Audio Coursesby JellypodLesson 10 of 10
Overview
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Welcome back to Let's Talk About Gangs & Criminal Networks. I'm Professor A., and I hope you had some time to rest over the Mardi Gras break. I know many of you have family obligations, work demands, or just needed mental space. I respect that. This week is Week 6., and we are jumping into "Permanent Punishment: Reentry Barriers and Deportation as Policy Failure." And I need to front-load something important before we dive in: this material is going to connect to real people I've known, real students I've taught, and real decisions our legal system has made that affect our communities right now, today, in 2026. So I'm asking you to show up with intellectual seriousness and human compassion. We don't analyze this stuff to perform suffering or trauma. We analyze it to understand how systems work—and how we might change them. Let me start with a story.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Fifteen years ago, I was teaching in Newark, New Jersey. I was in a high school where my students lived in what you might call Bloods territory—concentrated poverty, unstable housing, the constant background presence of street violence. And I taught young people who were trying to make it, and most of them were brilliant. They were reading. They were thinking. They were coming to school. But some of them told me something that I had never heard before, and it stuck with me: they said they didn't believe they would live past eighteen. Some of them didn't. Now, when I say that—when I sit here and tell you that some of my students from Newark didn't see twenty—I'm not being poetic. I'm describing a pattern. A predictable, documented phenomenon. And the reason I bring this up is because when you read Christian Bolden's memoir Out of the Red, you understand that those students of mine weren't uniquely pessimistic. They were reading a landscape accurately. They were in situations where the odds were structured against them by things that had nothing to do with individual choice. I used to talk to those students about Hip Hop as a text—as a legitimate epistemology for understanding their world. We'd listen to Tupac and Biggie and talk about their albums: Ready to Die. Life After Death. Born Again. Me Against the World. And there's something eerie about looking at those titles knowing what happened to both of them, knowing that they were gunned down, knowing that they seemed to know somehow. It's like when you read MLK Jr's "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, and he says, "I may not get there with you. I would like to live a long life, longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will." King knew his time was short. And my students—many of them—they knew theirs too. I wanted them to live long lives. I told them, "Don't be like Pac. Don't be like Biggie. Don't speak for yourself alone. Speak for the community. Speak for the future." But I also knew that me wanting something and the structural conditions they faced were two different things. I have shed many tears with my students and for my students. And I still pray for them. In 2026, I'm still praying for them. I mention this because when I read about Dr. Christian Bolden—who survived gang violence, survived prison, and came home to start over—I realized something: I didn't waste those nine years in Newark. Some of those students, they ran with the same crews Bolden did. They went to jail. Some of them survived. Some of them changed. And some of them are doing well for themselves now. That matters. Being a teacher willing to serve in communities that others won't dare enter—sometimes it feels like carrying a coffin, even though no one is dead. You carry the weight of the students. You carry the weight of the community. You carry the weight of knowing that these are people the larger society has thrown away. But if we don't do it, who will? Who's going to be there? I just wanted to do God's will: be a catalyst for those whom others treat as unworthy of love and support. That's why we're reading Bolden this semester. Because his story isn't exceptional in the way bootstrap narratives are exceptional—it's exceptional because of how hard it should never have been.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Let me walk you through what Bolden experiences when he leaves prison. This matters because it's not about individual psychology. It's about the architecture of a system. The Shock of Freedom Bolden gets released after five years in Texas prisons. And the first thing he describes is how disorienting simple freedom becomes. He's going to buy clothes in a store. Should be normal, right? But he's been in a total institution—Erving Goffman's term for places like prisons that completely reshape your self, your habits, your way of moving through the world. So he's trying on clothes, and he's trembling. He has panic attacks. His body doesn't know how to be free. He talks about eating. In prison, you eat in three to five minutes. You eat fast, the way an animal eats when it doesn't know when the next meal is coming. So when he gets out, he goes to a restaurant and he scarfs his food like a dog, and he looks up and everyone is staring at him. He still—even now, years later—he still bangs the heels of his shoes and flips them upside down before he puts them on. This is a habit from prison: in Texas, there are scorpions in the cells, and you check your shoes before you put them on. You carry that practice with you. You're marked by it. This is what we mean when we talk about collateral consequences. It's