison, where racial sorting shapes day-to-day life and relationships for the incarcerated and where prisoners use the resulting collective identities to navigate the segregated institution. But this social order also seeps back into the neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration. Local youth learn about it through the experiences of imprisoned loved ones, but they also encounter it themselves as it is reproduced locally in juvenile justice facilities that adopt the prison’s sorting practices. This book focuses on understanding how the institutions of the justice system shape the identities that we commonly recognize as criminal, as well as on mapping how this influence extends from the prison to the neighborhood. Through this analysis, we can see how local communities are impacted by the socializing power of the prison system, how this influence exposes residents to ongoing criminal labeling and violence, and how the fallout of this spillover is experienced across generations.