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

Introduction

Over the last four decades, the United States has witnessed a historic expansion of its criminal justice system. American jails and prisons house approximately 2.2 million inmates—a fivefold increase since 1980 (Glaze and Kaeble 2014). The growth in the US imprisonment rate has been accompanied by the equally historic rise in the number of individuals—roughly 5 million—currently supervised in their home communities through probation or parole services. In total, approximately 50 million Americans now possess criminal records (Uggen 2000). These numbers are even more staggering upon considering that criminal justice expansion has been disproportionately concentrated in poor, urban, predominantly black neighborhoods. These areas—referred to as “prison places” (Clear 2007)—are characterized by a significant number of residents either on their way to, in, or recently released from jail and/or prison. In certain neighborhoods in Cleveland, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, for example, nearly one in five adult males are behind bars in a given day (Lynch and Sabol 2004). In Chicago, more than half of those exiting state custody return to just seven of the city’s seventy-seven community areas (Visher and Farrell 2005).

Although urban poverty scholars traditionally examine how factors such as deindustrialization, joblessness, middle-class flight, and violence shape the cultural contexts of poor neighborhoods (Wilson 1987; Anderson 1990, 1999; Harding 2009), researchers have recently turned attention to the pervasive role played by criminal justice expansion (Stuart et al. 2015). In one of the most cited articles in this field, Loïc Wacquant (2001, 116) argues that criminal justice expansion has led to a fusion between the culture of prison and the culture of poor minority neighborhoods. This “deadly symbiosis” thesis proposes that as residents cycle repeatedly in and out of confinement, poor urban neighborhoods are increasingly “prisonized”—a process that denotes “the taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary” (Clemmer 1958, 299). Specifically, neighborhood social spaces have become inundated with the “language, dress, and interaction patterns innovated inside of jails and penitentiaries” (116). This manifests in graffiti and tattooing (Phillips 2009), footwear aesthetics (Ralph 2014), and other, embodied ways of moving through day-to-day life (Gowan 2002; Caputo-Levine 2013). As Wacquant (2001, 115) concludes, the prison and poor urban neighborhoods increasingly reflect a “structural homology,” in which they “comprise and comfort the same type of social relations.”

The exact sources and engines of the prisonization of neighborhoods and their social relations, however, are largely unspecified. What are the precise mechanisms by which the cultural contexts of prisons and poor neighborhoods fuse? How, concretely, do the ways of living in correctional facilities become ways of living in poor urban neighborhoods?

This article proposes that at least some of the answer to these questions can be found in the realm of intergenerational socialization and mentorship. We contend that the dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades has given rise to an unexpected and peculiar model of informal socialization, provided by an emerging social actor—what we term the “prisonized old head.” We define the prisonized old head as an individual who exhibits the following three 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.

In the following pages, we investigate the cultural transmission carried out by prisonized old heads. When we use the term culture, we are not merely referring to surface-level, more easily-noticeable symbols of culture, such as clothing and local argot. While these are certainly involved in the patterning of daily life, we are ultimately concerned with the cognitive and corporeal aspects of culture, which are the underlying sources of these more material components (Swidler 1986, 2001; DiMaggio 1997; Small 2004). Following recent developments in cultural sociology (see Small, Harding, and Lamont 2010), we direct attention to the transmission of evaluative schemas, scripts, and rituals that people use to make sense of, and navigate, their immediate social context. As Swidler (1986, 273) reminds, culture influences behavior “by shaping a repertoire or ‘tool kit’ . . . from which people construct ‘strategies of action.’” Culture becomes most visible and salient during “unsettled” periods of individuals’ lives, such as major life transitions, when people are reordering their lives and developing new strategies (Swidler 1986, 2001). It is difficult to think of a more “unsettled” period than the one experienced by prisoners reentering society, in which they attempt to avoid recidivism and reincarceration in the face of the precarious conditions that characterize poor minority neighborhoods. As such, we focus our analysis on the cultural repertoires and resulting strategies of action developed for the sake of desistance and daily survival.

The remainder of the article proceeds in several parts. First, we review existing research on informal socialization and cultural transmission in poor urban communities. In the past, such socialization aimed to prepare young people for employment in the mainstream, formal economy. As a result of de-industrialization and joblessness, this role has gradually eroded, creating a vacuum that is today filled by prisonized old heads. After detailing the setting and methods of our research, we present findings drawn from Stuart’s ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeless’ Skid Row neighborhood—widely regarded as the largest reentry community in the country. We demonstrate that upon release from state custody and in the face of harsh living conditions, former prisoners re-create the familiar behaviors and quintessential routines of incarceration. Through their informal mentorship, prisonized old heads socialize protégés to draw on and deploy prisonized cultural patterns. Next, we identify broader theoretical implications of such socialization. We discuss the contradictory effects of this tutelage on successful reintegration, upward mobility, and the collateral consequences of mass incarceration. We conclude by considering the proliferation of prisonized old heads in other sites and offer directions for future research.

