Forrest Stuart

Culture and Law: Beyond a Paradigm of Cause and Effect

This article examines a variety of ways in which social scientists make cultural argument about the law, including (1) holding culture as the independent variable to explain variations in law, (2) taking law as an independent variable to explain culture, or (3) considering law as culture. The authors explore each general strategy and its advantages and disadvantages in turn and argue that the law as culture perspective is one of the most interesting recent developments in sociolegal thought.

Carceral Citizenship: Race, Rights and Responsibility in the Age of Mass Supervision:

Scholars have shown how formal processes of legal exclusion coupled with ubiquitous criminal justice contact relegate the largely black poor targets of the carceral state to second-class citizenship. Building upon but departing from this work, we reveal how carceral expansion has not just produced new forms of second-class citizenship for poor black Americans, but an alternate citizenship category and a distinct form of political membership—what we call carceral citizenship. The criminal record does this work through a process we call translation, marking the conventional citizen and making them legible, as a carceral citizen, for governance through institutions of coercion and care. We delineate the features of carceral citizenship and discuss its implications for how we understand the role, force, and consequence of the state in the lives of the raced and criminalized poor.

The Prisonized Old Head: Intergenerational Socialization and the Fusion of Ghetto and Prison Culture:

Over the last four decades, the United States’ criminal justice system has undergone a historic expansion, which has disproportionately impacted poor urban neighborhoods. The meteoric rise in the percentage of the urban poor either on their way to, in, or recently released from jail or prison has led a number of scholars to theorize a “fusion of ghetto and prison culture” (Wacquant 2001). The exact sources and contours of this fusion, however, remain unspecified. How, concretely, are the cultural contexts of prisons transmitted to poor urban neighborhoods? This article proposes that intergenerational socialization is a key mechanism in this process. We contend that the dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades has given rise to an unexpected and peculiar form of socialization, provided by a new social actor—what we term the “prisonized old head.” We define the prisonized old head as an individual who exhibits three particular characteristics. They are (1) older individuals with extensive experiences in, and wisdom about, the criminal justice system; who (2) informally socialize neighborhood residents to embrace the cultural schemas and routines learned inside penal spaces; to (3) navigate the daily exigencies routinely faced in the neighborhood context. Stated simply, prisonized old heads leverage ways of life developed “on the inside” as strategies for living life “on the outside.” We articulate the emergence, mechanisms, and implications of this form of socialization drawing on fieldwork data in Los Angeless’ Skid Row neighborhood—one of the premier reentry communities in the United States. We show that although this socialization may contribute to desistance and self-transformation, it can simultaneously constrain upward mobility and limit reintegration.