Читать книгу Stick Together and Come Back Home - Patrick Lopez-Aguado - Страница 11
Оглавление1.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 it’s residents’ and workers’ common sense understandings of identity and criminality.
CATEGORIZING THE INCARCERATED
Within punitive facilities, the carceral social order operates as a dominant lens for understanding the incarcerated, but this framework is largely structured by the process of categorizing those in the institution by their potential gang ties. Race, home community, and peer networks are used to sort people into criminalized groups and situate them into separate segregated spaces under the presumption that they represent threats to each other. In doing so, the institution establishes a social context in which these collective identities not only define inmates’ everyday experiences in the facility, but also label them as associates of criminal gangs. In examining both penal and juvenile justice institutions, we can identify parallel processes that construct this same social order—one based in beliefs about racial incompatibility and gang rivalry—in both settings. In the Wasco State Prison (WSP) and in Fresno’s juvenile justice facilities, we can see how this social order is created at two ends of the criminal justice system, and how the consistent experiences across these institutions in turn produce consistent identities across generations.
Wasco State Prison Reception Center, Wasco, California
Throughout the week dozens of men recently released from state prison—many of them residing in nearby halfway houses—congregate at a reentry center in downtown Fresno to attend workshops and counseling sessions, or to use the center’s computers to look for jobs or write résumés. Most of these men grew up within a few miles of this center and lived in Fresno until they were finally sent to prison. In their stories, going to prison usually starts with a 100-mile bus trip south from the Fresno County Jail to the Reception Center at WSP, a trip that is repeated by the approximately 1,500 male residents the county sends to prison each year (CDCR 2014). Reception centers like Wasco serve as points of entry into the prison system for both newly convicted felons and parolees returning on violations. Here, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials hold incoming prisoners for 120 days while they “process, classify, and evaluate new inmates physically and mentally, and determine their security level, program requirements and appropriate institutional placement.”1 In this screening, men will receive a housing assignment that will dictate which of the state’s thirty-four prisons they will serve their sentence in, where they will be celled in that facility, and whom they will be housed with.
Wasco is the largest reception center in the state, receiving inmate transfers from jails throughout Southern and Central California. WSP is designed to process 2,334 inmates at a time through its reception center, but as of the time of this research Wasco was housing some 5,500 inmates in reception on any given day. As groups of men are bused in from the surrounding county jails, they are funneled into the facility, stripped, searched, identified, fingerprinted, and photographed. Here David, a twenty-eight-year-old Latino parolee, describes what it is like to step off the bus and pass through this process at Wasco:
Yeah, so going in there, You talk to the front desk, they’ll ask you your name, your CDC number. You walk off, you go through a metal detector, take off all your clothes, from the county [jail]. So you’re butt-naked, barefooted. They got you searched, know what I mean, check your hair, your ears, turn around, spread your buttcheeks, squat and cough, pick up your nuts, flush under the nuts, your mouth. Then they give you your pants, and oranges [prison jumpsuit], and a pair of shoes, like the slip-on shoes. . . . You get uh, five sets of shirts, white shirts, two oranges, top and bottom, five pairs of socks, five pairs of boxers. You don’t get no shower shoes, you have to wait ‘til you buy ‘em. Understand what I mean? You get a bar of soap a week, a roll of toilet paper a week. . . . And [then you] go ahead, get your lunch and go. It’s kinda like a herding thing, they herd you, know what I mean, ‘til they can get you situated into a room.
We can understand this process by following one such group of arrivals. When a busload of men from Fresno arrives at Wasco, one by one their personal information is recorded or updated, they are searched for contraband, and some basic supplies are distributed to them before they are finally assigned to a cell or dorm bunk. But being “situated into a room” is based in many factors, and is determined by how an inmate is categorized across a number of fields. In this process, the large crowd of men who come in together from the county are divided and subdivided down until they are all individually reorganized into the prison’s classificatory system. Low-custody-level inmates in Wasco are sent to C yard where they stay in less restrictive, open dormitories before being sent to minimum security facilities. Inmates who may be vulnerable to assault in general population, either due to their offense or because of conflicts from a previous prison term, are isolated in B5, the protective custody unit on B yard. Similarly, anybody with a history of violence is likely sent to the administrative segregation (or “ad seg”) unit on D yard. Any prisoners coming in with an admitted or documented Norteño affiliation is immediately sent to D3 since they may be vulnerable on other yards. Everybody else is placed in one of the “mainline” buildings on B or D yard.