De-industrialization, Criminalization, and the Intergenerational Socialization of the Urban Poor

Previous research finds that that the manner in which people come to understand and navigate their social context is shaped by intergenerational socialization and mentorship, which are conditioned by macro-level conditions that characterize a given community. Wilson’s (1987) social isolation thesis argues that when economic conditions are favorable, intergenerational socialization facilitates upward mobility, integration into the mainstream, and desistance from youth delinquency. In the class-integrated, albeit segregated, minority neighborhoods characteristic of the mid-twentieth century, this form of socialization was primarily carried out by the “traditional old head.” Elijah Anderson (1990, 1999) defines the traditional old head as an individual of stable means who, through informal channels, assists younger people in the neighborhood in “the transition . . . from idle youth to stable employment in the formal manufacturing economy” (1990, 69). Accordingly, “the primary lessons of the old head [were] about good manners and the value of hard work: how to dress for a job interview and deal with a prospective employer, how to work, and how to keep the job” (71). In their efforts to bring the ideals of formal employment to fruition, traditional old heads also provided their protégés with significant resources, including notable sums of cash, clothing, personal references, and apprenticeship opportunities that would allow them to better compete in the job market.

Acting much like a surrogate job counselor and parent, traditional old heads represented one of the most vital community institutions. However, the deterioration of economic conditions throughout the second half of the twentieth century—specifically de-industrialization, rising joblessness, and the depopulation of the inner city—caused the relationship between old heads and young men to grow increasingly frayed and tenuous. With legal opportunities for upward mobility on the wane, some residents turned to the informal and, at times, illicit economy in order to make ends meet. In time, these shifts rendered the traditional old head’s lessons about the importance of formal employment and the ethic of hard work obsolete in the face of drug dealers and street hustlers who provided more accessible styles of life and alternative models of success (Harding 2009). Under these conditions, Anderson (1990, 242) writes, “the youths mock and patronize the old heads . . . for not understanding the ‘way the world really works,’” while the former old heads become “quick to blame [young men] for not wanting to work.”

Yet, while the influence of the traditional old head may indeed be on the decline, ethnographic research suggests that new institutional arrangements emergent at the turn of the century have given rise to new agents of socialization. Duneier (1999), for example, finds that as formal employment opportunities grow scarcer, older men (in his case, street vendors) working in the informal (though not necessarily criminal) economy emerge as influential mentors. Young (2007) similarly finds robust mentorship provided by “redeemed” individuals, who were previously entangled in gangs and drugs. Despite the fact that these potential mentors do not fit neatly within the traditional old head model, they nonetheless encourage young people to pursue mainstream career goals, such as attaining their GEDs, and securing formal employment. As Duneier (1999, 40) argues, this finding “leaves open the question of what other kinds of mentoring relationships between older and younger men have emerged in the face of the decline of the industrial economy and the rise of the ‘new urban poor.’” The relationship between old heads and their protégés thus constitutes a valuable heuristic for examining the ground-level articulations of larger historical shifts.

This article argues that just as de-industrialization, joblessness, and depopulation led to the demise of the traditional old head in the final decades of the twentieth century, the concomitant trend of criminal justice expansion has led to the emergence of an influential substitute at the beginning of the twenty-first century—the prisonized old head. Previous research demonstrates that common biographical experiences are a key factor facilitating the development and persistence of intergenerational socialization (Duneier 1999). Coming of age in the early years of criminal justice expansion, prisonized old heads encountered much of the same criminalization that is currently experienced by today’s youth. Thus, while divergent opportunities and experiences in the formal employment sector can promote estrangement between traditional old heads and young men, shared exposure to a ubiquitous criminal justice system can also create the possibility for prisonized old heads to (re)connect with young protégés. As both generations now cycle in and out of jails, prisons, and disadvantaged neighborhoods side-by-side, opportunities for developing and maintaining close bonds has only increased. In short, criminal justice expansion has generated a consequential cohort effect.

Yet, to speak of a fusion of prison and neighborhood culture necessarily entails a transmission of prison-based interactional patterns and social relations to those who, as yet, have spent little or no time incarcerated. While prison places certainly contain a disproportionate number of former inmates, a majority of residents have not spent time in jail or prison. Furthermore, the recent turn to decarceration strategies—including the increased use of community supervision, alternative courts, and early release for certain offenses—also means that those who do have criminal records may not necessarily spend enough time behind bars to develop prisonized cognitive and corporeal schemas in the first place (Garland et al. 2014). These two concerns alert us to the fact that the prisonization of poor neighborhoods is not merely about the number of former prisoners who reside there; rather, it is about the transmission of cultural models and practices that are specific to incarceration. Thus, we contend, some heretofore-unidentified mechanisms must be responsible for driving the prisonization of poor neighborhoods. In the remaining pages, we detail one such mechanism: the socialization and mentorship provided by prisonized old heads in informal neighborhood spaces.

Studying the Prisonized Old Head on the Streets of Los Angeless’ Skid Row

Data for this analysis are drawn from a broader, five-year ethnographic study of everyday life in Los Angeless’ Skid Row neighborhood. Due to a combination of historical factors—a concentration of homeless shelters, soup kitchens, social services, and inexpensive housing—Skid Row has become one of the nation’s preeminent reentry sites and prison places, making it an ideal and strategic site for investigating the fusion of prison and neighborhood culture. As Zussman (2004, 362) points out, “successful case studies look at extremes, unusual circumstances, and analytically clear examples, all of which are important not because they are representative but because they show a process or a problem in particularly clear relief.”

