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