Even after these groups of men have been assigned to a building they are divided down still, this time paired with cellmates depending on how they are racially classified. During this sorting process incoming prisoners are categorized as Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, or “Others” (Asians and Pacific Islanders), and housed with other men in the same racial group. Latino inmates, the largest racial group in the prison, are also divided by where in the state they were committed from; Latinos from Southern California are sorted simply as “Southern Hispanics,” but most of our group from Fresno will be kept together as “Bulldogs.” The result is that prisoners find themselves slotted into an environment that is defined by race- and place-based divides, as Francisco, a thirty-five-year-old Latino parolee describes:
Going into prison, they already had like a modified program. Like uh, if you’re a certain group, you can’t be around this [other] group. So like when you go in to R&R, they have big [signs] like “Fresno,” “San Bernardino County,” “LA County,” you know from the counties where you’re from right? And they have doors already open for people in Fresno, they just rush us in, close it, and that’s how they did it. They just uh, it was already, it was already a modified, there was segregated kind of like in a way . . . it was like it was split. Um, they modified Bulldogs, Blacks, um Others, on top, and then on the bottom it’ll be Whites and Southsiders. All bottom tier. So it was already there.
In Francisco’s words we can see that after incoming prisoners are divided across the different buildings at WSP depending on their individual status or needs, inmates are still separated even within the same building. Important to note here is which racial groups are housed apart from each other on different tiers—Whites are housed away from Blacks, and “Southsiders” are kept on a separate tier than “Bulldogs.”
From an institutional perspective, this segregation is implemented because of the potential for gang violence between these racial groups. CDCR has always justified racially sorting inmates as necessary to prevent racial violence, and more specifically to separate rival race-based prison gangs. However, the number of validated prison gang members is actually quite small, and these inmates are already removed from general population and isolated in SHU units. But despite this, all incoming inmates are still segregated in this manner anyway. Racial sorting then operates as a process of identifying and separating pools of inmates who may become extensions of gang rivalries. For example, Blacks and Whites are separated out of fear that conflict between the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Guerilla Family may lead White and Black inmates to fight each other. Similarly, Latinos are split as Northerners or Southerners due to the belief that they may support the prison gangs that draw members from these respective regions of the state.
Framing racial groups as extensions of prison gang conflicts makes segregated spaces seem necessary because it marks individual prisoners as assumed gang associates. Within this system one’s presumed gang ties are determined by race, but also by one’s home community. In Francisco’s excerpt he illustrates that inmates are first tagged by the county they come in from, and for Latino prisoners this is consequential. The counties that Latino inmates come from affect the housing assignments that they receive because each county is classified as a Northern or Southern county; Kern and San Luis Obispo Counties on south are considered Southern counties, whereas most Latinos north of this (with the exception of Fresno) will be counted as Northern Hispanics. The Norteño (Spanish for “Northerner”) and Sureño (“Southerner”) 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 one of his peers, Diego explains that it is important for the institution to properly identify young people in order to appropriately divide them. Juvenile Probation makes files on youth while they are at JDF that document their suspected affiliations (which may or may not be accurate) and send these to any facility youth may transfer to after their release, including SJEA.
