Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado

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СКАЧАТЬ social order ties high-incarceration neighborhoods to the prison, and details some of the implications that this has for local residents. This chapter specifically looks at how prison-based affiliations come to appear in local communities, where they are learned and reproduced among criminalized youth. I argue that this spread of carceral identities is shaped not only by the institutional appropriation of penal sorting practices, but also by the effects of concentrated incarceration. For incarcerated residents, affiliations serve as important ties to home and as sources of support while confined in unpredictable settings. When these community members return home with little formal or material reentry support, many hold on to these identities—both because they may supply the only help that parolees do find, but also because these residents could never be certain that they would not be locked up again. At the same time, young people in the community first learn about these same affiliations from previously or currently imprisoned friends, relatives, and neighbors, informing how they imagine they would survive their own potential experiences in the prison. This close relationship between carceral affiliations and neighborhood identities shapes residents’ experiences with criminalization and violence, but it also contributes to a public perception of poor Black and Latina/o neighborhoods as pathological spaces, one that many local youth internalize.

      Chapter 5 explores how the carceral social order structures the parolees’ and probation youths’ experiences with violence, both inside and outside of the punitive facility. The need for strong group identities controlled some forms of gang and interpersonal violence in the institution, but it also dictated when violence was appropriate, or even demanded. The socialized perception that racialized groups were threats to one another compelled participants to use violence to themselves police the social order that the institution established—lashing out when group boundaries were threatened, or to force authorities to relocate them when they felt outnumbered. In turn, institutional staff generally used these instances to confirm their perspectives that probation youth and prisoners needed to be separated. This chapter also examines how penal violence spreads into the neighborhood through secondary prisonization and the institutional reproduction of the carceral social order, influencing the local conflicts that young residents must learn to navigate. Finally, I use this chapter to discuss how the expansion of carceral affiliations into local spaces also shapes young peoples’ exposure to police violence that is carried out in the name of gang suppression.

      In chapter 6, I explore how the carceral social order has become an authoritative framework for labeling poor youth of color as criminal gang members. The affiliations that the prison institutionalizes through the systematic separation of inmates are socially constructed as ties to criminal gangs. As juvenile facilities rely on this same separation to organize the institution, it structures a prevailing assumption that youth are gang involved, and that the forms of creative expression that they practice are examples of gang activity. But this system also shapes how police label youth as gang members in the neighborhood; similar to correctional officers sorting incoming prisoners, local police deploy a process I term “polarized labeling” in which young people are racially categorized, then assumed to be loyal to one side or the other of a rivalry between criminalized affiliations. In such instances, the sorting process essentially begins the first time youth are stopped in the street by police, long before ever reaching a prison. The extension of this sorting process from the punitive facility to the community represents a frightening capacity for the prison to produce criminality far beyond its own walls. But within the context of a neoliberal California, this criminalization also functions to frame youth, their families, and communities as economic burdens and social threats who need to be punitively managed rather than supported. I argue that this rationalizes the mass incarceration of poor communities of color by defining these spaces as “gang-infested” neighborhoods that require aggressive policing and surveillance, subsequently marking residents as appropriate targets for imprisonment.

      Finally, in the conclusion I outline the implications of the book and make recommendations for future research and policy considerations. I argue that relying on identifying and separating gang members not only fails to prevent violence in carceral institutions but also has serious consequences for those who are processed through these facilities. Namely, this practice positions individuals into rivalries between criminalized affiliations—exposing them to confrontation and violence, and ultimately ascribing them with criminal labels that keep them cycling through the justice system. I also use this chapter to explore alternative models, discussing instances both in this research and in previous studies in which criminal justice facilities desegregated their institutions, and argue that establishing a more just and effective criminal justice system requires reducing the emphasis institutions place on identifying and controlling gang membership.

PART I

      Inside the Facility

1.Constructing and Institutionalizing the Carceral Social Order

      “Aw you suck sir. Next!”

      Aaron just decimated my Batman. When we play boxing I can usually hold my own, but when they want to play this fighting game with Mortal Kombat characters battling comic book superheroes I usually just mash the controller buttons and hope for the best. Aaron actually knows the special moves and combinations though, so I don’t last long. I pass the Xbox controller to the next person in the rotation, then look over my shoulder to see what else is happening. Jordan is at his usual spot managing the playlist for the afternoon, arm resting on the stereo speaker ready to pick the next song. Adrian and Mike play ping pong while Eddie and Julian are playing dominoes on the table next to us. All things considered it is a pretty good place for them to forget for an hour that they are locked up. The boys here today certainly seem to be enjoying that opportunity. All of them except one.

      A boy I haven’t seen before sits by himself on one of the benches that line the wall with his head in his hands. Every few minutes someone else from the pod comes up to him and says a few words before going back to what he was doing. But still he stays on the bench. After a while I come over and sit next to him to introduce myself and to see what is troubling him. He introduces himself as Javier and explains that this morning he was sentenced to six months in the Fresno County Juvenile Detention Facility (JDF). He just transferred into this pod a few hours ago. He was brought in two weeks ago on a probation violation for a minor drug charge, and since then had been held in JDF’s detention wing while waiting for his court date. This was his first time in juvenile hall, so he thought he would receive a much shorter sentence or maybe even be released. Instead, because he was unable to demonstrate that he would receive treatment on his own, he found out that he was being sent to JDF’s substance abuse program for a mandatory six-month term. He tells me that his mom took the news pretty hard, and while he talks to me he still seems to be in shock himself.

      He speaks slowly, struggling to push his words out onto the floor while he stares down and shakes his head. “I really want to change my life. Maybe some of the programs in here can help me a little, but I dunno.” He pauses and looks up, staring into space while he tries to find how to describe what he is feeling. “I feel like when I get out of here I might be like a whole ‘nother person. Like worse, causing more problems. Cuz normally I don’t cause many problems, I’m a pretty calm person. But after being in here, I feel like I’m gonna be more, just, gang life.” He looks to me to see if I understand, perhaps unsure how else to explain it.

      “Why do you think that?” I ask him.

      “Because everyone I associate with in here are all gang members. When you’re locked up, gangs become like your family, cuz they understand what you’re going through cuz they’re there with you.”

      Javier feared his incarceration would strengthen the role gangs played in his life, in large part because the peers that youth come to depend on for basic contact when locked up likely include gang affiliates. Even in the few minutes we talk, other boys from the pod come by and try to help him feel better, telling him “I know how you feel man, this is my first time being locked up too!” But Javier’s fear is also shaped by the social dynamics at work in the pod. Most of his time СКАЧАТЬ