Captives in Society: The Role of Race in the Carceral Cycle

Though Gresham Sykes identified several aspects of prisoner life in his classic text The Society of Captives, he failed to consider the role of race. In this chapter, we offer a critique of this oversight by exploring race from the time Sykes was writing to the present day. We show that race has been and continues to be an organizing principle within American society, including prison society and the free world to which ex-prisoners return. The consequences of discrimination and inequitable treatment have manifested in an intergenerational cycle of captivity, whereby Black, Latino, and Native Americans have been disproportionately subjected to punishment in the United States. Echoing Sykes’s own call for reform, we argue that, to move towards an America that has equal treatment under the law and within society, regardless of race, thus breaking this cycle, criminological research must investigate how various individual, social, structural, environmental, and other contextual factors intersect within social phenomena. More importantly, criminological research must encourage social action to improve outcomes.


Introduction
italicized in what follows. Mitchell et al. 2017;Trammell 2012;Sykes 1958). Some of these roles persist in maximum security prisons regardless of race. For instance, most prisoners disdain rats, prisoners who inform the prison administration; center men, prisoners who work with the prison administration, such as the turnkeys in the Texas penitentiary system; "chomos," prisoners who abused children; and, sometimes, prisoners who are convicted of crimes, such as sexual assault, where the victims are not considered to be fair game (Ricciardelli and Moir 2013). Moreover, male maximum security prisons continue to have punks, inmates who by choice or by force receive sexual acts. Sykes's real men are what more recently incarcerated prisoners might call "stand-up" convicts: prisoners who do their own time and do not violate the convict code.
Other roles play out as a function of the racialized social order of prison. For example, prisoners who have better access to goods, such as commissary or contraband, become merchants, a role that exists in most prisons. However, much of this trade is governed through the rules of the dominant prison gangs (Roth and Skarbek 2014). More notably, the prison gang leadership structures are a function of the racialized social order of prison; vertically organized prison gangs consist of hierarchies of prisoners of typically the same race; and these prisoners have varying roles (with various names), including gang leader, yard boss, soldier, and prospect. Each role maintains the rules of engagement that the prison gang imposes. Often, prison administrations allow prison gangs to exist and to set the terms of engagement in the prison yard (Gundur 2020b). Sometimes, prison administrations clamp down on these gangs in an effort to re-establish their preeminence in terms of who sets the rules within the prisons' walls (Gundur 2018). Today, in America's large prison systems, where White prisoners are in the minority, gone are the days when White prisoners dominated the rules of the prison yard by doing the prison administration's bidding (DiIulio 1987;Seagren and Skarbek 2021).
Nonetheless, given that the dominance of non-White prisoners in carceral settings is a result of the inequalities of the criminal justice system, the supplanting of White prisoners by Black and Latino prisoners in the de facto power structures of carceral society is hardly a victory (Nellis 2016). Some scholars argue that, given how overwhelming racial disparities exist at nearly every decision point in the U.S. carceral system, the systemic nature of mass incarceration indicates that imprisonment is just another type of racialized social control which is designed to inflict the pains of imprisonment on the captives (Alexander 2010; Fleury-Steiner and Longazel 2013).
Sykes neither elaborated on the characteristics or qualities of "pain" nor commented on the comprehensiveness of the pains of imprisonment. This definitional ambiguity predictably resulted in the proliferation of research on the pains associated with imprisonment. Contemporary research has not only described the pains of imprisonment but also identified the pains associated with other areas of the carceral justice system, such as jail, probation, parole, and reentry (Ortiz and Jackey 2019; Haggerty and Bucerius 2020). Research has also investigated how certain populations might uniquely experience certain pains while incarcerated or while reintegrating into society. Sociologists Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Jamie Longazel (2013) identified pains specific to the institutional and systemic nature of mass incarceration as containment, exploitation, coercion, isolation, and brutality. This approach to understanding "the pains of imprisonment" is grounded in legal scholar Michelle Alexander's (2010) assertion that racial oppression has continued in a systemic way within America's prison system, despite institutional shifts in how that oppression occurs. This approach contrasts with Sykes's approach to the pains of imprisonment, which overlooked how some pains of imprisonment may be unique to, and potentially more impactful for, minority populations (Haggerty and Bucerius 2021).