However, as these files are passed to different institutions, the gang labels generated by how youth are categorized simultaneously follow them into new spaces. When Joey was sent to JDF for drug charges, they housed him alongside Bulldog gang members, despite the fact that he had no history of gang involvement. This assignment set into motion a criminal label that has persistently shadowed him ever since:
| JOEY: | [In JDF] I told them I didn’t bang, because on one side they had the nortes and the Sureños, and [on] the left side were the dogs. So I guess there was an opening and they put me there and it stuck. |
| AUTHOR: | You ever feel like you’ve been labeled? |
| J: | Yeah, I do! Cuz I was reading a sheet and it said I affiliate with Bulldogs. Fuck, they’re labeling me as a gang banger! Just cuz I hang on the east side, like I hang out with Bulldogs doesn’t mean I bang! [It] just means I get along better with the Bulldogs! |
| A: | When did you see that you were labeled? |
| J: | When I got out of my fuckin [appointment for drug treatment]! It said uhhh, “He doesn’t bang but does affiliate with Bulldogs occasionally.” Like what the fuck! That’s fucked up! Now I’m labeled as a Bulldog and I don’t even bang! So [now] people call out “So wassup dog? You a mutt or what?” Fuck! Are you serious? I don’t even bang and now you wanna disrespect? Yeah, starting a fight for no reason! |
When Joey was housed with the Bulldogs in JDF, he befriended one of the other boys housed with him, and continued to socialize with him at SJEA. Joey “gets along better with the Bulldogs” in large part because this is who he was housed with in JDF and who he came to develop friendships with. But this housing assignment, which he had no control over, is recorded in his file as a gang affiliation, framing him in subsequent settings as criminal and exposing him to confrontations from other youth.
At SJEA staff members note any affiliations already recorded in students’ probation files, but also make their own assessments in student orientation sessions, either confirming or updating the file. Each Thursday, new students transferring into the school come in for an orientation session, usually within a week of their release from juvenile hall. Here they meet with various counselors and school staff members, who explain things they need to know about the school like the dress code, daily schedule, and what is expected of them as students. These staff members also attempt to determine new students’ gang affiliations from police reports and juvenile probation files, as well as questions about what other students they know at the school. These orientation sessions provided the school staff with an opportunity to categorize new students into the criminalized affiliations they recognized. For example, one week a school counselor recaps one of these orientation meetings to me shortly after finishing: “We have six new Bulldogs, and we have one who affiliates with Bulldogs, but he hasn’t been labeled yet. I asked him who he knows here and he said ‘Oh I know him and him.’ So I said ‘OK, so you affiliate with Bulldogs’ and he said ‘No, I’m not in no gang! I just talk to those guys!’ but I told him ‘OK, but that’s still affiliating.’”
Much like the racialized housing assignments in Wasco, youth are categorized as they enter juvenile facilities so that they can be separated. After determining students’ affiliations the staff then direct them one side or the other of the divided blacktop, structuring a physical split between students. Students resultantly experienced the identity categories ascribed in this process through the division of youth into separate spaces, particularly visible when students came outside for lunch and recess breaks. During these breaks, SJEA students were contained to a small portion of the school’s asphalt parking lot—two rows of parking spots for about a dozen cars with a lane between them. Bracketing one end of this long and narrow space were a set of unused basketball hoops and a ping-pong table, and on the other a small trailer serving as a snack bar that sold chips and cups of instant ramen during lunch. Between them, twenty picnic tables were spread out across the blacktop, divided by a thirty-foot gap that split the entire space into two sides. Probation officers, security guards, and teacher’s aides would form a tight perimeter around this space that students were not permitted to venture beyond.
At the lunch tables, youth sat with their friends (who they usually already knew from their communities) and others they felt were most like themselves. However, at SJEA students’ peer networks were often interpreted as ties to neighborhood gangs, and consequently sections of the blacktop were seen by both students and staff as designated for different gang-associated groups, with rival groups positioned at opposite ends. Students dismissed for lunch would exit the school’s side door to the blacktop and first see the “Bulldog tables” clustered to their left, although most of the students sitting here were Latina/o kids from Fresno’s Eastside who didn’t gangbang. In the far left corner by the trailer is a table with all the White kids, most of whom are from the middle-class neighborhoods in North Fresno or Fresno’s more affluent suburb, Clovis. Next to them is a table with a multicultural group of students, most of them also from the Northside, who dress like skaters and hang out with the Whites. Continuing to scan the blacktop clockwise, to the right of them are most of SJEA’s Black students; first the teens from the Northside (although not as far north as the White neighborhoods) associated with Murder Squad, then the thirty-foot gap, then the Westside youth categorized with Twamp Gang. Next down the line is the table with all the Norteñas/os and all the Latina/o students from the Westside, then a table with a few Asian kids. Finally at the far right was the “Sureña/o table,” mostly filled with Latina/o youth whose families had recently moved to Fresno from Southern California.
