Sorted on the Outs: Recognizing the Carceral Social Order in Gang Validation Experiences

• In Event: Critical Police Studies: An Invitation

Abstract

In this presentation I examine how the racial sorting process institutionalized in California’s prisons has established a framework that neighborhood police commonly rely on when labeling youth of color as criminal gang members. Specifically, I argue that law enforcement officers use what I call the “carceral social order” – a system that reframes one’s racial identity, hometown, and peer networks as affiliations to prison-based, gang-associated groups – as a blueprint for identifying Black and Latina/o youth as specific types of gang members. In analyzing forty interviews with criminalized youth on juvenile probation, I found that many participants were first validated as gang members in experiences that closely mirrored the prison’s sorting process: police used young people’s race, home community, and friendship groups to categorize them as loyal to one side of a carceral rivalry or the other. For example, rather than connecting Latina/o youth to the particular street gangs present in their communities, the “gangs” they were assumed to be members of were often simply listed as Norteños, Sureños, or Bulldogs – the same rivaling groups that Latino inmates are sorted into in the prison. In these experiences we can see the close relationship between prison sorting and gang validation processes, but also begin to understand how the reproduction of carceral labeling works to strengthen the connection between prison and criminalized community.

Author

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Santa Clara University