Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity - Softcover

Lopez-Aguado, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520288599 ISBN 13: 9780520288591

Verlag: University of California Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

In Stick Together and Come Back Home, Patrick Lopez-Aguado examines how what happens inside a prison affects what happens outside of it. Following the experiences of seventy youth and adults as they navigate juvenile justice and penal facilities before finally going back home, he outlines how institutional authorities structure a “carceral social order” that racially and geographically divides criminalized populations into gang-associated affiliations. These affiliations come to shape one’s exposure to both violence and criminal labeling, and as they spill over the institutional walls they establish how these unfold in high-incarceration neighborhoods as well, revealing the insidious set of consequences that mass incarceration holds for poor communities of color.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Lopez-Aguado is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Santa Clara University.

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"In this vivid, compelling, and moving study of the impact of the prison system on young people in California’s central valley, Lopez-Aguado shows how mass incarceration and its collateral consequences actually produce many of the social problems they purport to prevent. He demonstrates that the prison is not simply a stand-alone institution but rather a node in a network of criminalization that makes life outside of jails and prisons for young people very similar to what they experience on the inside. The author’s fine ethnographic ear, his impressive rapport with the young people he studies, and his mastery of a broad range of concepts and theories combine to give us a book that enables us to see the prison in a new light, to discern social relations that are often right before our eyes, but hidden in plain sight."
—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"Lopez-Aguado demonstrates how forced racial sorting within the prison shapes identities and allegiances and how these identities shape life outside the prison walls in the community as well. His analysis provides powerful and important insight into previously hidden ways that mass incarceration continues to ravage the most disadvantaged communities."
—Aaron Kupchik, author of The Real School Safety Problem: The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment and Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear. 

"This ethnography provides gripping, in-depth description combined with brilliant theoretical nuance, helping us empirically understand the specific, day-to-day processes in which the prison and the carceral state impact the lives of marginalized populations. This is truly a groundbreaking study that demonstrates how racialized prisonization becomes embodied and embedded in communities already left behind."
—Victor Rios, author of Human Targets: School, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth

Aus dem Klappentext

"In this vivid, compelling, and moving study of the impact of the prison system on young people in California’s central valley, Lopez-Aguado shows how mass incarceration and its collateral consequences actually produce many of the social problems they purport to prevent. He demonstrates that the prison is not simply a stand-alone institution but rather a node in a network of criminalization that makes life outside of jails and prisons for young people very similar to what they experience on the inside. The author’s fine ethnographic ear, his impressive rapport with the young people he studies, and his mastery of a broad range of concepts and theories combine to give us a book that enables us to see the prison in a new light, to discern social relations that are often right before our eyes, but hidden in plain sight."
—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

"Lopez-Aguado demonstrates how forced racial sorting within the prison shapes identities and allegiances and how these identities shape life outside the prison walls in the community as well. His analysis provides powerful and important insight into previously hidden ways that mass incarceration continues to ravage the most disadvantaged communities."
—Aaron Kupchik, author of The Real School Safety Problem: The Long-Term Consequences of Harsh School Punishment and Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear. 

"This ethnography provides gripping, in-depth description combined with brilliant theoretical nuance, helping us empirically understand the specific, day-to-day processes in which the prison and the carceral state impact the lives of marginalized populations. This is truly a groundbreaking study that demonstrates how racialized prisonization becomes embodied and embedded in communities already left behind."
—Victor Rios, author of Human Targets: School, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth

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Stick Together and Come Back Home

Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity

By Patrick Lopez-Aguado

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28859-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction: The Carceral Social Order, 1, 
PART I. INSIDE THE FACILITY, 
1. Constructing and Institutionalizing the Carceral Social Order, 27, 
2. Carceral Affiliation and Identity Construction, 51, 
3. Negotiating and Resisting the Carceral Social Order, 79, 
PART II. COMING BACK HOME, 
4. "The Home Team" at the Intersection of Prison and Neighborhood, 113, 
5. Carceral Violence Inside and On the Outs, 138, 
6. The Carceral Social Order and the Structuring of Neighborhood Criminalization, 165, 
Conclusion: "How You Just Gonna Make Up Your Mind About Where We're Gonna Be, When Our Minds Should Be Going Higher?", 193, 
Notes, 205, 
Bibliography, 213, 
Index, 219, 

CHAPTER 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 play-list 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520288599
• ISBN 13: 9780520288591
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 238
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar