Stick Together and Come Back Home. Patrick Lopez-Aguado
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 at JDF will be spent in a divided housing pod, or more accurately on one side of it depending on which gang members in the pod staff think Javier is most likely to side with. Even though he doesn’t bang, it will be easy for others to assume that he does based on which side he is celled on and who they see him talking to. Now every day when his pod leaves the unit for class he will have to line up with the others, interlocking his fingers in front of him and leaving his back exposed to anyone behind him—a prime opportunity for anyone who might have a problem with him to “snake” or sucker-punch him in the back of the head. Other youth here have reported this occurring at least a few times a week. It would help Javier to have others in the pod who will back him up in these instances, or better yet to surround him so as to diminish the likelihood of such a brazen assault. Javier’s perception that everyone he interacts with here is gang involved is not quite accurate, but it is understandable because it is informed by the potential for everyone in the pod to be drawn into gang conflicts in this way—in large part due to how his pod is institutionally divided and managed.
It is tempting to frame Javier’s dilemma—as he does—in terms of how youth become involved with gangs while incarcerated. But focusing on gang conflict would miss how institutionally organizing young people around gang conflict—in Javier’s case dividing everyone in the pod by presumed affiliations—has a lasting impact on those who need to adjust to being categorized in this way. In this chapter I examine the origins of the criminalized affiliations that come to bridge prison and community. Within Fresno’s communities of color, understanding the neighborhood’s relationship with carceral institutions has to begin with looking at what happens when residents are incarcerated in these facilities. In both state prison and local juvenile justice facilities, incorporating residents into punitive institutions relies on classifying them as gang affiliates. Staff members categorize and separate the individuals in their charge by potential affiliations into racialized, gang-associated groups, then police the boundaries between these groups as part of the everyday management of the facility. The identities and conflicts that are constructed in this process comprise a carceral social order that directs day-to-day life in the institution, and that establishes