Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado
THE INCARCERATED
Within punitive facilities, the carceral social order operates as a dominant lens for understanding the incarcerated, but this framework is largely structured by the process of categorizing those in the institution by their potential gang ties. Race, home community, and peer networks are used to sort people into criminalized groups and situate them into separate segregated spaces under the presumption that they represent threats to each other. In doing so, the institution establishes a social context in which these collective identities not only define inmates’ everyday experiences in the facility, but also label them as associates of criminal gangs. In examining both penal and juvenile justice institutions, we can identify parallel processes that construct this same social order—one based in beliefs about racial incompatibility and gang rivalry—in both settings. In the Wasco State Prison (WSP) and in Fresno’s juvenile justice facilities, we can see how this social order is created at two ends of the criminal justice system, and how the consistent experiences across these institutions in turn produce consistent identities across generations.
Wasco State Prison Reception Center, Wasco, California
Throughout the week dozens of men recently released from state prison—many of them residing in nearby halfway houses—congregate at a reentry center in downtown Fresno to attend workshops and counseling sessions, or to use the center’s computers to look for jobs or write résumés. Most of these men grew up within a few miles of this center and lived in Fresno until they were finally sent to prison. In their stories, going to prison usually starts with a 100-mile bus trip south from the Fresno County Jail to the Reception Center at WSP, a trip that is repeated by the approximately 1,500 male residents the county sends to prison each year (CDCR 2014). Reception centers like Wasco serve as points of entry into the prison system for both newly convicted felons and parolees returning on violations. Here, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials hold incoming prisoners for 120 days while they “process, classify, and evaluate new inmates physically and mentally, and determine their security level, program requirements and appropriate institutional placement.”1 In this screening, men will receive a housing assignment that will dictate which of the state’s thirty-four prisons they will serve their sentence in, where they will be celled in that facility, and whom they will be housed with.
Wasco is the largest reception center in the state, receiving inmate transfers from jails throughout Southern and Central California. WSP is designed to process 2,334 inmates at a time through its reception center, but as of the time of this research Wasco was housing some 5,500 inmates in reception on any given day. As groups of men are bused in from the surrounding county jails, they are funneled into the facility, stripped, searched, identified, fingerprinted, and photographed. Here David, a twenty-eight-year-old Latino parolee, describes what it is like to step off the bus and pass through this process at Wasco:
Yeah, so going in there, You talk to the front desk, they’ll ask you your name, your CDC number. You walk off, you go through a metal detector, take off all your clothes, from the county [jail]. So you’re butt-naked, barefooted. They got you searched, know what I mean, check your hair, your ears, turn around, spread your buttcheeks, squat and cough, pick up your nuts, flush under the nuts, your mouth. Then they give you your pants, and oranges [prison jumpsuit], and a pair of shoes, like the slip-on shoes. . . . You get uh, five sets of shirts, white shirts, two oranges, top and bottom, five pairs of socks, five pairs of boxers. You don’t get no shower shoes, you have to wait ‘til you buy ‘em. Understand what I mean? You get a bar of soap a week, a roll of toilet paper a week. . . . And [then you] go ahead, get your lunch and go. It’s kinda like a herding thing, they herd you, know what I mean, ‘til they can get you situated into a room.
We can understand this process by following one such group of arrivals. When a busload of men from Fresno arrives at Wasco, one by one their personal information is recorded or updated, they are searched for contraband, and some basic supplies are distributed to them before they are finally assigned to a cell or dorm bunk. But being “situated into a room” is based in many factors, and is determined by how an inmate is categorized across a number of fields. In this process, the large crowd of men who come in together from the county are divided and subdivided down until they are all individually reorganized into the prison’s classificatory system. Low-custody-level inmates in Wasco are sent to C yard where they stay in less restrictive, open dormitories before being sent to minimum security facilities. Inmates who may be vulnerable to assault in general population, either due to their offense or because of conflicts from a previous prison term, are isolated in B5, the protective custody unit on B yard. Similarly, anybody with a history of violence is likely sent to the administrative segregation (or “ad seg”) unit on D yard. Any prisoners coming in with an admitted or documented Norteño affiliation is immediately sent to D3 since they may be vulnerable on other yards. Everybody else is placed in one of the “mainline” buildings on B or D yard.
Even after these groups of men have been assigned to a building they are divided down still, this time paired with cellmates depending on how they are racially classified. During this sorting process incoming prisoners are categorized as Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, or “Others” (Asians and Pacific Islanders), and housed with other men in the same racial group. Latino inmates, the largest racial group in the prison, are also divided by where in the state they were committed from; Latinos from Southern California are sorted simply as “Southern Hispanics,” but most of our group from Fresno will be kept together as “Bulldogs.” The result is that prisoners find themselves slotted into an environment that is defined by race- and place-based divides, as Francisco, a thirty-five-year-old Latino parolee describes:
Going into prison, they already had like a modified program. Like uh, if you’re a certain group, you can’t be around this [other] group. So like when you go in to R&R, they have big [signs] like “Fresno,” “San Bernardino County,” “LA County,” you know from the counties where you’re from right? And they have doors already open for people in Fresno, they just rush us in, close it, and that’s how they did it. They just uh, it was already, it was already a modified, there was segregated kind of like in a way . . . it was like it was split. Um, they modified Bulldogs, Blacks, um Others, on top, and then on the bottom it’ll be Whites and Southsiders. All bottom tier. So it was already there.
In Francisco’s words we can see that after incoming prisoners are divided across the different buildings at WSP depending on their individual status or needs, inmates are still separated even within the same building. Important to note here is which racial groups are housed apart from each other on different tiers—Whites are housed away from Blacks, and “Southsiders” are kept on a separate tier than “Bulldogs.”
From an institutional perspective, this segregation is implemented because of the potential for gang violence between these racial groups. CDCR has always justified racially sorting inmates as necessary to prevent racial violence, and more specifically to separate rival race-based prison gangs. However, the number of validated prison gang members is actually quite small, and these inmates are already removed from general population and isolated in SHU units. But despite this, all incoming inmates are still segregated in this manner anyway. Racial sorting then operates as a process of identifying and separating pools of inmates who may become extensions of gang rivalries. For example, Blacks and Whites are separated out of fear that conflict between the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerilla Family may lead White and Black inmates to fight each other. Similarly, Latinos are split as Northerners or Southerners due to the belief that they may support the prison gangs that draw members from these respective regions of the state.
Framing racial groups as extensions of prison gang conflicts makes segregated spaces seem necessary because it marks individual prisoners as assumed gang associates. Within this system one’s presumed gang ties are determined by race, but also by one’s home community. In Francisco’s excerpt he illustrates that inmates are first tagged by the county they come in from, and for Latino prisoners this is consequential. The counties that Latino inmates come from affect the housing assignments that they receive because each county is classified as a Northern or Southern county; Kern and San Luis Obispo Counties on south are considered Southern counties, whereas most Latinos north of this (with the exception of