In the United States, the poor and minorities are frequently overpoliced and criminalized (Rios 2007;Perry 2009 (2001) argued that these processes manifest through the actions of U.S. lawmakers and organizational leaders within the criminal justice system, who used the carceral system to marginalize and oppress Black people, by developing institutions which were uniquely designed to manage and regulate Black populations. Black people were enslaved. Jim Crow laws marginalized and criminalized Black people. Convict leasingthe practice of leasing prisoners' labor -was slavery by another name (forced labor was expressly allowed to persist in the 13 th Amendment's ban on slavery) and disproportionately impacted Black people (Bolden 2020;Mancini 1996). Finally, mass Zeng 2020). Notably, Black women are incarcerated almost 2 times, and Latina women 1.3 times, as much as White women (Carson 2020). Black feminist scholars have noted, for decades, how the criminal justice system's punitiveness towards Black women in the United States is interconnected with the societal devaluation, marginalization, and brutalization of Black women (Collins 2000). Narratives of incarcerated Black women highlight how contemporary patterns of oppression contribute to their incarceration, and how racial, gender, and sexual discrimination are so entrenched in American society that they extend into prison (Willingham 2011). As is the case with the overincarceration and exclusion of Black men from free society, the structural violence that is perpetrated against Black women, and which underwrites these practices, can be traced back to historical state-sanctioned practices that disproportionately marginalized, discriminated against, oppressed, and victimized Black women Despite decreasing rates of incarceration in the United States, the racialized narratives that continue to cast Black and Latino people -particularly young peopleas criminogenic persist (Rios and Vigil 2017;Abrams, Mizel, and Barnert 2021). These narratives manifest in policing policies and sentencing outcomes, leading to ongoing cycles of incarceration and disruption to prosocial developments in these communities.
Often, the labels, restrictions, and stigmas that former prisoners carry as they attempt to reenter society create significant barriers to participating in prosocial ways and contribute to the sustainment of the pains of incarceration for former prisoners in the free world. One of the pains of incarceration that a prisoner experiences is separation from prosocial society. Former prisoners returning to society experience a labeling effect that continues to define them as being apart and unwelcome (Kavish 2017;Kavish, Mullins, and Soto 2016). Just as early labeling theorists posited, punishment is inherently retributive, stigmatizing, and exclusionary (Tannenbaum 1938;Lemert 1951;Becker 1963). Labeling theorists posit that formal labeling can potentially increase deviant or criminal behavior particularly as formal labeling fundamentally changes people's identities and creates barriers to accessing conventional others, such as peers, community members, and authority figures, like teachers or employers, and mainstream opportunities. While labeling theorists have primarily focused on formal labeling, measured by arrests and criminal convictions, simply getting stopped by police during adolescence -an event that is more likely to occur to a non-White child than a White child -has a significant indirect effect on criminal and non-criminal Latino and Black men were significantly less likely than White men to have adjudication withheld (Bontrager, Bales, and Chiricos 2005). Thus, consistent with labeling theory, and as it was in Sykes's time, Latino and Black men were and are significantly more likely than White men to be formally labeled.

Race as an organizing principle as captives return to society
In short, to be disproportionately labeled -as is the case with people of color with histories in the criminal justice system -means to be disproportionately disenfranchised, to disproportionately lose rights, and to be disproportionately impacted by other collateral consequences of felony convictions. The disadvantages of being both an ex-prisoner and a person of color create significant differences in reentry success, official recidivism, and actual desistance between White and non-White people. Many of the racial disparities that reduce individual opportunities and access to structural resources are part of everyday American life. These disparities simultaneously mean that non-White people in the U.S. face increased law enforcement scrutiny, formal criminal justice responses, and collective inequality, which, in turn, bolster the increased likelihood that formerly incarcerated minorities will return to the society of captives. Racial inequality has a compounding effect and leads people released from prison, and their families that experience those effects, to feel "trapped" in the "ghetto" as they struggle to access services and opportunities and as they remain unable to experience upward social mobility (Drakulich and Rodriguez-Whitney 2018). For some, this reality encourages a return to unlawful behavior, thrusting returned citizens into a cycle of captivity (Wikoff, Linhorst, and Morani 2012). Accordingly, any rehabilitation or reentry effort must first address the structural forces that have resulted in the unequal incarceration of minorities in the United States.

A Cycle of Captivity
Sykes's observation that "prison, somehow, is expected to turn men from the path of crime to the path of conformity with the law" (1958,132) has remained an unrelenting driver of incarceration in the United States. Nonetheless, the carceral system has persistently failed to achieve this goal as evidenced by the cycle of captivity that exists for many. In the United States, roughly 1.8 million people are incarcerated in prisons and jails on any given day (Kang-Brown, Montagnet, and Heiss 2021). An additional 3.6 million people are on probation, and 840,000 people are on parole (Zeng 2020; Sawyer and Wagner 2020); thus, around 6.2 million are under some form of correctional control every day. Additionally, in the United States, another roughly 19 million people live with felony convictions (Shannon et al. 2017).