not just the legal stuff. It's the way that the total institution etches itself into your body. The Employment Crisis But here's where the system really shows its architecture. Bolden gets a job at H-E-B grocery through his stepfather's connections. He works hard. He moves from bagger to cashier. Six months in, management pulls him into a back room. Listen to what they say: "So, you wrote on your application that you had been convicted of a felony. We would like you to tell us more about that." He explains. And then they tell him, "H-E-B has decided that we do not want you working for us." What's important here is that this wasn't a conversation. The decision was already made. They made him recount his story anyway. This is what Devah Pager—and we'll get to her research—calls a ritual humiliation. You force someone to disclose. You make them relive it. And then you discard them anyway. After that, Bolden is hitting the streets with applications. Everywhere along FM 78. And every time he sees that box—"Have you ever been convicted of a felony?"—he feels like he has a stamp on his forehead. He knows his application is going into the trash. He refuses to lie. He always checks the box. Burger King? They look over his application and stare at him like he's an axe-murderer. Rejection. He applies everywhere. It takes the kindness of one Little Caesars manager who hires him on the spot as a delivery driver. When Bolden points out his felony conviction, the manager shrugs it off. That's it. That's the job. This is the lesson: one person's compassion or indifference determines whether Bolden eats or goes hungry. The system doesn't contain multiple pathways forward. It contains a single gate, and almost everyone is closing it. Parole as Perpetual Threat Then there's the parole system. Bolden's parole officers keep changing. New one every few months. Never the same person twice. One officer falsely accuses him of selling cocaine—confuses him with someone else who shares his initials, "C.B." The officer screams at him. Says he's going back to prison. No apology when the mistake is discovered. Another officer screams at him when an electronic monitor glitches during a phone call. Bolden describes waking up covered in sweat from night terrors where he's been falsely accused and sent back to prison with no one knowing. The parole system, designed supposedly for reintegration, functions as a perpetual threat of re-incarceration. You're never safe. You're always one false accusation, one bureaucratic error, one officer's bad mood away from going back inside. Education as Escape Hatch So Bolden decides he's going to go to college. And here's what some of his parole officers say: they're outright hostile about it. They tell him his priority should be to remain gainfully employed. The clear message is: college is a pipe dream. He pushes through. He earns a bachelor's degree. Magna cum laude. Applied sociology. He still can't get a job. All the applications result in outright rejections or silence. Even with a degree. Even with accomplishment. Even with evidence that he's exactly the kind of person who should be employable—someone who worked his way through school, who achieved academic excellence, who wanted to build something. The criminal record is still the overriding signal. It's louder than any credential. It takes Dr. Susan Day—a real person who saw something in Bolden—who tells him flatly: "You ARE going to graduate school." That's it. No negotiation. And that launches him toward a PhD, toward a tenured professorship in criminology, toward being where he is today. But here's the critical analytical move: Bolden's trajectory from prisoner to professor is extraordinary. And that exceptionalism is precisely the point. Most people leaving prison never encounter a Dr. Day. Most people never get that one person who believes in them enough to override the entire system's rejection. The fact that we celebrate Bolden's success as a feel-good story is actually evidence of how broken the system is. He shouldn't have had to be exceptional to survive.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now I'm going to show you the research that quantifies what Bolden experienced. This is Devah Pager's 2003 Milwaukee study. And it's one of the most important pieces of criminological research ever published. Here's what Pager did: She sent matched pairs of testers—Black and white applicants—who were identical in every way except one thing. Some had a criminal record randomly assigned to them (felony drug possession, 18 months served). Some didn't. Same resume. Same qualifications. Same presentation. The only difference: a criminal record. Then she tracked who got called back. The Raw Numbers White applicant with no criminal record: 34% callback rate. White applicant with a criminal record: 17% callback rate. Black applicant with no criminal record: 14% callback rate. Black applicant with a criminal record: 5% callback rate. Let that sink in for a second. A white applicant with a felony conviction on their record—17% of employers call them back. A Black applicant with a clean record—14% of employers call them back. A criminal record for a white person is less of a barrier than being Black in the first place. And for Black applicants, the criminal record effect is 40% larger than it is for white applicants. For whites, it's a 2:1 ratio—twice as many callbacks for people without records. For Black applicants, it's a 3:1 ratio. The Concept: The Negative Credential Pager calls this "the negative credential." It's a concept I want you to remember. This is the Law pillar in action. Here's