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