According to the Los Angeles Police Department, at any given time there are roughly 1,000 active parolees with registered addresses in Skid Row. Other estimates report that as many as one-third of all parolees in LA currently reside within the neighborhood’s fifty-block area (Vaillancourt 2010). A number of local social service organizations have long operated daily shuttles transporting individuals between the neighborhood and one of the largest jail systems in the world—the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility—located less than two miles to the north. Prisoners exiting other county, state, and federal facilities regularly make their way to the neighborhood via the city’s primary Greyhound bus terminal located just one mile to the southwest.

Demographically, Skid Row is home to approximately twelve to fifteen thousand total residents, 75 percent of whom are black. Two-thirds of the total population resides in the large collection of single room occupancy (SRO) hotels and small apartments built in the early and mid-twentieth century. SRO residents have a median annual income of just over $4,500. Almost 90 percent of SRO residents are unemployed, while 45 percent report a mental illness or disability (Los Angeles Housing Department 2005). One-third of the neighborhood population is classified as homeless, living either on the streets, in shelters, or in transitional or program housing. It is important to note that over the last two decades, Skid Row has firmly cemented itself in the larger archipelago of black poverty. The neighborhood now operates as a permanent home and “community of last resort” for many residents who formerly resided in the neighborhoods studied by Wilson (1987), Anderson (1990, 1999), and Duneier (1999).

Given recent sociological research documenting the influential role of informal and intergenerational socialization on the larger cultural context of poor neighborhoods (see especially Harding 2009), Stuart intentionally sought out groups engaging in this brand of mentorship. Such groups abound in and around Skid Row’s parks, streets, and other public spaces. At any given time, dozens of men come together to play basketball, cards, and engage in prison-style exercise routines. These groups consistently refashion pull-up bars, fences, fire hydrants, electrical boxes, or any other available physical structure to intensify and diversify these workouts. This article draws on fieldwork data collected alongside one particular group, made up of twelve, tight-knit, black men whose ages ranged from nineteen to fifty-three (a difference of thirty-four years). During fieldwork, nine of the group’s twelve members had criminal records. Four were on parole and three were on probation. None of the men were employed in the formal labor market during the time of research, although six spent various time working part-time, off-the-books jobs in the nearby industrial district and downtown. The two oldest members of the group—a squat and thoughtful forty-nine-year-old man, named “Big Ron,” and a broad-shouldered fifty-three-year-old man with greying braids, named “Steel”—are the clear and unchallenged old heads. We provide additional details on these individual group members and their daily activities in the pages to come.

Over the course of roughly nine months, Stuart conducted daily fieldwork alongside Big Ron and Steel’s group. Between ten and thirty hours per week, Stuart observed and participated in these men’s workouts, and followed group members throughout their daily routines—into their private residences, to court appearances, and whenever they generally socialized. Much of Stuart’s access and rapport was aided by Stuart own personal background. Self-identifying as a black man, Stuart was in his mid-twenties at the time of fieldwork. He entered the field with significant weightlifting expertise and several years’ experience as an outreach worker and pre-release counselor in California’s minimum-security prisons. As one of the younger members of the group, Stuart’s primary role was that of protégé. Stuart’s relatively privileged position in the field—as someone who did not reside in Skid Row and did not have a criminal record—yielded key findings and insights. At times, the actions and statements of group members indicated that they held a certain level of insecurity and defensiveness in the face of potential judgment from a younger man who was more educated, better-employed, and more aligned with so-called mainstream social life. However, this led the group members to take extra time out of workouts and articulate the myriad benefits of a given weightlifting or life lesson. They anticipated that Stuart—because of his privileged position—might judge such practices incorrectly. The group’s leaders were also more willing to accommodate Stuart’s questions regarding the rationale of these lessons in ways that did not apply to the other protégés.

As a result of this dynamic, the group encouraged Stuart to take constant fieldnotes. These were recorded in the stepwise fashion advanced by Snow and Anderson (1987). This consisted of making mental and jotted notes in the field, and then expanding jottings in detailed and extensive field narratives following each day’s observations. Utilizing an abductive approach (Tavory and Timmermans 2014), fieldnotes were subjected to multiple rounds of coding in dialogue with relevant literature. Research questions and foci of inquiry were honed through theoretical sampling as prominent themes and salient patterns emerged from the data.

Transmitting Prisonized Culture: Building a Prison Yard in the Streets

Mirroring other prison places and reentry neighborhoods, Los Angeless’ Skid Row is marked by severe economic, racial, and social disadvantage. As such, it is saturated with the very “people, places, and things” (Leverentz 2014) associated with criminal offending, relapse, and recidivism. Amid a dearth of employment, educational, and health resources, neighborhood residents confront an abundance of inexpensive drugs and illicit opportunities. While difficult for all inhabitants, these conditions can create a particularly “unsettled” (Swidler 1986, 2001) existence for former prisoners, who must attempt the difficult task of starting their lives anew after lengthy periods in restrictive custody, cut off from the outside world. Despite this dilemma, they are not completely without recourse. Many of these individuals underwent a similarly jarring life transition at least once before, when they were initially incarcerated, and were forced to develop cultural repertoires and corresponding strategies of action to better acclimate to prison life. Under the tutelage of prisonized old heads, they refashion this “cultural equipment” (Swidler 2001) upon their release in order to better navigate and survive the difficult conditions of life on the outside.

