“I Would Be a Bulldog”: Tracing the Spillover of Carceral Identity Patrick Lopez-Aguado Santa Clara University 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 un- der-researched aspect of mass incarceration’s collateral consequences. In this article, I use ethnographic data collected over 15 months in two juvenile justice facilities and interviews with 24 probation youth to examine how the identities socialized among Latino prison in- mates spill over into high-incarceration Latina/o neighborhoods. Strict segregation prac- tices in California’s prison system categorize and separate Latino inmates as coming from either Northern, Southern, or Central California, respectively institutionalizing Norten ˜o, Suren ˜o, 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 bound- aries 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 car- ceral subjects far beyond the penitentiary gates. KEYWORDS : mass incarceration; collateral consequences; juvenile justice; criminal label- ing; racial sorting. Author: Do you ever worry about going to the adult prison system? Manny: Naw, I don’t really think about it that much. It just happens, you know? Everybody gets locked up at least once in a while. – Interview with SJEA student Manny, 15 The author wishes to thank Aaron Kupchik, Cheryl Maxson, and the anonymous reviewers from this journal for their helpful com- ments and suggestions on previous versions of this article. The author would also like to thank Melissa Guzman, as well as Ruth Peterson, Laurie Krivo, and the 2014 cohort of the Racial Democracy, Crime, and Justice Network’s Summer Research Institute (crack the ground!) for their consistent support and advice. This work was supported by a grant from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States [DG-11-104]. Direct correspondence to: Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Department of Sociology, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, 95053. E-mail: plopezaguado@scu.edu. V C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com  203 Social Problems, 2016, 63, 203–221 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spw001 Advance Access Publication Date: 29 March 2016 Article by guest on May 3, 2016 http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from