Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado
identity categories that stem from this schism are commonly interpreted as gang affiliations by correctional staff and law enforcement, although not necessarily by prisoners. Here Martín explains how Latino prisoners are labeled as gang affiliated in the sorting process based on where they are from:
Well basically see, when a person don’t bang it’s either because they’re in church, or they’re just trying to do their time. See, nobody really puts ‘em on any[thing], [or] categorizes them. But when you get booked in, in the reception or so forth, when you get to prison, they gonna tell you “you from Fresno, you from LA, or where you from? What hood you from?” Say “I don’t bang.” But then what they always do anyways, police themselves categorizes you as being from Fresno. So either way, whether you’re out there gangbanging, whether you go in the prison being a gangbanger or not, the police are gonna categorize you anyways. Know what I mean? Every time, wherever you’re from. Whether you’re from Bakersfield, LA, Sacramento, whatever. They’re still gonna categorize you as Northern or Southern, regardless.
Martín says that nobody forces prisoners to join gangs (“nobody puts them on”), and that gang-involved inmates generally do not mistake or confront those who “don’t bang” as gang rivals. Instead, he claims that new inmates are often labeled as gang affiliated by correctional staff. Many of the Latino parolees similarly described being labeled as gang members because of where they came from and how they were sorted. Because the purpose of racially sorting inmates is to separate gang rivals, this process inescapably associates individual prisoners with one gang or another by virtue of categorizing them as potential supporters. This process conflates race and gang association in a way that gives the criminalized identity categories ascribed to inmates the same kind of permanence and inescapability as race within the institution. It comes to define one’s role within a segregated social system, and stays with the individual throughout their term.
Even within protective custody (PC)—a unit explicitly inaccessible to active gang members—incarcerated men still struggle to get away from the gang-associated identities ascribed to them. Javier, a Latino parolee originally from Northern California, was sent to a PC unit when he went through reception at Wasco because he had previously renounced his Norteño affiliation. In this quote Javier describes how his history with the Northerners was made known to the entire unit:
They knew I was from San Jose because there’s like a big ole board, like a bulletin board where you have to write your name and where you’re from in San Jose, like the COs [corrections officers] put it out there on purpose. . . . It’s like right in the front in like in the dayroom area, with like benches and everything right there for you to watch TV but at the same time the bulletin board’s right there. They put everyone’s name up there, and what cell you’re in, and where you came from and if you’re a Northerner or a Southerner.
Javier’s experience gives us an idea about how pervasively the identity categories created in sorting permeate the prison, and how stubbornly they attach themselves to individual inmates. Despite the fact that he is in protective custody precisely because he wants to distance himself from the group he was sorted into, he is still identified to everyone in his unit by this gang-associated label.
Institutionalizing a segregated environment is at the heart of how the prison constructs the carceral social order. Prison authorities define the handful of identity categories that the institution will recognize and divide inmates into this rigid schema as they are processed through reception. How one is classified in this process has spatial consequences, as it defines the spaces (and therefore people) that one does or does not have access to. The institution distributes and distinguishes spaces for different groups, such that space in the facility—yards, buildings, cells, or even the different corners or tables of shared rooms—then come to be defined by who is there or who can be there. But this classification also comes to determine one’s relationship to other inmates, as the resulting segregation becomes a way to define who you and “your people” are, who you are not, and who you are in conflict with. In treating sorted groups as extensions of prison gangs, prisoners are positioned into a preexisting set of relationships and conflicts that consequently shape the environment they must adapt to while incarcerated. But back in the communities that inmates come from, a similar process is institutionalizing some of the same groups among young residents.
San Joaquin Educational Academy, Fresno, California
As the Fresno Sheriff’s “grey goose” bus makes its way down the Central Valley to Wasco, its passengers can see the rows of crops whip by like the pages of a flipbook, and some perhaps think of the homes they are leaving behind. Most would remember home as somewhere among the Latina/o and Black neighborhoods that straddle downtown Fresno, within the old regions of the city known simply as the Eastside and the Westside. Left behind by the residential and commercial development that pushes ever northward, the neighborhoods here are home to some of the highest rates of concentrated poverty in the nation (Kneebone 2014). Complementing this economic desertion has been the subsequent mass perception of these communities as dangerous parts of the city, and the ensuing declarations by public officials to wage war against the criminalized residents living there. During the 1990s and early 2000s, units of masked SWAT officers equipped with body armor, armored vehicles, and military weapons—not unlike the riot police used to suppress 2014’s Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri—were deployed on a daily basis in these neighborhoods for routine patrols. Black and Latino youth in particular were targeted by these units as violent gang members, as one such officer claimed that “if you’re 21, male, living in one of these neighborhoods, and you’re not in our computer,2 then there’s something definitely wrong.”3 However, this intimidating criminalization and legal violence directed against Fresno’s youth of color did not begin with the militarized policing of the 1990s; my own father lived on the Eastside in the 1970s until he was twenty-two, and decades later would still caution me as a young man to never make eye contact with police officers.
The long-term criminalization of Fresno’s communities of color has led to multiple generations of local residents simultaneously navigating the criminal justice system. While the incarcerated men from these communities are sorted into the prison’s segregated social order in Wasco, local youth are exposed to juvenile justice institutions that classify and separate them in much the same manner as their older neighbors.
When young people are arrested in Fresno, they are sent to booking in JDF, the county’s new and expanded juvenile justice campus. After an officer drops a teenager off here, they are fingerprinted, have their picture taken by a camera mounted to the ceiling, and are interviewed at one of the desk stations before being put into one of the holding cells that line the walls. Some youth may be released to their parents if it is their first arrest or if they were brought in on a minor offense. Otherwise they are sent to the detention side of the facility. Within the detention wing of JDF, youth are sent to different pods depending on individual needs—girls are sent to their own pod, youth aged fourteen and younger are sent to another, and youth who may be violent or mentally ill are also in a special pod. On JDF’s commitment side some pods are similarly designated for specific populations such as girls, high security youth, teens sentenced for drug offenses, and those sentenced to a full year (the longest sentence one can serve at JDF without being transferred to state custody) for a serious felony. But much like at Wasco, within each pod young people are also split up by their potential affiliations. Again youth are labeled by their race, neighborhood, and peers into categories that staff members use to determine where in the facility they should be housed, rooming youth from rivaling affiliations on opposite ends of their assigned pods. Diego explains this to Edgar, one of the few students at the San Joaquin Educational Academy (SJEA) who had not been “locked up,” when describing to him what juvenile hall is like:
| E: | Do they ask you where you’re from? |
| D: | Well yeah, but if you’re down then they’ll already know. |
| E: | But what if you aren’t labeled down? |
| D: | Well then yeah, they’ll ask you. Cuz they need to know before they put you in, cuz in the pod all the Sureños, Norteños, and taggers are all on that side (gesturing his hand away from his body) and [on] this side it’s all Bulldogs. |
While describing incarceration to