FIGURE 1. The segregated blacktop at San Joaquin Educational Academy.
Patrick Lopez-Aguado
The size of these groups and the dynamics between them could shift with the demographics of the students enrolled at any given time because student turnover was very high, but even groups that were absent for a time still had a space that was recognized as theirs. When I first came to SJEA, one of the staff members pointed out each of the groups on the blacktop before pointing to an empty space and telling me “there aren’t any Sureños here right now, but when there are they stay over there.” The division of space was fundamental to the daily operation of the school to the point that it was recognized even if the isolated group was not even present—illustrating how the presumed need to categorize youth is engrained as a dominant logic, such that the categories ascribed in this process hold meaning even when there is nobody to fill them. The consistent emphasis placed on identity categories defines group boundaries by constructing the collective threat of an “other,” even when this other is an imagined enemy. This othering is accomplished through the designation of group space, and space is only divided among gang collectives. In this arrangement there is no space for unaffiliated youth of color, meaning that nonwhite youth are always imagined as gang members.
BOUNDARY MAINTENANCE
Fresno’s criminalized residents encounter a consistent social order in both the state prison and local juvenile justice facilities, one in which they are put into race- and place-based groups that are then separated from each other in relation to gang rivalries. Also consistent across these sites is the institution’s direct role in designing and enforcing this system. Facility staff members not only classify incoming inmates/students into racially defined groups and separate them spatially, but they then also police the boundaries between these groups. This reinforcement of spatial boundaries in turn reifies carceral affiliations as cohesive groups with powerful collective identities. By encouraging people to stick with “their own” and structuring an environment in which it is hard not to do this, the institution engrains into individuals the rationale that segregation is an important means of protecting themselves from violence.
It is not hard to see how inmates quickly understand this logic in reception. Reception centers are overcrowded facilities with high rates of turnover and reputations for being unstable and dangerous institutions. Facilities like Wasco have relatively high rates of inmate violence, and a 2006 report found that Wasco had the highest rate of improperly placing violent inmates (who should be in ad seg) in general 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 to do his time outside of his assigned category.
In Steven’s story, we can see how thoroughly the logic of the carceral social order guides the management of inmate populations; because staff see it as impossible for inmates to live in the prison without a racial group, they end up enforcing this social order by isolating “independent” inmates in either protective custody or solitary confinement. This removal of independent prisoners contributed to the institutionalization of the carceral social order by keeping space divided and making it impossible to do time without abiding by the racial division of the population. While the COs’ concerns for Steven’s safety are certainly not groundless, they are the direct result of a constructed environment that demands everyone be classified.
Inside punitive institutions like the prison, the carceral social order is implemented not only by categorizing and separating people, but also by socializing and maintaining the resulting segregation. But while prison staff structure and facilitate this segregation through housing assignments, race-based punishments (Spiegel 2007), recognizing informal racial leaders (Walker 2016), and racially dividing shared spaces, much of the enforcement of racial boundaries is carried out by inmates themselves. By the time they are adults, prisoners effectively enforce much the carceral social order themselves by monitoring spatial borders and confronting nonconformists. Most of the parolees were already well familiar with the divides and expectations of this social order before they ever reached the prison. Probation youth, however, are still being socialized into this. In their facilities, institutional staff members take on a much more direct role in maintaining the separation between sorted groups.
Policing Space
SJEA’s influence in shaping the carceral social order became clear through the ongoing policing of students’ physical space. During student breaks six to eight staff members are typically on duty to supervise, making sure that students stay at their designated tables and sending them to the bathrooms in separate waves depending on which side of the gap their table is on. As the weather began to warm it revealed an underlying emphasis the school placed on maintaining physical distance between groups of students. Fresno is known for intense summers where long stretches of triple-digit heat are not uncommon, and by early April it was already becoming uncomfortable for students and staff alike to stay in the sun during lunchtime. The students’ lunch area was in the center of an asphalt blacktop that absorbed much of the heat while offering little in the way of shade. Two trees by the side of the school building offer the only protection from the sun, shading a small area of the parking lot immediately adjacent to the “Bulldog tables,” and because of how the lunch area is divided the students sitting here are the only ones able to access it.