All told, almost half of American adults report having an immediate family member who has been incarcerated, indicating that about half of America struggles, to varying degrees, with pains inflicted by the U.S. carceral system (Enns et al. 2019). Of the people released, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 77% are rearrested within five years of their release (Alper, Durose, and Markman 2018). Even as incarceration rates appear to be decreasing from the 2010s, the numbers are alarming (Kang-Brown, Montagnet, and Heiss 2021). Yet, all of these figures gloss over the fact that Black and Latino men continue to be overrepresented in these data, meaning that they and their families disproportionately confront the pains of incarceration and they do so time and again. When we consider the carceral experience to be a cycle that repeats not only within individual lives but also from one generation to the next, and when we recognize that people of color continue to be overrepresented in the carceral experience, then we must conclude that we have failed to rectify the ills of the past.
Prison is only one location in the cycle of captivity that occurs within the United States, and Sykes provided a snapshot of this location. In his chapter "The Defects of Total Power," Sykes reminds us that, within prison walls, order is prioritized over rehabilitation, and prisoners are usually severed from any sort of contact or participation with the pro-social society outside those walls. Sykes's observation some seventy years ago holds true in many prisons: most prison personnel are charged with the task of keeping prisoners in line and maintaining the carceral status quo (Thompson 2011). As Sykes notes, even when prisoners behave according to the prison administration's expectations, the rewards they receive are limited to the carceral setting; the benefits of good behavior do not transfer into the free world. Society offers a clear rejection with no clear avenues to rejoin; prisoners are forever labeled as deviant. The adage "Do the crime, do the time" has no currency; the time never stops for most ex-prisoners, especially if they are people of color.
As Sykes further observed, the pains of imprisonment, in the form of "deprivations, particularly as they involve a threat or an attack at a deep psychological level," are realities that people face while incarcerated (1958,131). This observation is equally applicable to what happens upon release. As such, it is important to understand what incarceration does to released captives, particularly when they are not assisted in gaining employment, pursuing further education, developing pro-social relationships, and maintaining healthy lifestyles (Pratt et al. 2016). It is also important to understand the drivers of sustained failure which push people into prison initially and -as we explored in the last section -often push them back into a society of captives (Pratt et al. 2016). As incarceration rates continue to grow in the United States, race remains a significant determinant as to a person's likelihood of initial incarceration (Nellis 2016).
Race also affects how easily a captive sheds that label upon release from prison and reintegrates into free society, a society where White felons are viewed more positively than Black people without a record and where politicians still extract political currency from "tough-on-crime" narratives that have been damaging to communities, especially those of color (Pager 2008;Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman 2016). To that end, race also influences the risks formerly incarcerated people face in being removed from their communities and returned to a society of captives (Davis 2001).
The predominantly color-blind approach that Sykes offered must be relegated to the past. Sykes should have recognized the disproportionate captivity of people of colorparticularly Black men. Since the abolition of slavery, a litany of laws and practices, including Black Codes, vagrancy statutes, convict leasing, and Jim Crow laws, had been enacted to discriminate against people of color (Chowdhury and Butler 2019).
Nonetheless, Sykes's calls for reform still ring loudly. Sykes's (1958, 134) final words of The Society of Captives can be recast to recognize the impact of race: the particular pattern of social interaction, into which a person who is incarcerated enters and then is returned to upon release, is part of a complex social system with its own norms, values, and methods of control; and any effort to reform the carceral system-and thus to reform the criminal-which ignores the social systems of not only prisons but the societies that harbor them is as futile as the labors of Sisyphus. The extent to which the existing social system works in the direction of prisoners' deterioration rather than their rehabilitation; the extent to which these systems can be changed; the extent to which we are willing to change them --these are the issues which confront us and not the recalcitrance of the individual inmate. Despite Sykes's oversight regarding race, his words illustrate that we cannot leave the past behind us until we recognize how its racist roots are hardcoded in the outcomes of the present and the future and how carceral experiences continue as cycles that repeat within individual lives and from one generation to the next. To move forward, criminological research must not only investigate how various individual, social, structural, environmental, and other contextual factors intersect to explain social phenomena but also encourage social action to improve outcomes. And race is an inescapable factor that -consciously or not -underwrites many narratives of incarceration and reincarceration that are formed from the intersection of these factors, thereby making their more precise study necessary.