what she argues: "It is the state that certifies particular individuals in ways that qualify them for discrimination or social exclusion." The criminal record is an official certification by the state. Unlike other stigmas—like, say, being judged based on clothing or accent, which are informal—the criminal record has the backing of institutional authority. The state says: this person is risky. This person is damaged. And then the market acts on that certification. What's dark about this? Pager found that 75% of employers asked the criminal history question on their applications. But fewer than half of them actually performed background checks. They asked the question and made snap judgments based on the checkbox. The applicants in her study never even got to interview in most cases. The application went in the trash. When testers did get interviews—when employers bothered to have personal contact—the criminal record effect actually decreased. People's interpersonal skills could partially overcome the stigma if someone looked them in the eye. But that almost never happened. Over 75% of applications never resulted in an interview. This is Christian Bolden's exact experience. The system is designed so that you never get a chance to be a human being in front of an employer. You're a checkbox first. If you're a checkbox with "felony," you're trash. The Scale and Stakes At the time Pager published this research, there were over 12 million ex-felons in the United States. That's roughly 8% of the working-age population. Think about that. One in every twelve people of working age had a criminal record that could be used against them in employment. Now, in 2026, we're talking about 77 million Americans with criminal records—if you include arrests that didn't result in conviction, misdemeanors, etc. The negative credential has become structural. It's not about exceptional individuals. It's about a massive portion of the population being permanently marked. Pager's policy conclusion is direct: "In our frenzy of locking people up, our crime control policies may in fact exacerbate the very conditions that lead to crime in the first place." Translation: We incarcerate people. We give them criminal records. We make it impossible for them to get jobs. They can't survive on the legitimate economy. So they return to illegal economies. We then incarcerate them again. We created a machine that manufactures repeat offenders. And we're surprised when it works.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Now I want to zoom out to the global scale. Same logic. Different geography. In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. IIRIRA. I know that's a mouthful. Let me explain what it did. The Legal Mechanism Before 1996, to deport someone for a criminal conviction, you had to have an actual sentence of five years or more. That's a high bar. IIRIRA changed that radically. It expanded the definition of what counts as an "aggravated felony" to include crimes carrying a possible sentence of just one year. That includes many misdemeanors. And here's the part that matters: it applied retroactively. So immigrants who had already served sentences for crimes that weren't on the aggravated felony list suddenly became deportable when Congress added new crimes to the list. Congress literally redefine their past convictions retroactively and said: you're leaving. The law also barred people from asylum, nearly all discretionary relief, and allowed expedited removal with no appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals. This wasn't a process. This was an expulsion. MS-13: From Domestic to Transnational So what does this have to do with gangs? MS-13 was born in Los Angeles in the 1980s. It was created by Salvadoran refugees fleeing civil war. It was a domestic American street gang. It was not transnational. But starting with IIRIRA, and accelerating through the 2000s, the United States began deporting gang members back to Central America. From 2001 to 2010 alone, nearly 130,000 foreign nationals were deported to Central America because of criminal convictions. Primarily to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. A researcher named Ambrosius looked at this with econometric rigor. He examined 255 Salvadoran municipalities and asked: where did MS-13 actually expand? And he found this: the places where MS-13 grew weren't random. They were the municipalities that migrants had come from. The places that sent people to the United States. The mechanism? Deportation. Specifically, the deportation of people with criminal convictions. He compared deportees who had criminal convictions with deportees who didn't. The convicts' return was associated with rising homicide rates. The non-convicts' return was not. So the U.S. system exported gang members back to the exact communities that had sent them abroad in the first place. The Cultural Export Now, here's something important: MS-13 members didn't become a majority of gang members in El Salvador. Surveys show only 4-11% of interviewed gang members were actually deported from the U.S. But they didn't need to be the majority. They were role models. They had been to Los Angeles. They knew gang structures. They had cultural capital. They could teach local youth how to organize, how to claim territory, how to use violence strategically. The scholar John Hagedorn says it this way: "In Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, gang members returning from Los Angeles possessed powerful cultural symbols that appealed to alienated youth." Deported convicts functioned as organizers and recruiters among marginalized