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