One of the primary ways in which this cultural transfer occurs is through prisonized old heads’ active and strategic replication of the quintessential social spaces and associated group behaviors of correctional facilities. In Skid Row, this manifested most immediately in the efforts of Big Ron and Steel to intentionally re-create the prison’s recreation yard on neighborhood streets. More specifically, they reproduced the “weight pile”—a term that broadly refers to section of the correctional facilities (usually the recreation yard) that houses outdated iron weightlifting equipment and provides prisoners with the opportunity to perform calisthenics, such as push-ups, pull-ups, and “burpies.” For many inmates, including both Big Ron and Steel, the prison weight pile is about far more than merely attaining physical fitness or battling boredom. Rather, the prison weight pile is a symbolically charged space that fundamentally reorganizes life behind bars. As inmates “work the pile,” as Big Ron often referred to it, they actively cultivate a particular way of “doing time” that centers on self-transformation, introspection, and improvement.

Big Ron and Steel both credit the prison weight pile, its mentorship model, and associated activities with saving their lives. Prior to spending almost thirty cumulative years behind bars on robbery, assault, and narcotics-related charges, both men had been deeply entrenched in gang life and drug dealing in South Central Los Angeles. With each successive sentence, however, the two found themselves spending increasing time with the older inmates who convened at the prison weight pile during their recreation time. These older men, many of whom were serving lengthy (sometimes life) sentences, became their mentors and encouraged Big Ron and Steel to separate themselves from former criminal peers, abstain from drug use, and generally serve their remaining sentences “quietly.” Big Ron explained:

The OGs [old heads] in the pen turned my life around. I’d probably still be locked up, or dead, if wasn’t for them. I struggled, but they showed me I didn’t have to kick it with the homies from the hood. They helped me get healthy. Helped me get sober. They got me into lifting heavy weight. That changed everything ’cause it turns out you can’t lift [weights] when you got dope pumping through your veins. That’s why we always say: The iron is good medicine.

Drawing such a direct link between desistance and “the iron,” Big Ron and Steel are quick to brag to their current pupils that they had become so dedicated to the prison weight pile that they had each put on over twenty pounds of muscle by the time of their most recent release.

Big Ron and Steel self-consciously transmitted these lessons to the streets of Skid Row by creating what they referred to as the “Skid Row weight pile.” The men’s proud use of this term stands as one of the most obvious and powerful indicators of the extent to which the prison and the urban neighborhood have become fused in residents’ minds. Up to four days per week, Big Ron and Steel convened a group of younger protégés to perform physical exercises using an admixture of homemade dumbbells, barbells, and other makeshift weightlifting equipment. For the next hour or so, the two mentors would provide their pupils with a combination of weightlifting instruction, life lessons, and pragmatic advice. In this manner, they socialized their pupils to negotiate the daily exigencies of urban poverty by using the skills, habits, and schemas they had developed while incarcerated. This socialization centered squarely on what they called “getting a good pump.” In a broad sense, “the pump” refers to the noticeable, short-term growth, and sometimes even doubling, of muscle size that occurs while an individual is engaged in intense anaerobic exercise like weightlifting. While the pump holds an almost mythical character in locker rooms and gyms around the world, it takes on an additional, highly symbolic quality in prisons and, in turn, in prisonized neighborhoods. In both settings, the pump serves to fundamentally restructure an individual’s larger system of attitudes and behaviors. Amid a dearth of resources and potential feelings of despair, it provides individuals with a healthier, more self-reflective, and, most importantly, less criminally involved way of moving through the world and addressing one’s needs.

Owing to Big Ron and Steel’s tutelage, the group at the Skid Row weight pile viewed their daily (and quite obsessive) effort to “get pumped” as a fundamentally therapeutic practice. For them, it was a prime engine of sobriety and desistance, due to its capacity to promote and maintain a renegotiation of the relationship between mind and body. A majority of the men viewed their previous drug use, gang life, and criminal behavior as mutually constitutive elements in a downward spiral in which they had lost control over their lives. Indeed, they routinely conflated criminality and drug-involvement. For the men, their accelerating drug consumption had created the need to earn more money, often by selling larger quantities of drugs and/or engaging in burglaries and robberies. Their increasing time spent with fellow gang members had in turn led to increased drug consumption and opportunities for making a quick buck.

As a result, when the men referenced their former criminal and drug-involved lives, they overwhelmingly spoke in terms of an alienated and antagonistic relationship between their body and their mind. Referring to his past behavior, one of the younger men in the group, a fair-skinned black man named Dice, described himself as an “all-star crack head.” “I was bad there for a little bit,” he confessed to several of the men during a workout. “I wasn’t living no life. I was just living for my next hit. Once I got high, then I was thinking about how I was gonna get high again.” Others similarly discussed their earlier lives as characterized by a struggle between a criminal, addicted self—driven primarily by desires to satisfy physical sensations—and a “real” self—a kind of moral conscious that had increasingly been rendered silent. They spoke of feeling as though they were “held hostage,” “trapped,” or “flying on autopilot.”

