Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado
were asked if they would be interested in being interviewed and contributing their stories after I explained the focus of my research.14 Although I was unable to conduct any interviews at JDF, many of the students I met there eventually attended SJEA and participated in interviews once they were enrolled there. Interviews were conducted and digitally recorded in private offices on the school grounds at the end of the school day.
Attempting to make my sample of student interviewees roughly representative of the racial demographics of the school, I interviewed twenty-four students who were Mexican or Chicana/o, eight Black students, five White students, two Native American students, and one Asian student. Four of the students I interviewed identified with more than one racial group when asked about their background, but at the school primarily socialized with one racial group of students. Student interviewees ranged in age from fifteen to eighteen, and of these thirty-six participants, ten were girls and fifteen self-identified as gang members.15 Finally, in approaching students for interviews I also made an attempt to be inclusive of the different cliques present at the school16 and more or less mirror their share of the overall student body.
Fresno Job Placement Center
On a wide but quiet street in downtown Fresno, among buildings for city bureaucracies and public utility companies, a small office building houses a prisoner reentry center. The Fresno Job Placement Center (FJPC) is a nonprofit agency in which counselors help people returning from prison find housing and job opportunities. Outside, a small group of parolees gather for a smoke before heading in. After wrapping up they go in through the center’s computer lab and past the whiteboard that announces this morning’s meeting. They continue into a room with about a dozen folding chairs arranged in a circle, grabbing a cup of coffee from a table in the corner before sitting down.
Every Friday morning, the FJPC hosts mentoring meetings for all new clients entering the program. These meetings last for about an hour and average about ten to twelve people in attendance. In these meetings parolees discuss their experiences returning to Fresno, offer each other support and encouragement, and share strategies for searching for and applying for work. The agency’s staff invites me to attend each week, allowing me to introduce myself to those in attendance and explain why I am interested in their stories. After the meeting, I conduct and record interviews with anyone interested in contributing their story in a private office.
Thirty-one of these formerly incarcerated men and women eventually volunteer to be interviewed for this research. In these interviews participants talked about their personal histories with the justice system, and discussed how they learned of and navigated the prison’s social order. The parolees interviewed in this work described being categorized as Blacks, Whites, Northern Hispanics, Southern Hispanics, Bulldogs, and Others. All but one of the participants were on parole or probation at the time of the interview. Most had been released from custody in 2010 or early 2011. Interviewees ranged in age from twenty-seven to forty-nine. A small number of participants were also contacted through an inpatient drug treatment center near downtown Fresno.17
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
The first half of this book primarily takes place inside the punitive institution, focusing on how the carceral social order is created and understood in these settings. In chapter 1 I describe how punitive facilities structure, socialize, and reinforce the carceral social order within the institution. I argue that in their efforts to prevent institutional violence by separating rival gangs, the prison, the juvenile detention facility, and the continuation high school instead construct a consistent social order that is based in gang rivalries—one in which everyone in the facility is compelled to participate. Within these facilities, staff members construct this social order by using race, home community, and peer networks to categorize entire institutional populations into gang-associated groups. Staff members then routinely maintain these categories as distinct peer groups by policing the spatial boundaries between them, as keeping rival groups separated is perceived as necessary for ensuring institutional security. I conclude this chapter by discussing how the relationships and conflicts that are structured by these sorting and segregation practices ultimately socialize this carceral social order as a dominant, “common sense” logic for both managing and navigating punitive facilities.
Chapter 2 discusses the identities that are constructed by and instilled within the segregated carceral facility, as well as how the parolees and probation youth learn to understand them. Racial and neighborhood identities come to be rearticulated as carceral affiliations inside the institution, and incarcerated residents learn to see these affiliations as valuable resources for protecting themselves while navigating the punitive facility. But while carceral affiliations are often framed as criminal gangs by authority figures, participants used and understood these identities differently, and I argue that developing a critical analysis of the carceral system’s socializing power requires recognizing this difference. Additionally, I use this chapter to examine how the sorting process not only creates carceral affiliations as collective identities but also influences how individuals understand aspects of their own personal identities. As participants are socialized to identify with carceral affiliations, this process also shapes how they learn to understand their own racial, gang, and gender identities, as these are each molded to help one fit within the social order of the punitive institution.
In chapter 3, I examine how affiliated identities are performed within a context in which individuals must read each other’s position in the carceral social order. Specifically, I examine how participants use space and style to signal one’s ties to the racialized groups institutionalized in the facility, and to interpret who others are affiliated with as well. I also use this chapter to explore how individuals attempt to negotiate and resist the prevailing carceral social order when they do not fit neatly into the system’s organizational schema; participants who were mixed race, had family members in rival gangs, or who affiliated with a different racial group had to figure out how they would navigate a divisive environment in which their position was not immediately clear. In these instances, individuals had to choose one affiliation over another, or in some cases, attempt to resist the carceral social order entirely by refusing to affiliate with anyone. In this chapter I explore these participants’ experiences, outline how and why they came to occupy the positions they did, and describe what obstacles they faced.
Chapter 4 begins the second half of the book, which focuses on how the carceral 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