Everybody Bangs: The Institutional Production of Criminality and Violence in Juvenile Justice Facilities

• In Event: 180 - Regular Session. Deviance and Social Control

Abstract

In this paper I present an ethnographic analysis of young people’s experiences in two juvenile justice facilities – a juvenile detention facility and a continuation high school. I argue that the practices used to identify and separate rival gang members in juvenile facilities actually position many probation youth into gang rivalries. This has two significant consequences for the adolescents involved. First, it subjects them to a process of "polarized labeling" that assumes criminalized youth affiliate with one side of a local gang rivalry or the other. This process established a perception that all youth in the facility were in gangs when few actually were, but also marked them as targets for future re-incarceration. Secondly, this system structured young people’s experiences with violence. Students were often confronted as gang members by rival groups – even if they were not gang-involved – based on how they were categorized in the institution's sorting process. This exposed them to assault in the facility and even in their own community. Additionally, fights often stemmed from youth defending the spatial distance between groups that the institution itself demanded. The facilities in this research categorized youth into rival camps and then kept these groups separated throughout the day under the assumption that students would attack each other if given the chance. Youth internalized this logic and perceived anybody violating these group boundaries as threats to their personal safety, consequently using violence to reinforce this spatial distance.

Author

• Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Santa Clara University