Abstract
A good ethnography describes how social status creates meaning, so that the audience can understand the depth of experiences of the group being studied. Early prison ethnographies, for example, taught us about “prisonization” and how incarcerated people make sense of their surroundings while managing safety risks. Stick Together and Come Back Home is an excellent ethnographic work that follows this tradition. In it, Patrick Lopez-Aguado describes how California’s preoccupation with preventing gang violence results in a racialized “carceral social order” that creates meaning for respondents, shapes their behavior, and impacts how they and their communities are policed and punished.
Over the course of fifteen months, Lopez-Aguado spent time in a juvenile detention facility, a continuation high school for youth on probation, and a reentry center for formerly incarcerated people – three sites where neighborhoods and punishment systems converge. His observations, interactions with clients and students, and interviews with almost 80 respondents provided him with rich data describing the futility and harms of California’s penal practices. The main problem he describes begins with the state’s assumptions that youth and adults who enter penal facilities (including prisons, juvenile detention, and continuation schools) are gang members. This assumption – which is usually incorrect since relatively few are actually gang affiliated – justifies racial sorting, where facility staff label the youth and adults as belonging to specific gangs based on their race and what part of the state they come from. Facilities segregate people according to these assumed gang identities, and in the process create a series of rules and affiliations that incarcerated people (and students) must follow to protect their safety and maintain order within the system created by the facilities. In the process, the state actually creates the gang identities that often didn’t exist before incarceration, but that pervade after one’s release. Youth in communities learn about these identities and the need to claim group affiliation for safety’s sake from peers and family members who have been incarcerated. The assumptions of gang affiliations that emanate from prison then justify aggressive, zero-tolerance policing of entire communities.
The result is a cycle of structural violence that deeply impacts communities and their members. Racialized perceptions of Black and Latino/a young people from poor areas as gang members results in violence within prisons and schools (as incarcerated people and students enforce the rules of segregation forced on them), conflict in neighborhoods, and aggressive policing. It also justifies the racist and classist views of low-income Black and Latino/a people as unworthy of social supports and in need of more policing and punishment. This carceral social order leaves its imprint on the individuals caught in it, since their state-informed identities shape how they see themselves and with whom they align, both inside and outside of prisons, detention centers, and continuation schools.
Simply put, Stick Together and Come Back Home is one of the best books I have read in recent years. It makes several important and thoughtful contributions to the sociology of punishment, highlighting how the penal state creates meaning and structures life for members of socially and economically marginalized communities. It shows how punishment doesn’t just reshape life for incarcerated people, but also for their families and entire communities. Thus, mass incarceration doesn’t harm communities only through often-studied collateral consequences such as loss of wages or the emotional toll on family members whose loved ones are incarcerated, it also reshapes family members’ identities, social networks, and opportunities. By illustrating the depth of this “spillover of carceral identity”, Lopez-Aguado makes an important contribution to the field that should shape how scholars understand the effects of the penal state on marginalized communities.
One particular strength of Stick Together and Come Back Home is the way it maintains a focus on race and racism, while drawing heavily from prior work that understands mass incarceration in more neutral terms. The racial sorting Lopez-Aguado describes, where prison and school officials assume universal gang membership and that individuals’ affiliations can be determined based on race and place, can be seen as actuarial. It is based on prisons’ and schools’ efforts to prevent conflict among the warehoused by separating individuals predicted to be rivals, and thus draws from Jonathan Simon and Malcolm Feeley’s insights about the new penology that have helped shape our understandings of contemporary punishment. But Lopez-Aguado centers race within this discussion, demonstrating how racialized views of gang membership and affiliation create the misunderstandings that guide this actuarial process down a harmful path.
Another strength is the deep level of empathy that guides Lopez-Aguado’s analysis. His care and empathy for the youth and adults who he learned from during his research comes through clearly in the pages of this book. It is clear when he describes his interactions as a tutor and mentor, as well as in the interview transcripts he provides, and because of it the reader is able to see incarcerated youth as children seeking safe spaces to grow and learn. The connection he establishes with respondents adds warmth, humanity, and greater insight into his analysis of their lives and how they make sense of the penal state.
I could easily continue listing the qualities and contributions the book makes. Stick Together and Come Back Home is a wonderful book that deserves a place alongside classic ethnographies of punishment.
