Carceral racialization, prison segregation, and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231179127 |
| Author | Stefano Bloch,Enrique Alan Olivares-Pelayo |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
Carceral racialization, prison
segregation, and the Integrated
Housing Program in Arizona
Stefano Bloch
University of Arizona, USA
Enrique Alan Olivares-Pelayo
University of Arizona, USA
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.
Keywords
Prison, race, racialization, carceral geography, Arizona
Introduction
Race has long been the central organizing feature for incarcerated people. This became
particularly true starting in 1970 as incarceration rates began increasing exponentially,
Corresponding author:
Stefano Bloch, School of Geography, Development and Environment, University of Arizona, ENR2 Building,
1064 E Lowell St, Tucson, AZ 85719, USA.
Email: s.bloch@arizona.edu
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2024, Vol. 28(2) 212–231
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231179127
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
with a disproportionate number of those sent to prison in the United States being poor
people of color. Between 1970 and 2020—an era known as “mass incarceration”,or
more specifically for our analysis, “mass imprisonment”(Garland, 2001)—the prison
population grew from under 200,000 to over 1.4 million, a more than 500% increase
in incarcerated people in just over a generation. Before this era of mass imprisonment
and the creation of what Miller and Stuart (2017) identify as the “carceral citizen”,
race was rarely acknowledged in prison research for reasons ranging from a lack of demo-
graphic data, to self-imposed scholarly colorblindness, compounded by the fact that most
prisons in the United States were overwhelmingly White spaces (Bosworth and
Carrabine, 2001; Carroll, 1974; Hemmens and Marquart, 1999; Henderson et al.,
2000; Jacobs, 1977; Trulson and Marquart, 2002). But within the first decade of mass
imprisonment, race-based prison gangs became a focus for scholars of penology as
groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood, Black Guerilla Family, Mexican Mafia, and
Nuestra Familia began making inroads into the western US states of Arizona, Utah,
Nevada, and to a later and lesser extent Texas from their birthplace in the California
prison system (Camp and Camp, 1985).
The arrival of race-based gangs further exacerbated racial self- and institutionally sup-
ported segregation across the US Sunbelt’s burgeoning prison industrial complex (Lynch,
2009). Numerous studies have focused on prison gangs and corresponding racial violence
(Gaes et al., 2002; Pyrooz, 2022; Pyrooz and Decker, 2019; Skarbek, 2014), but in recent
years prison racial cordoning has increasingly been acknowledged as a far more complex
process that is reflective of prisoner organization in which orthodox notions of race are
not the principal dividing line or source of violence between prisoner groups
(Rahimipour Anaraki, 2021; Weide, 2020). Notwithstanding trends in racialized gang
violence in prison settings, and informed in part by our combined experience as formerly
jailed and incarcerated scholars, we understand how selecting a socially constructed and
spatially contingent racial identity within a carceral context is a fundamental decision
from which almost all other experiences and opportunities are derived. With whom
one can bunk, eat, exercise, trade goods, and worship is predicated upon the racial cat-
egory one subscribes to while “locked up”. Despite the salience of racialization and
racial in-grouping in a carceral context, as Infante et al. (2023: 2) point out, “little is
known about the informal racial code of conduct (i.e., the racial code) that arguably
bridges the gap between institutional racial classification and the enactment of racial cat-
egories to participate in the racial politics of prison.”
Unlike notions of immutable and heavily guarded racial categories that pervade free
society, race-making in a carceral context is based on a confluence of “negotiated settle-
ment”(Goodman, 2008), “racial sorting”(Lopez-Aguado, 2018), “racial priming”(Bloch
and Olivares-Pelayo, 2021), institutional racialization (Walker, 2022), participation in
prison “politics”(Weide, 2022b), and adherence to the “racial code”(Infante et al.,
2023). Building on extant literature looking at prison race-making practices and para-
digms, we discuss prison race-making and racial sorting in the context of control
exerted equally by Arizona’s racialized Security Threat Groups (STGs)
1
and the
Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry’s (ADCRR)
Integrated Housing Program (IHP), which seeks to end racial segregation within the
ADCRR as mandated by a 2020 federal decree. We contribute to the literature on
Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo213
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