For those with lengthy incarceration histories, their discovery of the prison weight pile marked the moment in which they regained control over their unconscious and bodily drives. Dante, a middle-aged man who initially began working out in California’s Chuckawalla Valley State Prison, recounted the renewed and exhilarating sense of agency he began to feel after two weeks under the guidance of older inmates. He recounted how he began “living from pump to pump,” indicating a new orientation to life in which nearly every aspect of his day became infiltrated by thoughts of his next workout:

I started to see that I was doing stuff to my body that I didn’t think I could do. So I was really hyped up about it. I would just sit there in my bed thinking about what muscles I was gonna work tomorrow. I’m at the commissary, I’m on the toilet, I’m thinking about hitting the iron. . . . It was like a new kind of high I was craving all the time. . . . That’s what gave me the strength to do my time. Without that [dedication to exercise], and without them [mentors], I would have probably popped off at somebody who looked at me wrong. They [the Department of Corrections] would have kept tacking on months. I’d still be in there.

By providing these men with a new feeling of control—over their body and thus over their lives more generally—the act of pumping instilled them with the tools to rupture previous cycles of powerlessness and to avoid becoming “held hostage” again.

This new sense of control was squarely rooted in the repetitive, often-monotonous physical techniques that characterize the weightlifting activity itself. Using a particular movement, along a particular motion, for a particular number of repetitions, the men not only honed their ability to isolate and intentionally manipulate a specific muscle but they also honed the ability to isolate and manipulate specific fibers of that muscle. As in prison, the favorite exercise at the Skid Row weight pile was bicep curls. The men took care to control distinct parts of the muscle—targeting the “long head” of the bicep, for instance—by slightly adjusting the angle of their wrist or by alternating their grip. Through a strategy of divide and conquer, getting pumped thus trained the men’s minds to control their most minute and otherwise unconscious motor functions. As the most experienced participants, Big Ron and Steel devoted a majority of their energy during their workouts to closely watching their pupils and instructing them how to better perfect this form of corporeal mastery. Steel, for instance, would regularly call out from the perimeter of the circle: “Think about turning your arms off when you use your back;” “Concentrate on the top part of your shoulder to make that muscle do the work;” “Breathe out hard and really imagine your muscle growing.”

The Magnetism of the Prisonized Old Head: Cultivating Dedicated Protégés

As suggested earlier, to speak of a fusion of prison and neighborhood culture at the hands of prisonized old heads requires an investigation into both how and why these mentors and their prisonized ways of living become attractive not just to former long-term prisoners, but also with neighborhood residents who have spent little or no time in correctional facilities. In addition to their impressive physiques and conspicuous presence on one of the neighborhood’s busiest thoroughfares, Big Ron, Steel, and their group derived much of their magnetism from their elevated capacity to provide support and resources for daily survival.

Big Ron and Steel attracted younger people into sustained mentoring relationships according to two processes. The first was a kind of passive recruitment of former inmates who, while simply walking past, immediately recognized the activity and its constituent social roles. For Tyrell, a soft-spoken and burly man, it was a beacon of familiarity and hope. When Tyrell was released from the California Men’s Colony located some two hundred miles to the north, he used his “gate money” to purchase a bus ticket to LA. On the suggestion of his cellmate, he walked from the Greyhound station to a homeless shelter in Skid Row. He spoke of his initial feeling of despair. He was rudderless and was literally starting his life over from scratch. This feeling immediately subsided when he caught sight of Steel, who was hoisting homemade dumbbells over his head. Tyrell was immediately reminded of his mentors in prison, and how they assisted him in getting (and remaining) sober. “Right when I saw the boys,” Tyrell recalled, “I didn’t feel alone anymore. I knew they weren’t gonna just sit around and keep poisoning themselves like everyone else. God showed me some other niggas out here that’s just like me.” Nearly twenty years younger than Big Ron, Tyrell immediately took on the role of a willing pupil. “I’m trying to get to where he’s at,” Tyrell explained. “It takes time to get a chest like that. It takes discipline and dedication. You can’t be out here in these streets [gangbanging and selling drugs] and have a chest like that. That’s why I got him teaching me how to get there.”

Others came to the group through a more active process of recruitment. This was the case for most of the younger members—typically men in their twenties and early thirties—who had far shorter incarceration histories, if any history of incarceration at all. They came to the weight pile not necessarily because it resonated with their own past experiences in the prison yard, but because either Big Ron or Steel sought them out, recognizing that these younger men might benefit from their mentorship. Stuart was himself initially brought into the group on account of Steel’s active recruitment. Early in his fieldwork, Stuart began a near-daily exercise routine in one of Skid Row’s small parks in an effort to gain access to the dozens of intergenerational groups who congregate there. Without solicitation, Steel interrupted Stuart’s use of a pull-up bar to offer tips for exercising more effectively. As Steel later recounted to Stuart, he initially made contact because he had not seen Stuart before and thus assumed that Stuart had only recently moved to the neighborhood. Given Stuart’s physical build and apparent experience weightlifting, Steel also assumed that Stuart may have possibly spent time incarcerated. Steel endeavored to make contact and mentor Stuart before the perils of Skid Row—drugs, criminal opportunities, and aggressive policing—did any damage.

