Caught Up
Caught Up follows the lives of 50 Latina girls in “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” community school located 40 miles outside of Los Angeles, CA. Their path through these two institutions reveals the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. For example, the connection between both of these sites is a concerted effort between Legacy Community School and El Valle administrators to provide young people with wraparound services. These well-intentioned services are designed to provide youth with support at home, at school and in the actual detention center. However, I argue that wraparound services more closely resemble a phenomenon that I call wraparound incarceration, where students cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention despite leaving the actual detention center. For young people in Legacy school, returning to El Valle became an unavoidable consequence of wraparound services.