Carceral racialization, prison segregation, and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona

Abstract

Prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) coordinate to circumvent full racial housing integration, revealing how “race” and adherence to the “racial code” is used as an organizing concept in carceral settings that is distinct from conceptualizations of race and politics of identity within free society. In addition to providing a review of the literature on the complexity of prison racialization, we base our discussion of racialization and adherence to the racial code on our combined experience as formerly racialized and gang-affiliated inmates, as well as on insights from informal and semi-structured interviews with prisoners who have navigated attempts at racial integration as part of the ADCRR's recently adopted Integrated Housing Program.

A Legal Geography of Prison and Other Carceral Spaces

“…“The carceral” ceases to be a concept if not for the existence and inevitability of the most “austere and complete” form of punishment, captivity, and confinement in contemporary society: a hardscape of manifest material oppressions and dispossession, built of concrete, glass, and steel, its existence facilitated, fuelled, and funded by law. For this reason, geographers have paid necessary attention to the politics and placement of prison construction (Bonds 2009; Gilmore 2007; Martin and Mitchelson 2009; Moran 2016; Story 2019; Ybarra 2021), but less so to the legal foundations, framing, and supply‐side legal upkeep of its exitance (see Bloch and Olivares‐Pelayo 2023a).…”

Captive bodies, prison geographies, and the somatic carceral condition

“…Over 80 years ago, and three decades before the start of a period in the United States known as mass incarceration, Clemmer (1940) identified the "atomized world of prison life" and its system of self-governing and institutionalized socialization among prisoners, which he termed "prisonization." Prisoners undergo prisonization by adapting to and adopting the formal and informal norms, mores, and customs of prison life, allowing for the creation of what Sykes (1958Sykes ( /2007) identified as prison subcultures, later known as "cars" within institutions across California and later Arizona and elsewhere (Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo, 2023). In contemporary prison parlance, strict adherence to the norms of prisonization is known as "the politics" or "reglas" (Skarbek, 2014), which comprises a general "convict code" of fervently enforced rules, ethics, and responsibilities (Trammell, 2012), including with whom one can bunk, eat, exercise, trade, play cards, buy and sell contraband, and even fraternize, as well as the spaces one can inhabit on a daily basis, including cells, handball courts, mess halls, day room tables, and barbers' chairs.…”

“…The so-called racial code, more than any other aspect of the reglas , regulates life in U.S. prisons in particular (Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo, 2023; Lopez-Aguado, 2018; Weide, 2022), with carceral contingent racialization determining one’s “race” (Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo, 2021), thereby delimiting the use of particular spaces and social interactions based on what “car,” racial clique, or gang-affiliated STG (Security Threat Group) a prisoner is compelled to join or with which he is assigned. As Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo (2021) point out, being compelled to select ones race at intake is the first and perhaps most consequential and potentially transformative step toward full prisonization.…”