“Girls, Take Care and Boys Be a Man: Gendered Interventions in Policing 'Delinquency' among Latina Youth”

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 20: Youth, Family, and Social Reproduction

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research to examine Latina girls’ experiences within a juvenile “delinquency” deterrence program within a California police department. Situating the program within the broader context of the carceral state, this study analyzes how policing extends beyond punishment into domains often framed as “caring”. Through a year of participant observation of mentoring sessions, life-skills classes, field trips, and family meetings, I examine how racialized and gendered logics structure the practices of carceral care work within this program.

Findings reveal that Latina youth are routinely categorized by officers into a “good girl/bad girl” dichotomy (Garcia 2009; 2012; Lopez and Chesney-Lind 2014) that governs their access to resources. These classifications are based on subjective assessments of sexuality, respectability, adultification, and emotional policing. Girls labeled as “good” are framed as worthy of investment, while those labeled as “bad” are often subjected to heightened surveillance and exclusion from intervention efforts altogether. In some cases, girls deemed “bad” are discouraged from continued participation in the program.

By embedding intervention within policing, the program reproduces carceral logics that frame care as conditional and contingent on compliance, therefore demonstrating another form of carceral care work (Massaro 2019; Restrepo 2019; Moreno 2022; Ziv 2025). Officers exercise broad discretion in determining which youth merit resources, effectively requiring Latina girls to earn care through demonstrations of sexual restraint. Rather than addressing structural vulnerabilities, carceral care work reifies stereotypes of Latina girls and reinforces gendered pathways of punishment. Finally, I argue that gender is not incidental to carceral care work, but one of its central organizing criteria. Gender shapes who receives care, how that care is delivered, and what kinds of compliant or “docile” bodies care is meant to produce (Foucault 1975; King 2004). Therefore, girlhood becomes a key site where punishment is reframed as protection, and care itself becomes punitive.

Author

• Alexia Loren Palomino, University of Illinois-Chicago