Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Camacho, Angélica

Titel

The moral panic of the mafioso: The rise of the prison industrial complex and the attack on brown communities

Ist Teil von

• Latino studies, 2023-12, Vol.21 (4), p.541-565

Ort / Verlag

London: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Alongside California’s 1990s growth of the carceral state and backlash toward Latinx migrants came increased panics about prison gangs, especially the Mexican Mafia. Departing from traditional criminological studies that aim to gather information on and study the intricacies of gangs and their members, I instead study the Mexican Mafia as a social phenomenon. This article introduces the moral panic of the mafioso to understand how racialized moral panics informed by the criminalization of the Mexican Mafia contributed to the popular acceptance of tough-on-crime punitive approaches. I argue that a moral panic of the mafioso formed part of the racialized criminalization of Brown people that gave rise to the carceral state, while it also legitimized the existence of Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Units (SHU), and undermined prisoner organizing against the California Department of Corrections (CDC). The moral panic of the mafioso justified carceral governance against Mexicanxs/Chicanxs/Latinxs in the United States whose increased presence and migration to the Southwest was increasingly perceived a national threat. Consequently, the criminalization of people incarcerated in Pelican Bay SHU as alleged mafiosos is connected to a state-sanctioned domestic war against Latinxs. Mafiosos functioned as scapegoats that helped to advance modes of carceral power in service to a US imperialist, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, colonial national structure.