One day the heat prompts SJEA staff to reevaluate this configuration. As the students finish eating their lunches most stay at their tables, barely talking as they try to shade their faces with their hands, but the Bulldog students all stand up and position themselves under the shade of the trees. After about forty minutes of sitting in the heat, the sun becomes too much for the half dozen Black students in attendance,5 and they collectively walk across the blacktop and stand with the Bulldogs in the shade. The staff members supervising lunch seem stunned and look at each other in confusion, unsure of what to do. The Black students and Bulldogs don’t generally have problems with each other and it quickly becomes clear that neither group is interested in fighting, so even though the Probation Officers (POs) seem alarmed by this boundary crossing, they don’t do anything to correct it. Soon the rest of the students follow suit, joining them under the trees and in any pockets of shade they can find along the wall. The only students still in the sun are two Norteño boys who stay by their table and look sadly over at everyone else in the shade—as uncomfortable as they are, they know crossing over will likely start a fight with rival gang members and get them in trouble with the staff, so they stay put.
When I come back the next week I find that the tables have been rearranged into two parallel rows spaced about 25 feet apart. Each row has 7 tables, stretching about 60 feet from the trailer through the space between the planters. Most interesting is that while still divided, all of the tables are now centered in the middle of the blacktop, intentionally positioned away from the wall and the shade provided by the trees. When I ask her about it, Mrs. Rodriguez, a youth outreach worker at the school, explains: “We did that to move that group that thinks they run everything around here. We moved them out of the shade cuz if this side has to be in the sun, then they can in the sun too!” The school changed the setup of the students’ lunch area because they wanted to make it fair for all of the students, arguing that it was unfair for the “Bulldog-affiliated” students to have the only tables in the shade. However, because staff members fear that students will fight if they are allowed to simply share the shade, they decide to keep everyone in the sun, addressing the disparity while still enforcing the separation between groups and keeping students on their appropriate sides. The emphasis the school placed on dividing students even while reorganizing the tables highlights how important they considered it for preserving institutional security and student safety, and during the summer months policing the students’ access to shade served as an important means for preventing them from crossing group boundaries.
After rearranging the tables outside, the staff wouldn’t let any of the students stand or sit in the shade during break or lunchtime, even when they were talking with me. When the students were out on break I usually sat on one of the side benches under a tree by the building so that I could observe what happened during break without imposing on students while they socialized with their friends. When I was outside some of the students I worked with or had gotten to know would often come up to me and talk for a while before going back in for class. However, now when they did this one of the probation officers or staff members would step in and tell them to move along, sending them back to their table. Consequently, policing the students’ access to the shade became a way for staff to keep students at their appropriate tables and on their designated side of the divided blacktop.
During one of these lunch breaks, I sat with Ben, one of my regular students, while he complained that he had to stay after school to help clean up the yard as punishment for getting to school late this morning. He explained, “It’s not even hard work or anything, it’s just hella hot.”
“Yeah, and they won’t even let you guys in the shade anymore huh?” I responded, referring to the staff moving the tables away from the trees.
“Naw, it was cuz we were all chillin’ here, and kids from the other side started coming over, started sitting in the shade.”
“Were they scared something was gonna happen?”
“I dunno, probably. They probably thought there’d be fights, like different gangs would both be in the shade and they’d get into a fight, cuz this is like the only place there’s shade.”
One of the POs supervising lunch spots us and walks over. She says hi to me and walks around the bench to stand directly behind Ben, putting her hands on the top of the seatback and leaning forward over him. “Get off the bench.”
“What?” Ben asks incredulously, looking back up at her.