Steel and Big Ron recruited BJ, a fast-talking twenty-something, through a similar form of outreach. Halfway through a strenuous workout one day, the two men noticed BJ walking on the opposite side of the street. They immediately recognized his predicament. Released from county jail only an hour prior, BJ was wearing the thin, light blue paper jumpsuit provided to inmates whose clothes are destroyed during their arrest—BJ had ripped his clothes on a fence while trying to outrun police officers. It was his first criminal charge as an adult. Observing the young man’s look of despair, Big Ron stepped away from his exercises and called BJ over. He introduced him to the rest of the men, who quickly directed BJ to a nearby shelter to ask for a new set of clothes. Afterward, BJ returned to sidewalk, where the group explained how and where he could acquire food, housing, and even apply for public benefits. Big Ron and Steel convinced BJ to join them for a workout the next day. Big Ron even allowed BJ to crash on the floor of his SRO room until he could find his own housing arrangements. The older man had one condition for all this support: Big Ron made BJ promise that he would not return to his former neighborhood, and the scene of his transgressions, in South Central.

Although Tyrell and BJ initially joined the group at the Skid Row weight pile as the result of different forces, both remained actively involved in the daily workouts because the space provided the necessary foundation for beginning life anew. As BJ confided one afternoon, his arrest and incarceration had cost him more than just his clothes. He had also lost his job, his girlfriend, his apartment, and all of his money. Big Ron’s mentorship, however, provided a new, optimistic beginning:

I was depressed about it for a long time. But, Ron got me turning my thinking around. Glass half full kind of shit. So yeah, I came out broke as hell, but he reminded me that I also get to start over. I get to live life on my terms. He [Big Ron] showed me I could do anything I want so long as I get right with myself first.

Importantly, the Skid Row weight pile represented new beginnings even for those members who did not have any serious exposure to the criminal justice system. For Henry, a thinner man in his mid-twenties with a history of heroin addiction, the weight pile became an informal NA (Narcotics Anonymous) group, and Big Ron became his unofficial sponsor. For months, the young man had been stopping and chatting with Big Ron and the others before and after his meetings with caseworkers and drug counselors at the social service organization located on the next block. In a savvy move to draw Henry into the group, Big Ron challenged him to see how many bicep curls he could complete. Henry accepted, and easily completed the first twenty. As he began to struggle, Big Ron offered him some pointers for steadying his breathing. Henry found a reservoir of strength and completed five more repetitions. He left that day with a feeling of accomplishment and returned two days later, eager to test his strength and put Big Ron’s weightlifting advice to additional use. Much to Big Ron’s pleasure, Henry joined in on the full workout and became a regular presence at the weight pile beginning the next week. Months later, Henry would credit the weight pile with his sustained sobriety:

It’s one thing to talk about being sober, but it’s another thing to really work at being sober. Ron helped me see it’s a full body thing, you know? The stuff I do in there [in appointments with drug counselors] only works because of the stuff I do out here [at the weight pile].

Henry’s revelation punctuates the gravitational pull of the prisonized old head on young men. Beyond using his knowledge of weightlifting technique to coax new members into the group, Big Ron’s instruction at the weight pile also provided his pupils with a new and compelling orientation for navigating precarious neighborhood conditions. Henry, and others with minimal incarceration histories, effectively learned to survive daily life in the neighborhood by engaging in the activities, routines, and habits more commonly associated with life in correctional facilities.

The Paradoxical Role of the Prisonized Old Head: Broader Implications

The socialization provided by the prisonized old head carries a number of important and highly paradoxical sociological implications. In this section, we draw specific attention to the relationship between the prisonized old head and (1) employment in the formal, mainstream economy; (2) formal reentry and rehabilitation programming; and (3) broader social effects and the impact on successful reintegration.

On one hand, by creating intimate social space and cultivating coherent cultural repertoires, the prisonized old head socializes protégés toward desistance. While we are unable to systematically evaluate the long-term effectiveness of the socialization at the Skid Row weight pile, it was characterized by the elements that research most frequently associates with successful desistance. Laub and Sampson (1993) were among the first to suggest that engagement in crime has more to do with the strength of one’s emotional attachments to society than any known crime control mechanism (police, courts, prison, etc.). The strength of one’s social relationships mitigates one’s engagement in crime. Re-offending thus occurs when these bonds are weakened. Examining the mechanisms through which desistance occurs, Maruna (2001, 7) similarly concludes that “to desist from crime, ex-offenders need to develop a coherent, pro-social identity for themselves.” Those who are able to desist have high levels of self-efficacy, and craft narratives that create meaning for their lives (McNeill et al. 2012). Through the pressures of group obligations and peer policing, Big Ron and Steel created a stable social space—in most cases, the most stable aspect of their lives—where they and their protégés developed strong emotional bonds and self-efficacy on both the cognitive and corporeal levels. In fact, the available evidence suggests that membership and participation in the group was at least as stable, if not more stable, than the neighborhood’s formal programs. For example, one of the flagship rehabilitation programs—a twenty-one-day residential program called Streets or Services (SOS)—has a completion rate of roughly 7 percent (Blasi 2007). In contrast, eight of the twelve men who frequented the weight pile at the beginning of Stuart’s fieldwork were still participating on a near-daily basis more than seven months later. During that same period, a handful of new, equally dedicated members also replenished the group’s ranks.

