C ONCLUSION

This Article has described two models of inmate culture in men’s carceral facilities. The first, present to a greater or lesser extent in many men’s prisons and jails across the country, is what I have called the hypermasculinity model. In this model, men desperate to avoid being seen as weak do their best to appear hard and implacable, and may even resort to victimizing others in a preemptive effort to avoid being victimized themselves. In such a climate, gang membership offers the promise of security and belonging, and thus, where the hypermasculinity imperative governs, gangs tend to increase in size and power. The second model of inmate culture is that found in K6G, a small and unconventional unit in the L.A. County Jail, which houses gay men and trans women. In K6G, there is no hypermasculinity imperative, nor are there any gang politics. Unit residents feel free to express emotions, to develop meaningful interpersonal relationships, to relax, and to be themselves.

K6G is still jail, and there is much about life in the unit that is deeply unpleasant and even dangerous. Still, K6G is widely seen as preferable to the Jail’s GP as a place to do one’s time in L.A. County. In K6G, sexual assault is relatively rare and collective violence (a.k.a. rioting) virtually never occurs. The absence of gang politics and of any need to perform a hypermasculine identity relieves residents of the pressure to adhere to the rigid and irrational behavioral code that governs life in the Jail’s GP. And perhaps more importantly, it frees them from the constant scrutiny of others looking for signs of weakness and vulnerability. As a consequence, people in K6G are able to let down their guard. For these and other reasons, people in K6G far prefer placement in that unit to life in GP. And the daily parade of men coming into the Jail who pretend to be gay in order to gain access to K6G provides strong evidence that many men housed elsewhere in the Jail feel the same way.

It is tempting to think that K6G’s distinctive environment, namely its freedom from any hypermasculinity imperative or gang politics, is a function of the sexual identity of its residents. And it is certainly true that the particular character of life in K6G has been shaped by the preferences and inclinations of the people in the unit. But in order for those people to create the internal culture of K6G, they first had to feel able to shed the hypermasculine posturing that for many unit residents was a way of life during previous custodial terms in the Jail or state prison. The particular behaviors and norms of life that have emerged in K6G, some of which may well be traceable to the sexual identity of its residents, are thus best

understood not as the cause of the freedom K6Gs enjoy from the gang politics and hypermasculinity imperative that govern life elsewhere in the Jail, but its effects.

The primary cause of the freedom K6G residents enjoy, I have argued, is something more basic than the sexual identity of unit residents. By contrast with men in the Jail’s GP, the people in K6G feel independently safe from physical or sexual violence. They therefore feel confident that, while in K6G, they need not take the self-protective yet ultimately destructive steps to which men in GP feel compelled to resort in the absence of any surety of external protection.

That the success of the K6G model does not primarily turn on the sexual identity of its residents is something to celebrate. It offers the possibility that this success may be generalized beyond its current narrow context for the benefit of all people in custody, whatever their sexual orientation or gender identity. Realistically, under current circumstances— most notably the overcrowding, understaffing, and resource limitations that plague many prisons and jails nationwide—it is possible that many institutions may feel unable to widely implement the strategies K6G suggests for how to keep people in custody safe. Nor will all correctional officers exhibit the wisdom and humanity of K6G’s long-time supervising officers. Still, the K6G experience offers several lessons for those committed to making carceral conditions as safe and humane as possible and suggests a number of strategies that prison administrators committed to reproducing K6G’s success might pursue. This Article canvasses several of these lessons and strategies in the hope that, despite the obstacles to their implementation, they may nonetheless guide sorely needed penal reform.

Some may argue that it is the K6G model and not the hypermasculinity model of GP that should be abandoned. After all, the purpose of incarceration is punishment, and the relative ease of life in K6G may seem “too good” for people in custody. This Article rejects this claim, and argues that this notion has it exactly backwards. There are both moral and constitutional limits on what the state may do to the people it has incarcerated, and the fear, trauma, stress, and danger that men in the worst GP units can live with on a daily basis strongly suggest that the conditions imposed by that model far exceed those limits. The question that most urgently bears our attention is thus not whether the people in K6G “have it too good,” but what steps prison and jail officials around the country can take to make their GP units more like K6G.