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Stick Together and Come Back Home
Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity
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I came to JDF through the Fresno Youth Network (FYN), an outside agency who helped me find my way in, both figuratively and literally. Exiting from the freeway, a manicured, tree-lined road leads around the courthouse to the “commitment side” of the facility where FYN has a clubhouse for the youth inside. Standing alone in the dry, hot openness of the San Joaquin Valley, JDF is surrounded in each direction by flat fields that stretch out to the horizon, filled only with the noise of the highway and warm, unmitigated winds that carry the smell of tilled soil. It just makes coming in or out of the facility feel that much more dramatic. The glass door at the entrance is locked, as it often is. There’s a reception desk just inside, but when they’re short-staffed you have to just wait for someone free to come let you in. Sometimes it can take a while. I push the button on the metal intercom next to the door and a voice comes in asking “Can I help you?” I glance up to the round black camera bulging from the overhang ceiling and explain that I volunteer with FYN inside. They have hundreds of the same camera throughout the facility, above every doorway and down every hall. “Alright someone will be there in a few minutes.” While I wait for them to let me in a pair of rabbits chase each other around nearby, in the field between the parking lot and the cement wall of one of the pods.
After about ten minutes one of the JCOs finally gets to the door and lets me in once I show them the ID card the agency gave me. I store my wallet and cell phone in one of the lockers built into the opposite door, pass through the metal detector next to the reception desk, then wait until I hear the door buzz and the handle click open before going into the waiting room on the other side. I turn left in the waiting room and pass through a double set of security doors, the kind with a small room between them where the second won’t open until the first one is closed again. I push the same metal intercom button to open the second door and wait for the staff controlling the door remotely to inspect me over the camera again. This is why I keep my ID out. Eventually the thick steel bar locking the second door begins to slide open and I proceed into the visit room. I pass by the rows of lunch tables to another set of double security doors on the other side. These doors open into a long gray hallway with a concrete floor and walls, and more black camera bulbs every so many feet along the ceiling. The sound of the door closing echoes down the hall, and I walk to the end through one more door, this one leading to the grass quad outside. Outside is a soccer field with all the pods built into a circle surrounding it. I walk along the outside wall of the gym until I reach the door to the rec room, where I knock so the FYN staff will let me in.
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