Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado

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СКАЧАТЬ around which social life is organized (Lindsey 2009; Goodman 2008). But within the poor communities of color that host parolees released from detention (Clear 2007), law enforcement agencies read these same identities as evidence of criminal gang membership (Katz 1996; Mendoza-Denton 2008). As such, parolees are often sent back to prison for violating gang stipulations of their parole based on actions such as socializing with similarly labeled peers or possessing anything that officers see as promoting this “gang” identity.

      Criminalizing the very identities that the prison demands of its inmates never lets parolees shake their criminal status; this is the essence of Foucault’s (1977) delinquency. But these Norteño, Sureño, and Bulldog identities also come to inform how criminality is articulated in the neighborhood; they comprise the labels law enforcement ascribe to youth in gang validation processes (Rios 2011), as well as the identities neighborhood youth subsequently embrace to signal their resistance to local social hierarchies (Durán 2013; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Rios and Lopez-Aguado 2012). The policing of prison-based identities in neighborhood contexts represents an important extension of the prison’s ability to designate criminal status to the families and communities of the incarcerated. In these identities we can see how the prison produces meanings of criminality that increasingly define poor people of color and their neighborhoods as the appropriate targets of mass incarceration by labeling them as gang affiliated. This production by prisons pushes us to consider how “gangs” operate as a social construct—one that is part of a hegemonic master narrative of crime (Brotherton 2008; Ewick & Sibley 1995) that rationalizes not only perpetuating mass incarceration but also concentrating it almost completely in poor communities of color (Clear 2007).

      WHERE PRISON AND FRESNO MEET AND MESH

      The details are blurry, as they usually are with these kinds of stories, but people seem to agree that it happened sometime in the mid-1980s. Fresno was already an important dividing line in the prison for corrections officers separating Northern and Southern Hispanics; it was the southern frontier of Norteña/o street culture and one of largest cities from which La Nuestra Familia could extort drug market revenue. For at least the previous decade local street cliques on Fresno’s expansive Eastside had acknowledged this affiliation through the shared name of Fresno 14 (or F-14). But in the mid-1980s, members of F-14 incarcerated in San Quentin convened and decided that they would no longer “follow orders” from La Nuestra Familia. Some say that they were tired being used to attack La Nuestra Familia’s rivals, but most importantly this signaled that F-14ers active in the drug trade were now refusing to pay the prison gang any shares from local drug market earnings, instead now keeping all profits for themselves. These homeboys subsequently broke rank with other Norteña/o gangs and began calling themselves Bulldogs, a regional designation emanating from the marketing strategy to represent Fresno State University’s sports teams as being from “the Valley.” Word of this split soon spread through to the state’s other prisons, the California Youth Authority facilities, and back to the streets of Fresno where F-14 was soon “retired” and many young people began claiming Bulldogs for themselves. Decades later, young teenagers calling themselves Bulldogs still vaguely reference this event in local street mythology through regular proclamations of “We don’t take any orders!”

      The story of the Fresno Bulldogs is generally understood as one of gang formation, or perhaps secession. But this story has had consequences for scores of local youth and adults who don’t consider themselves to be gang involved, and in many cases have explicitly avoided gangbanging throughout their lives. Gang politics affects what happens to everybody inside the prison, but this influence eventually trickles out to impact the “quasi-inmates” back home too. Part of why word spread so quickly and effectively is because the CDC began removing everyone from Fresno from Northern yards and segregated them into different housing assignments. Over time Fresno County Latinos came to be segregated as their own racial group in the prison, and for the most part even sent to the same facilities.⁸ Now people in Eastside Fresno knew that if they got locked up they were doing their time with Bulldogs, regardless of if they banged or not. What started as a dispute between a handful of Fresno-based gang members and the prison gang they formerly paid tribute to soon changed not only how all Fresno Latinos are categorized but consequently also the collective identities that traveled back home.

      Fresno is a city of about a half million people, over a quarter of whom (28.9%) fall below the federal poverty line (Census 2015). Additionally, over half of the city’s poor residents (50.9%) live in high-poverty neigh-borhoods, giving Fresno the fourth highest rate of concentrated poverty in the nation (Kneebone 2014). These neighborhoods with poverty rates exceeding 40 percent are mostly confined to the communities south of McKinley Avenue⁹ in which 75 percent to 99 percent of residents are people of color. These are the same communities we see disproportionately affected by mass incarceration. Fresno’s problems with poverty and unemployment, coupled with a notoriously aggressive police department (see Parenti 2000), have left its communities of color particularly vulnerable to criminalization; while people of color represent 57 percent of all county residents, they account for 69 percent of all arrests (Benjamin 2015). But the disproportionate investment of public funds in crime control over community support also pushes poor criminal suspects into confinement. For example, despite California State Bar guidelines recommending parity in the resources available to prosecutors and public defenders, in 2009 the Fresno County Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution to finance the Public Defender’s Office at 61 percent of the funding made available to the District Attorney.¹⁰ This disparity has led to a Public Defender’s Office that is grossly unequipped to meet the local demand for its services; individual public defender attorneys average 612 felony cases and 1,462 misdemeanor cases every year, over four times what the American Bar Association recommends. Faced with such overwhelming caseloads, public defenders can do little more than advise their clients to plead guilty so as to avoid more serious charges or longer sentences. As a result, only 0.19 percent of the cases brought to the Fresno County Public Defender’s Office ever actually go to trial.

      Fresno’s place as a borderland between regions of the state dominated by rival prison-based subcultures, and a county with higher incarceration rates than the Bay Area or Los Angeles (California Sentencing Institute 2017), make it an important site to examine how the prison’s social order spills into the community. In this work I focus on three points of contact at which the neighborhood intersects the carceral system, sites where residents pass from one to the other at different points in the life course—the juvenile hall, a continuation high school for youth on juvenile probation, and the prisoner reentry center. By incorporating multiple sites that impact criminalized youth into my analysis, I was able to track youth across institutional settings and observe how the social orders they encountered in each were related. In the reentry center I sat in on group meetings with parolees and interviewed them individually about their experiences both in the prison and the community.¹¹ This ethnography includes seventy-nine in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with parolees and probation youth in Fresno. While I collected this data I lived on the Eastside for over fifteen months, blocks away from many of the participants that I would get to know during this time.

       Juvenile Detention Facility

      Just south of the city limits, where the railyards and industrial warehouses finally give way to the surrounding farmlands, a large complex of two-story gray cement boxes with color-coded doors and paneling sits alongside the highway. Rather than being built up as one monolith structure, Fresno County’s Juvenile Detention Facility (JDF) is sprawled out across a large property. It actually includes two separate campuses—each capable of incarcerating up to 240 youth—that span out on either side from a central courthouse; one is for “detention housing” for youth awaiting trial or transfer to a state facility, the other for “commitment housing” for youth already sentenced by a juvenile court. JDF opened in 2006 at a cost of $145 million, making it the largest capital project in the county’s history. But this facility is actually just the first stage in Fresno County’s original master plan for the site; at the time of this research planned future additions included three more 240-bed confined housing wings, a boot camp, group homes, a continuation school, a reporting center, СКАЧАТЬ