She replies calmly: “You know you’re not supposed to be sitting here. I’m not calling you out, it looks like you got up on your own.” Ben rolls his eyes, stands up, and goes back to sitting with his friends. I ask her why students can’t sit here, and she answers: “They can stop and talk for a few minutes, but then they try to play it off like ‘Oh I’m just talking to him.’ So just so no one gets hurt feelings, just move them along.”
As Ben’s comments indicate, students understood that the school’s attempts to restrict their access to shade intended to keep them separated. Probation officers shooed students out of shade anytime they tried to linger under the trees, arguing that if some of the youth could not have access to shade then none of them should. While staff members felt this kept things fair between students, it functioned to maintain divisions between youth because kicking them out of the shade inevitably entailed sending them back to their designated tables.
The school’s staff also reinforced divisions between students by policing the boundaries between groups and directing youth who crossed these boundaries to “stay with their side.” Probation and security staff members restricted students to one side of the blacktop in order to prevent gang members from crossing sides and starting fights with rivals. However, uncertainty about which students were actually gang members exposed almost all of the students to these same restrictions. When Rafael, an unaffiliated tagger, went to talk with a friend of his who had just come to the school, he sat with her on one of the tables furthest from the building. The security guard calls for these tables to use the restroom if they need to and Rafael, who usually sits with the Bulldogs on the tables closest to the school building, gets up from the table and starts walking inside. One of the probation officers supervising the break calls after him:
“Rafael! Where are you going?”
“They called bathroom.”
“Aren’t you on this side?” She asks, pointing to the tables closest to the school building.
“I was sitting over there.” He counters, pointing back to the opposite side.
“Don’t be switching sides! If you’re gonna be on that side, you stay on that side!”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, serious. If you gonna go to the bathroom you go when your side is called.”
The probation officer scolds Rafael for not remaining on the side that he usually sits on because his presence on the far tables violates the strict division of physical space. Even though Rafael is not a gang member, staff sees his presence on the “Norteña/o side” as a potential security threat because they associate him with the Bulldogs he usually sits with. To avoid this risk they reprimand him and tell him to “stay on his side,” enforcing the division of students into gang-associated groups. In doing so, the school ascribes gang labels onto students and blurs its ability to distinguish between gang members who may start fights and unaffiliated students.6
The restrooms the students used during breaks were seen as especially vulnerable sites for fighting, making it particularly important for the staff to keep students separated as they came inside to go to the bathroom. Later in the week I sit with Ben again during break, and we watch another student try to head in to use the bathroom out of turn, only to be sent back when the PO yells at him “I didn’t call your side!” We laugh and I say to Ben, “Damn they’re serious about the sides huh?”
Ben smirks and nods, “Yeah.” I tell him about the PO scolding Rafael for switching sides a few days ago, and he explains why they’re so strict about keeping students separated during bathroom breaks: “It’s cuz they don’t want someone sneakin’ over here and then goin’ into the bathroom where they can fight, cuz out here it’ll probably get broken up quick, but in there you could probably fight for longer.”
These efforts to keep students separated in the name of preventing fights extended into where they did their schoolwork as well. Students were not divided in the classroom or split into different classes, but some staff members were concerned about keeping the students that I took out away from potential rivals. The school’s RSP (Resource Specialist Program) teacher and I both pulled students out of their regular classes and worked with them in small groups at the opposite ends of a large room. One day the vice principal, Mrs. Garcia, calls us both into her office. I come in and sit down, and while waiting for the RSP teacher to join us I ask Mrs. Garcia “Is something wrong?”
“Well there’s some concern about you taking out kids from different gangs.”
“Oh, did something happen?”
“This morning there was an incident that was an extension of something [that happened] yesterday after school, so I’ve already suspended 3 students this morning over that. So things are a little tense right now. Our staff has noticed it and asked that I talk with you, because you tend to pull out more Bulldog affiliates, and she gets the few Norteño and Sureño students, and they’re too close to each other. There hasn’t been a problem yet, but the looks have started. It’s all in the body language. And cuz you’re way in the front [of the building], I’m concerned that if there was a problem it would take security a minute to get there, and by then someone could really get hurt.”
