On the Outs: Global Capitalism and Transcarceration.

• Author: Soto, Oscar Fabian

I WAS LYING DOWN FACE UP ON A SIX BY FOUR METAL UNCOMFORTABLE bunk bed. I was staring at the ceiling, where VSM 13, EVD 13, VHB 13, and Varrio Posole (1) were scribed into the wall, thinking about how I ended up in thepinta (jail/prison). Inside the jail, loud wall banging noises were echoing throughout the halls, footsteps getting closer and closer, the rattle of keys growing louder and louder. Suddenly the steps stopped, complete silence. With a loud bang, the large green metal door with a small square window at its center opens. I was being released.

A tall, shorthaired correctional officer (CO) stood in the doorway. "Soto, pack up your shit, you're going home," he yelled. I let out a sigh of relief, but was scared of the social consequences that would follow me once I exited this hellhole. I grabbed my mattress, pillow, and blanket, put them on my shoulder, and started walking out toward the door. I slowly headed toward a long dim lit hallway with the CO behind me. "Stay out homie,"a deep voiced bald Chicano said, as his voice echoed through the narrow dark hallway. As I walked to the changing room, men peaked their heads through the small square windows of their cells wishing me luck. The captive men showed their support with Chicano barrio whistles, (2) gangs signs, and head nods, as if I had graduated with honors from a prestigious institution. As I reached the changing room, the handcuffs came off, I opened the door, and I changed from my county blue jumpsuit into my civilian clothes. I opened a plastic clear bag with the rest of my belongings: wallet, phone, and some change

I had in my pocket the night I got arrested. I grabbed my jacket, threw it over my shoulder, and began to head out. Before I could leave, however, the correctional officer smirked, and said "I'll keep the lights on for you, we will see you soon, your kind always comes back."

Before my incarceration, hanging out with the local gang taught me to understand what Elijah Anderson (1999) calls codes of the streets. These codes describe a set of informal and formal rules governing interpersonal public behavior in certain communities. These can range from not snitching (talking to law enforcement or any form of authoritative figure) to rules prescribing the proper way to respond to violence or challenges. These codes are established and enforced by people who are street-oriented. (3) In addition, some codes help develop the distrust toward authoritative individuals, especially the police. This distrust of the police can also develop through acts of hyperpolicing, including the constant accosting and repetitive questioning without fault that we are often subjected to on a daily basis. This hyperpolicing consisted of detaining us before and after school, following us onto school grounds, and constantly searching our person and personal belongings. We were policed for being different, being the so-called troubled kids, gang members, or at-risk students.

Through this hyperpolicing and labeling, it became clear that I would one day get arrested. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1948)--a false definition of the situation that evokes new behavior and makes the original false conception come true--I was arrested. I was facing major time in prison with eight different charges: two felonies and six misdemeanors. Like many of my homies (friends), I was convicted, served time, and was released back into society. After my release date, I was constantly followed and policed by my probation officer, the police, and even the community. I felt stuck in what Goffman (1961, xiii) calls total institutions, "places of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed formerly administered round of life." I suggest here that, taken together, various social institutions that those "on the outs" (4) have to navigate constitute in effect a total institution that undermines efforts at reintegration through what Jeremy Travis (2002) calls invisible punishment. Invisible punishments are punishments accomplished through the reduction of rights and privileges for those formerly incarcerated, which are nearly invisible sanctions unseen by the public.

To give context, I drove a 2003 Honda Civic ES. It was a lowered silver car with tinted windows, black rims, and a sound system that could be heard for miles. It was a unique car, recognizable by everyone in the community, including the people that uphold the criminal injustice system. On a daily basis, police would follow me after work, pull me over for no apparent reason, and, being the naive person that I once was, I would allow them to search my car. Being pulled over often came with the phrase, "we are doing routine checks on Honda Civic cars, making sure these cars aren't stolen." I felt trapped, traumatized every time a black and white vehicle resembling a patrol car was following me. Because of this I started to police myself. Instead of taking the traditional roadway home, I would take roads that theoretically have less patrolling, less surveillance: the back roads as some call them. I was under formal probation, meaning I was subjected to regular check-in with a probation officer, along with drug testing, mandatory searches, and required evidence of employment and school enrollment. I also had a set of conditions specific to my case. These included not having the following: spray cans, ski masks, gloves, weapons (such as guns and knives), and affiliations with certain groups of people.

The constant surveillance of the police and required reporting to probation officers became a reminder that the prison system's control mechanisms spread to the streets. On the outs, these experiences became part of my daily routine. So much so that I felt that these mechanisms made it difficult to find employment, to continue to go to school, or to maintain childhood friendships, and in my case these mechanisms became normalized in my community. Finding employment was challenging due to my record. Seven months, twenty applications, and five interviews later, employment was still out of reach. Employers looked at me differently, and they ignored or threw away my applications and kicked me out of their offices. It was this autobiographical experience that led me years later, as a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to begin theorizing the concept of the revolving door incarceration system, (5) a system designed to perpetuate carceral state control over people coming out of prison or jail, which I personally lived through and will discuss in greater detail later.

In 2014, the prison population in the United States stood at over 1.3 million people. This did not include those held in local jails, which would bring the count to more than 2.4 million people behind bars (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2014). Additionally, the United States has over 4.7 million people on probation and parole, meaning that there are over 7 million people under the criminal injustice system of social control (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2014). As I will discuss in this article, the mass unemployment, marginalization, and recriminalization of the formerly incarcerated has resulted in a process of ongoing recaging in the United States. In turn, coercive state control over the formerly incarcerated in poor communities has several functions for the criminal injustice system. First, the state's recriminalization through coercive tactics once on the outs makes formerly incarcerated individuals vulnerable, and therefore subject to conditions of social control and hypersurveillance. Second, the lack of resources combined with control mechanisms, like probation, parole, and surveillance on the outs, allows the criminal injustice system in general to continually reincarcerate marginalized, immigrant, and poor communities. As I will reference later, the militarization of police, the permanent hyperpolicing of poor communities, and the rise of immigrant detention centers are themselves sources of accumulation for private capital. Third, incarceration policies, the creation of an imaginary criminal in the public consciousness, and the absence of a critique of capitalism within the movement against incarceration help turn attention away from the crisis of global capitalism as a source of distress among sectors of the working class, and as a result turn formerly incarcerated and immigrant communities into scapegoats for the crisis.

The story of reintegration in the twenty-first century is therefore central to the new global capitalist world order as it is manifested in the United States. As an insider who has experienced incarceration and reintegration, I strived in my trajectory as a scholar and activist to understand, with a passion that comes from lived experience, the link between global capitalism, hyperincarceration, and reintegration. In the following section, I will link the critique of global capitalism to the revolving door incarceration system. This is followed by a brief discussion of the ethnographic methods used in the larger project's empirical research, which focuses on 12 interviews from a southern California reentry halfway house. The house and the community serve as interpretive sites that illustrate the larger situation in the United States with regard to the reintegration, caging, and recaging of people in the criminal injustice system. I next turn to the discussion of my findings, which attempts to synthesize three levels of analysis. The first is the macro level that links global capitalism to incarceration and the reincarceration of racialized poor communities. The second is the meso level, which looks at social institutions that push people into incarceration and reincarceration. The third is the micro level, which draws on interviews from Chicano men that have experienced incarceration...