“Sores in the city”

This chapter focuses on Black gangs that were the “tempest” caused by the carceral current which swept through the Chicago’s Black neighborhoods in the early 1960s. Carceral power or the mechanisms of prison punishment was the spatial backdrop against which Black gangs like the Almighty Black Stone Rangers emerged. Architectures of confinement, restrictions on Black movement, ubiquitous policing, few job options, and rising rates of Black male incarceration provided the fertile carceral landscape for the germination of Black gangs. Because they were formed within the milieu of prison, Black gangs borrowed the hegemonic masculine elements of prison masculinity to form their expressions of masculine authority. The masculinity of Black gangs in turn informed the masculinities of prison.