As Mrs. Ruiz, the RSP teacher, comes in Mrs. Garcia repeats her concerns to her and goes on to say that she wants us to start working with our students in separate rooms, telling me to use the conference room from now on. Mrs. Ruiz and I look at each other with some confusion, and she turns back to Mrs. Garcia and counters that neither of us have had any problems with our students sharing a room. Indeed, I had never seen either Mrs. Ruiz’s or my own students do anything to try to start a fight while we had them out, and none of our students were involved in the shouting match/verbal provocations that resulted in that morning’s three suspensions. Mrs. Garcia simply responds: “Our staff knows who these kids are and they’ve seen the stares and the looks starting. It may not be swearing or yelling but it’s all in the body language.”
Mrs. Garcia’s concerns articulate an underlying assumption of the prevailing logic at SJEA—differently affiliated youth are bound to fight unless they are separated, so it’s important to properly identify students’ affiliations in order to keep them away from any potential rivals. Even though the students I took out had never given me any problems and had not been involved in any fights at the school, they were still seen as likely to attack others based on which side of the divided student body they associated with. However, the criminalizing associations that supposedly made these students likely to fight were structured, in some cases even forced, by the divisive context imposed by the school—one in which students’ race and class identities, and where in Fresno they were from, shaped how they were subsequently divided and categorized in the institution. Much like the juvenile hall and the prison, the school then relied on the labels it institutionalized to establish a social frame for understanding the young people it managed, creating a “knowledge” of youth criminality that was removed from the actual threat posed by these individuals. The school’s systematic division of students and the relationships it imposed between them actually generated the very threats staff were scared of, as it reinforced students’ identifications with particular affiliations, their fears of other groups, and the institutionalization of the carceral social order.
THE CARCERAL SOCIAL ORDER AS COMMON SENSE
At the beginning of this chapter Javier describes his fear that his incarceration could embroil him in “gang life.” Because he sees most of those around him in JDF as gang affiliated, he worries that acclimating to being locked up will require him to become part of the gang conflicts that shape everyday life in the pod. Javier feels that this is especially true because he sees these gang-involved peers as a surrogate family within a context in which he is removed from his real family. But his real concern is that the consequence of his inability to access substance abuse treatment could keep him cycling though punitive facilities for a long time:
If my mom could have found a rehab that was in-patient, but was out there, she would have sent me to that, but they couldn’t find one. The judge said I needed rehab for my addiction, so he sent me to [JDF’s substance abuse program]. . . . I dunno, I feel like instead of helping me they’re just punishing me by putting me in here. I know I need help with my addiction but I don’t know if the programs in here can really help, I mean taking everyone away from their families, everybody’s always all depressed in there. I wouldn’t care so much if it was just me and I didn’t have a family, but I do have a family, so I don’t belong in here. I feel like I’m just gonna get used to being locked up, like I’ll probably be back in here.
The dearth of resources for poor youth in Fresno and the role of punishment in managing local social problems make the only drug treatment option accessible to Javier one inside the juvenile hall. But in addition to feeling that he is being punished rather than helped, he also senses that this may expose him to a far more permanent penalty; Javier’s adjustment to what is supposed to be a temporary circumstance entails a much more persistent criminalization. Said another way, he knows that adapting to being locked up could very well lead him to continue to get locked up.
Positioning oneself within the carceral social order is a big part of the adjustment and socialization Javier is describing. But it is important to recognize that beyond a set of institutionally defined collective identities, this social order also becomes a common sense framework for understanding who one does and does not get along with within punitive settings. The assumption that different racial groups represented threats to each other was a fundamental underpinning in the day-to-day management of WSP, JDF, and SJEA, and the subsequent segregation of prisoners and students engrained this belief into the individuals held in these facilities. Consequently, the groups that individuals are divided into become strong identities inside the institution that individuals are socialized to appropriate; the policing of spatial boundaries and the constructed threat of the other teach incarcerated residents to see these identities as necessary, ultimately conditioning individuals to position themselves into this social order. In this context, the carceral social order provides a logic for how individuals navigating these institutions come to see themselves, their peers, and what is best for them while incarcerated.