communities. They occupied high-status positions in gangs because they had U.S. experience. They imported structures and behavioral patterns that interacted with local conditions. And those conditions—poverty, limited opportunity, weak state capacity—made those structures take root. The Human Cost The scale is staggering. From 1997 to 2015, El Salvador received 244,000 deportees. More than 90,000 of them had prior criminal convictions. That's 1.5% of El Salvador's entire population. Arriving in a single country. Within eighteen years. El Salvador's authorities got no information on the criminal backgrounds of returnees until a 2014 information-sharing agreement. So the state didn't even know who was arriving. They had no capacity to manage the influx. No job training programs. No reentry support. No nothing. El Salvador's homicide rate reached 109 per 100,000 in 2015. The highest in the world during peacetime. That's not coincidental. We exported murder through a deportation pipeline.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: Let me connect this back to our analytical frameworks. Remember H.T.I.L.G.? History, Theory, Intersectionality, Law, Geography. History: MS-13 is born as a domestic gang in 1980s Los Angeles. IIRIRA (1996) transforms it into a transnational phenomenon through mass deportation. Theory: Pager's negative credential. Strain theory—Bolden's experience of being treated unfairly. Labeling theory—once the state marks you as criminal, the label shapes your future. Intersectionality: Black applicants with clean records get fewer callbacks than white applicants with felonies. Race + criminal record = compounded stigma. Immigrants deported for low-level crimes face triple stigma: race, nationality, criminal record. Law: IIRIRA, aggravated felony definitions, the checkbox on employment applications, ban-the-box reforms that are trying to resist this. Geography: Violence doesn't originate from gang culture. It originates from specific places: neighborhoods devastated by redlining, communities facing concentrated poverty, municipalities receiving involuntary deportations from abroad. The through-line is clear: Law does not merely respond to crime. Law creates categories of permanent exclusion. And those categories of exclusion generate the very conditions—unemployment, displacement, social marginalization—that produce crime. Whether operating at the individual level (Bolden unable to get hired) or the transnational level (deported convicts destabilizing El Salvador), the mechanism is the same: the state certifies people as irredeemable. Then it structures society to ensure that redemption remains functionally impossible for most.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: I want to bring this forward to this moment, February 2026. Because this isn't historical. This is current. This week, ICE is detaining approximately 68,000 people in the United States—a 75% increase since the Trump administration took office. Louisiana alone is holding 8,244 detainees. That's the second-highest state total after Texas. A new DHS directive has expanded ICE authority to detain lawful refugees who haven't yet obtained permanent residency. We're talking about people who arrived legally, are working legally, and now face detention and deportation simply because their green card process hasn't been finalized. This is the IIRIRA logic on steroids. Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota has arrested 3,000 people since December. Federal agents have shot and killed at least two people. And records just revealed that a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, was shot dead by DHS agents in South Padre Island, Texas, in March 2025. On the other side, we have reentry reform movements gaining traction. Washington State's Fair Chance Act (effective July 2026) is delaying criminal history inquiries until after a conditional job offer. California's AB 2095 is restricting employers' ability to deny positions based solely on conviction history. The Prison Policy Initiative is calling for making conviction history a protected class under civil rights statutes. That would be a paradigm shift: instead of treating criminal records as legitimate grounds for exclusion, we'd recognize record-based discrimination as structural inequality. But we're not there yet.
Ms. Andrea Hagan aka Professor A.: So here's what I need you to understand as we close: Christian Bolden's journey from gang member to prisoner to professor is not a bootstrap narrative. It's a story about how extraordinary individual resilience was required to overcome ordinary structural barriers. The system was designed for him to fail. Devah Pager's data proves it's not accidental. And the IIRIRA demonstrates that when we export this logic across borders, we destabilize entire nations. Bolden succeeded because of an exception—a person named Dr. Susan Day who believed in him. But most people leaving prison never encounter Dr. Day. And that's the system working as intended. When I taught in Newark, my students understood something that society didn't want to acknowledge: they understood that the deck was stacked. They weren't being pessimistic. They were being realistic. Some of them got out. Some didn't. All of them were brilliant. And their communities didn't throw them away. The legal system did. That's why we study this. Not to perform trauma. Not to make ourselves feel good. But to understand how the machine works. And—eventually, in conversations beyond this classroom—to figure out how to build something different. Keep studying, keep asking questions, keep pressing forward. Blessings.
