Dissertation

From con -boss to gang lord: The transformation of social relations in California prisons, 1943–1983

McCarty, Heather Jane

2004

Overview

In the post-World War II era, social relations in California's prisons underwent a significant transformation. In the early post-war years, convicts espoused the thieves code, or convict code—which demanded convict class loyalty in opposition to prison officers and administrators. Prisoners began to organize collective protests and work stoppages aimed at challenging prison policy and demanding prisoner rights. Starting in the 1960s, violent prison gangs—mapped onto racial and geographical divisions—emerged to rival this growth in collective action. At first, gangs provided simply an alternative form of prisoner solidarity, but by the late 1970s, they had supplanted the convict class as prisoners' principle mode of social organization and effectively redefined the convict code. From Con-Boss to Gang Lord analyzes how and why the base for prisoner social relations transmuted from collective convict solidarity to antagonistic divisions along various axes—race being the most pervasive—from 1943–1983. I argue that factors both within and beyond prison walls contributed to this change. I demonstrate the role of both institutional changes and external political changes on prisoners' social organization, while at the same time foregrounding prisoners' own struggle with a dialectic between convict and gang solidarity. Finally, I show how changes in prisoner social relations played a role in the shift, by the 1970s, to a punitive model of prison administration. My dissertation provides the first historical narrative of the transformation of prisoner social relations and culture in the post World War II era. Historians have primarily focused on earlier periods, centering their inquires around the formation and transformation of the penal institution while emphasizing the contributions of reformers to these changes. Sociologists and criminologists examine prisons in the twentieth century, but largely provide case studies of one prison over a limited period of time. Their works contribute useful analytical concepts, rather than a synthetic and historical account of penal systems. My work dissects the transformation of race, state, and punishment in postwar California and helps us understand how California prisons became the gang-ridden, hyper-violent, and racially divided institutions that they are today.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American history / Criminology
• ISBN: 9780542009662, 0542009668