"i Would Be a Bulldog": Tracing the Spillover of Carceral Identity

Abstract

The socializing power of the prison is routinely discussed as a prisonization process in which inmates learn to conform to life in the correctional facility. However, the impact that identities socialized in the prison may have outside of the institution itself remains an under-researched aspect of mass incarceration's collateral consequences. In this article I use ethnographic data collected over fifteen months in two juvenile justice facilities and interviews with twenty-four probation youth to examine how the identities socialized among Latino prison inmates spill over into high-incarceration Latina/o neighborhoods. Strict segregation practices in California's prison system categorize and separate Latino inmates as coming from either Northern, Southern, or Central California, respectively institutionalizing Norteño, Sureño, and Bulldog collective identities in the process. I argue that these identities have come to frame how criminalized Latina/o youth understand the prison's influence on their community. As youth enter the juvenile justice system, they encounter facilities that have appropriated the prison's sorting practices by categorizing youth and policing the boundaries between them. Carceral group identities become instrumental in young people's daily lives in this context, mirroring what they have heard from the experiences of incarcerated loved ones and confirming where they would fit in the prison's social order. This process not only labels youth as gang members, but instills in them identities and worldviews that rationalize their own incarceration, extending the prison's ability to categorize people as carceral subjects far beyond the penitentiary gates.