Gender Incarceration in (Group) Homes: Testimonios from Chicana/Latinas

• In Event: Beyond the Numbers: Qualitative Research in Juvenile Justice

Abstract

This paper examines the surveillance, punishment, and isolation toward young Chicana/Latinas in group homes. I argue that group homes are understudied sites of incarceration emblematic of privatization facilities within the neoliberal prison- industrial complex. Scholarship on the juvenile legal system has primarily focused on boys and youth infractions, rather than questioning how “crime” itself is created by laws and policies that disproportionately target youth of color (Chavez-Garcia 2012). Moreover, reformers and group home advocates suggest group homes replicate a home environment; however, they fail to meet crucial requirements necessary to supporting young women’s mental and emotional well-being as defined by the young women themselves. Rather, these homes replicate unequal power relations of punishment that more closely resemble incarceration by analyzing the tactics of this carceral state of group homes. My project highlights the way that young Chicana/Latinas have always contested tactics of punishment and spaces of power. Drawing on testimonios and ethnographic fieldwork to recover and document youth’s voices, my research not only offers an important counternarrative to ideas of gender deviancy employed by state agents to justify these facilities, it also denaturalizes the overrepresentation of Chicanas/Latinas in the juvenile legal system.

Author

• Joana Chavez, University of California, Los Angeles