Yet, these processes may come at a larger cost to both individual and community vitality. First, consider the differences in the substance of the socialization provided by the traditional old head and the prisonized old head. Both similarly steer protégés away from problematic ways of life (i.e., drug use and crime), yet they differ significantly in what they steer protégés toward. While the ultimate goal of the traditional old head is formal employment in the mainstream economy, the primary aim of the prisonized old head is avoiding (re)incarceration and generally staying out of trouble—a more modest, but, in the era of mass incarceration, a more pressing goal. This divergence is largely rooted in the economic and social conditions that characterize the historical periods in which these mentorship models operate. The deterioration of minority communities and the concurrent expansion of policing and incarceration has created a situation in which many residents must now devote an inordinate amount of cognitive and physical energy to merely avoiding police stops, warrant checks, and arrests (Rios 2011; Goffman 2014; Stuart, 2016). This is energy that, in the past, was devoted to preparing for and joining the formal labor force. This is even more so the case for those carrying the mark of a criminal record, for whom the odds of being subject to police contact are sometimes greater than the odds of landing a job (Pager 2007; Stuart, 2016). Additionally, given prisonized old heads’ own positions in this disadvantaged stratum, they do not possess the vital resources—the cash, clothing, and leads on jobs—that the traditional old head, by definition, passed along to protégés to assist their upward trajectory. Without the requisite financial, cultural, or social capital, the prisonized old head’s ability to serve as a mainstream role model is severely diminished.

Given these constraints, the socialization provided by the prisonized old head may, at times, even serve to normalize joblessness. Among Big Ron and Steel’s group, for example, this was most evident in the manner in which the men viewed “working the pile” as a laudable substitute for “working a job.” Recall that getting pumped day after day required that the men spend their time away from the weight pile resting at home. This led those who were employed to consistently complain that, much like parasitic women, stable jobs ultimately inhibited their ability to get pumped. In fact, Big Ron and Steel sometimes celebrated unemployment. For instance, during an afternoon workout, a group member, named Tony, informed the others that he had been fired from his part-time janitorial position. Steel was unmoved. “Fuck it,” he ordered, matter-of-factly. “Don’t sweat it. That just means you got more time to get down [to exercise at the weight pile] now. I better see you going extra hard, doing double days. You ain’t got no excuses now.” The other men echoed their mentor’s words. In the months that followed, Tony made good Steel’s advice. Big Ron and the others repeatedly commended him for his increased dedication to the weight pile (and thus decreased dedication to securing a new job), which was evidenced in significant muscle growth.

A second implication concerns the position of the prisonized old head in relation to the mentorship models that operate in the more formal context of human service agencies, which frequently occupy the same neighborhood spaces as the prisonized old head. A number of ethnographic studies demonstrate that intergenerational mentorship constitutes a key pillar of reentry and rehabilitation programs, with former prisoners serving as peer counselors, group leaders, and senior residents (see especially Haney 2010; Kaye 2013; Miller 2014). On first glance, such mentorship appears quite similar to the socialization provided by the prisonized old head. However, upon closer inspection, one observes consequential differences between the two, traced directly to the informality of the latter. Organizationally, while formal reentry programs certainly make use of former prisoners as staff members and counselors, these individuals answer to, and in the event of disputes, are overruled by professional staff, social workers, and directors who typically lack direct personal experiences with incarceration, and must instead rely on what their clients frequently criticize as “book knowledge” (Leverentz 2014; also see Gowan and Whetstone 2012). In contrast, prisonized old heads, as described here, constitute the highest form of authority within their informal peer groups. These organizational differences contribute to a key divergence in the curriculum found in either space. Drawing from professional knowledge and specialized education, programming and mentorship in formal reentry settings attempt to propel former prisoners to take up new orientations and schemas by distancing themselves from their past lifestyles, in which crime, drugs, and incarceration are closely intertwined as negative facets of their former lives. While prisonized old heads similarly compel their protégés to distance themselves from crime and drugs, they do so by instructing them to revert to previous orientations—to amplify and perfect schemas associated with incarceration. For example, whereas formal reentry and recovery programs socialize men to trade the hypermasculinity associated with the street and correctional facilities for the mainstream forms of masculinity associated with middle-class, family-oriented, and religious ways of life (Flores 2013), the prisonized old head socializes men to embrace hypermasculinity, and to use it as a primary tool for desistance.

Against this backdrop, we can understand why Big Ron and Steel actively encouraged their protégés to avoid formal reentry programming, which they criticized as infantilizing, emasculating, highly coercive, and antithetical to their mentorship (see Gowan and Whetstone 2012). According to Big Ron and Steel, these programs actually undermined long-term desistance and sobriety by minimizing the importance of the corporeal-cum-cognitive mastery inculcated at the weight pile, and by attempting to foster desistance in an organizational setting that did not reflect the harsh reality of the world beyond the programs and their supportive personnel. During one workout, which took place less than a hundred yards from one of the largest service providers in the area, Steel railed against the futility of the organization’s trademark reentry program. “What happens when they [the participants] graduate those programs?” he asked rhetorically. “Then they come right back out here [to the streets]. But there’s no caseworkers out here when shit gets rough.” In contrast, he argued, those at the weight pile were actively honing their minds and bodies in the “real world,” without depending on formal support staff. When Steel learned that Dice and Stuart had occasionally entered the facility to eat free lunch together, he criticized the two, joking that they would have to complete additional exercises in order to counteract any negative effects that their proximity to the programs might have had.

