Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado
population among nonviolent offenders (Cate 2006). For the parolees reception was intimidating and unpredictable. Nobody in reception knows each other because everyone is just passing through, so none of the relationships, reputations, or general stability that might otherwise shield one from violence in a more permanent setting are present. Instead, COs tell incoming prisoners to find and turn to their “people” to keep themselves safe and assess which inmates to look out for (Goodman 2008), communicating to inmates that their safety relies on their ability to foster protective bonds with others based in common racial identities and hometowns.
Within the segregated facility, sticking close to the people one is safe around then shapes the space one has access to. In this context, parolees understood space as racially divided, and that transgressing racial boundaries could easily lead to violence. Prisoners are already kept to racially determined housing assignments or cells, but in shared spaces such as the yard, day room, or open dorm housing units, physical boundaries between racialized groups become very important. Inmates make meaning of this segregation in terms of safe and unsafe spaces, as Mark, a forty-seven-year-old White parolee explains:
Everything is territorial there. Like the Northerners will have their spot. The Blacks will have their spots, their tables where they sit on the yard and play their games you know, [just like] the Northerners have their spot. The Others, which is you know, are your Asians or your Samoans, you know just a mix. Like they have their designated area. And the Whites have their designated area. And if you wanna play some card games, or dominoes, or whatever on the yard, you sit in your designated area. Ok, you can’t go to no other designated areas. [Nor] are you supposed to walk through someone else’s designated area. That’s off limits. You gotta walk around . . . you can’t just walk on through, you gotta walk around. Walking through their area is like a disrespect issue. You know, you’re like saying “F-you.”
Parolees learned to only see their own group’s spaces as safe and others’ as dangerous, and understood that entering such areas could easily lead to confrontation and violence. This presumed threat also shapes why some would take seriously outsiders who violate group space, as this would challenge the safety of that space.
No matter what facility parolees ultimately went to after reception, they always found similarly segregated institutions. The housing assignments they received in reception still kept them away from other racial groups, and continued to shape their perceptions of who was safe or dangerous. But this segregation was also so consistent because COs throughout the system learned to keep facilities secure by maintaining physical distance between sorted groups. The institutional perspective that different racial groups will fight if they are not separated then leaves it to COs to control the prison by actively enforcing the carceral social order. Here Mark, a former CO from Calipatria State Prison, describes how learning to be a correctional officer entails familiarizing oneself with the carceral social order: “The number one tool you could have in working in [the prison], being a correctional officer and so forth, is knowing who’s who. Part of the training that they give you when you’re going to go into corrections is ‘know your inmates.’ Know who hangs with who, who doesn’t like who, where the certain races [are], where they divide themselves, where they sit, where they play, where they shower, all that comes into play.” Mark explains that a fundamental part of being a CO is knowing which groups inmates are “supposed” to be in, who their enemies are because they’re in that group, and where they should be within the segregated space of the facility. Most interesting is that he mentions this as part of how individuals are officially trained to be corrections officers, revealing how the carceral social order is embraced at the institutional level as a lens for understanding—and therefore as a means of managing—prison inmates.
Racial segregation in the prison is regularly rationalized as something inmates want, demand, or do on their own. Some parolees even pointed to this characterization as evidence that inmates, not the guards, in fact control the prison. But while prisoners may to some extent choose who they affiliate with and find some empowerment in this, they are limited by the parameters that the institution makes available to them. Correctional staff enforce racial segregation in multiple ways, in large part because it offers them a manageable way to maintain order in carceral facilities when they have too many people to supervise. Sociologist Michael Walker found that racial segregation makes correctional work much easier for staff members who learn to delegate many of their managerial tasks to the informal leaders of racial cliques (2016). But rarely discussed is how protective custody contributes to the enforcement of prison segregation.
PC is a separate unit in the prison reserved for removing inmates who staff think would be particularly vulnerable—primarily sex offenders, informants, and gang “dropouts”—from general population. While PC is supposed to be a safer alternative to being in general population for these inmates, most parolees actually saw being in PC as more dangerous in terms of making oneself a target for assault,4 because one of the few ways someone can get into PC is by offering incriminating information on other inmates to prison authorities. Even “dropouts” who want to leave a gang cannot get into PC without first going through a process called “debriefing” in which they offer COs information on other active members. PC ultimately enforces the carceral social order by acting as a deterrent; prisoners can either go along with their role in the dominant social order or they can go into protective custody, be seen as a snitch, and receive a stigma that puts them at consistent risk of assault. Because of this risk, many of the parolees adamantly stated that they would never consider going into PC. Consequently, one of the most effective mechanisms for enforcing segregation in the prison is referring inmates who refuse to abide by the carceral social order to PC.
Expecting prisoners to belong on one side of a segregated space leaves little room for ambiguity, and frames inmates trying to do their time outside of racial boundaries as signs of imminent trouble. Assuming that inmates needed to be on a side also dismissed the possibility of doing time on the mainline without identifying or “running” with one’s sorted group. Resultantly, anyone who was not accepted by the other inmates in their racial group was seen as vulnerable and consequently removed from general population and sent to PC. For example, Steven was originally housed with the Northerners until a rumor spread that he had incriminated a friend while talking to police. When staff learned that the other Northerners wouldn’t accept him anymore, they told him they were going to transfer him to the Special Needs Yard (or SNY, another term for PC), but Steven didn’t want to do that. He wanted to stay in general population by himself rather than go to PC, but for staff that was not an option:
| STEVEN: | I’m not gonna lie to you, even doing my own thing, as I went my own way, I got harassed big-time. I got harassed more by staff going off and doing my own thing than I ever got harassed belonging as a whole, you know? |
| AUTHOR: | Really? Why? |
| S: | Yeah. I don’t know. They fucked with me big time, because they felt that I needed to be uh, [either one of the] dudes that are active (clique up with racial group), [or one of the] dudes that SNY [go to PC]. Me, I choose to do my own thing. Just because one group says that I’m not worthy of what they’re doing, doesn’t mean I have to go over here and kick it on the yard with a bunch of pieces of shit, you know? So I’m gonna do my own thing. I consider myself independent, so I got myself in a lot of trouble to the point to where they wouldn’t even put me with no one else. They kept me single celled. I caught SHU [Secure Housing Unit] time, and thank God I never had to hit a yard full of garbage. . . . I did cages, single celled cages, single celled living for three years five months, and it, to me it fucked me up, you know? What happened is, like I said, I didn’t mess with these people [the Northerners], didn’t mess with these people [the PC yard], didn’t mess with administration, so what they tried to do was kinda like socially isolate me, you know? So I was by myself, know what I mean? Nobody talked to me, nobody gave me no genuine conversation, none of that shit, you know? |
Steven claims that the COs gave him a hard time when he tried to defy the social order of the prison and exist outside of his sorted group. They would not let him stay in general population, and the only way he could avoid PC was by getting himself into enough trouble that they would send him to administrative segregation in the SHU. Consequently, Steven spent the remaining three and a half years of his sentence in solitary confinement in the SHU, where he feels he was punished with social isolation for trying