"Multiply Entangled Youth": "Innocent" Institutions, Architectures of Entanglement, and Criminal Outcomes

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Thirteen
  In Roundtable Session: Resisting the Web of Carcerality: Counternarratives of Youth Impacted by Foster Care, Homelessness, and the Criminal Justice System (Table 10)

Abstract

Problem Statement
This research paper, drawing from Homies Theorizing Back ––a Critical Participatory Action research project alongside a group of multiply marginalized and system-impacted young people at a youth re-entry center in southern California–– documents architectures of entanglement, a conceptual framework theorized by the youth that describes a complex and perpetually tightening web of interlocking and intersecting systems and logics that severely limit the worlds, freedom, and the “choices” of youth deeply entangled in carceral geographies.

Theoretical Framework
For both its theoretical and empirical lens, this project draws from three research traditions: the participatory action research, critical ethnographic, and Indigenous and decolonizing research traditions. Theorizing back ––the methodology at the heart of this paper–– is about honoring the power and knowledge of those from whom counter-hegemonic notions derive and whose lives are deeply grounded in struggles (Gramsci, 2011); engaging people in a learning process that positions them as experts in their own lives (Cammarota & Fine, 2008); and people coming together to create mutual realities (ontology), find common meanings (epistemology), and ultimately improve their worlds (axiology and methodology). In addition, this paper is in dialogue with the literature on carceral geographies (Moran, 2016) and the school to prison nexus (Rodriguez, 2006; Meiners & Winn, 2010).

Methodology
This research project’s methodology was Theorizing Back; a critical, participatory, and humanizing methodology described by Tuck (2009) as “a sister component in a larger decolonizing project” (p. 112). The specific methods and strategies of inquiry were co-constructed by this project's co-theorizers: 14 young people between 18-24 years old. The data corpus, which included more than 100 hours of transcripts from theorizing back meetings, interviews, critical educational histories, conversations, freestyle sessions, voice memos, and approximately 200 pages of field notes and written memos, were collaboratively analyzed through three rounds employing different coding methods, including in-vivo.

Findings
Through architectures of entanglement, this study documents a “sticky” web of systems, institutions, practices and logics that resonate and further build on what Rodriguez (2006) describes as technologies of domination that exceed the narrow boundaries of the juridical-carceral structures. Unlike Foucault’s (1975) environments of enclosure, which were theorized as very visible, these architectures were theorized by the youth as both visible and invisible, consequently able to produce a force much greater (and egregious) than the sum of their parts.

Scholarly Significance
This study is significant at it visibilizes the intricate nexus between “public” and “benevolent” systems –– including schools–– and broader carceral geographies, raising important and urgent questions for those committed to abolishing punitive and carceral systems and instead, building life-affirming, caring, humanizing, and culturally sustaining (Paris and Alim, 2014) schools and education systems and practices. Moreover, this study found that entanglements were both a symptom of the logics of carcerality and also part of how carcerality, in its contemporary iterations, was able to negotiate its innocence and do its work; consequently pointing to an evolution of injustice that cynically capitalizes on people’s freedom as it further “entangles” and traps them into a system of punishment, coercion, criminalization, dispossession, and exploitation.

Author

• Miguel Casar Rodriguez, University of Alabama
  Presenting Author