Constrictions on employment and formal programming relates to a third, and broader implication. By propelling neighborhood residents to self-impose the conditions of incarceration while living on the outside, this socialization normalizes criminalization and imprisonment in a manner that cements residents of impoverished marginal populations (including those without incarceration histories) in the liminal state and geographical site of reentry for the foreseeable future. By compelling residents to direct their daily affairs according to the routines, spatial arrangements, and principles of life behind bars, the prisonized old head essentially encourages protégés to keep one figurative foot squarely in the prison. In their attempts to protect their ability to pump and thus regain control of their lives, Big Ron’s pupils actively locked themselves away in their SRO “cells” for most of the day, save for a few hours in which they ventured outside to engage in recreation in the simulated prison yard. As a result, the members of the group expressed little intention of moving out of Skid Row for the foreseeable future. Beyond the magnetic bonds they developed at the weight pile, the protégés faced stern lectures from Big Ron and Steel at the very mention of leaving Skid Row, the group, or its curriculum.

Conclusion and Directions for Future Research

The massive and continual cycling of populations between prison and disadvantaged urban neighborhoods has become a normative social arrangement that transforms the urban landscape and reshapes the life-worlds of the urban poor. Survey and demographic research attests to the ways in which these interactions shape the urban poor’s participation in the labor market, healthcare, and political incorporation (Wakefield and Uggen 2010; Clear 2007; Pager 2007; Massoglia 2008). This article advances previous work by directing attention to a set of cultural collateral consequences that do not ordinarily appear in large-scale data sets. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, we demonstrate how criminal justice expansion also exerts influence through informal, self-imposed, and cultural processes. Taking the lessons learned inside penal institutions to the street, prisonized old heads socialize protégés to reconstitute prison conditions, behavioral practices, and interactional styles, and to transmit them anew within their community. Stated simply, prisonized old heads leverage ways of living life “on the inside” as strategies for living life “on the outside.” Intergenerational socialization thus represents a recurring social mechanism by which, in Wacquant’s (2001) language, the culture of poor neighborhoods and prisons “meet and mesh.”

In-depth, ethnographic case studies are uniquely positioned to discover, document, and theorize emerging sociological developments. In this article, we have provided a set of empirically grounded propositions about the causes, contours, and consequences of the prisonized old head’s emergence and socialization. We intentionally selected this case—informal, intergenerational socialization among black men in one of the nation’s preeminent reentry communities—for its capacity to reveal prisonized mentorship in particularly sharp relief. However, it is nonetheless a single case. We contend that the defining characteristics of the prisonized old head are transferrable, and we urge future researchers to apply our conceptualization to other demographic groups. An investigation of the gendered dynamics of prisonized socialization will be particularly fruitful. Between 1980 and 2010, the rate of incarceration for women has increased 464 percent (Sentencing Project 2012). This dramatic upswing raises the question: Do women former prisoners engage in similarly prisonized forms of mentorship? Are there similar consequences? Our findings lead us to propose that just as women served as traditional old heads (Anderson 1990, 1999), they may similarly act as prisonized old heads. However, we do anticipate differences in terms of the “vehicle”—the specific social gathering and activity—by which women re-create and transmit prison behaviors, roles, and routines. Both inside and outside of the prison context, weightlifting is typically viewed as a particularly masculine pursuit; this is part of the reason that Big Ron’s crew found it so affirming. In contrast, research shows that women, particularly women of color, who are viewed as inappropriately masculine or in violation of dominant forms of femininity, are frequently subjected to increased criminalization (Chesney-Lind and Eliason 2006). We direct researchers to identify the quintessential pastime activities of women prisoners while incarcerated, and then investigate whether and how these activities are taken up in the neighborhood context. Ultimately, how and to what extent this socialization occurs among women is an empirical question. Given our findings, however, we anticipate that researchers will nonetheless find this form of informal mentorship in any marginalized community or demographic group in which large numbers of residents cycle through incarceration. Curiously, virtually all ethnographic studies of reentry have been conducted squarely within formal service organizations. As a result, there is scant in situ research about the daily lives of the majority of former prisoners, who may not necessarily be enrolled in reentry programs. Our analysis of the prisonized old head thus represents a first step in accounting for this much-overlooked social sphere and its constituent relationships and interactions.

While we have focused attention on one particular group in one particular neighborhood, evidence suggests that such socialization exists in other locales, so much so that it has moved beyond the informal sphere to shape formal human services delivery. In recent years, a growing number of community organizations have adopted explicitly “prison-styled” workouts as a new model for reentry and rehabilitation programming. One of the most prominent of such organizations—a New York non-profit called Bartendaz—uses prison-style exercises and calisthenics as the central pillar for everything from rehabilitation to youth empowerment, conflict resolution, and violence prevention. Given the contradictory and sometimes troubling implications of the prisonized old head’s mentorship, we urge future researchers to examine such innovations in formal programming. The close bonds, stability, and desistance observed at the weight pile provide some degree of optimism. If these formal programs are able to overcome the drawbacks we identified regarding prisonized mentorship’s contradictions, and thus deliver services in a manner that is more amenable to the life experiences, routines, and struggles of former prisoners, they may be more effective at minimizing the alienation and durable inequality caused by incarceration.