Life behind Bars

Author(s):  
Jerry Flores

In this and other American detention centers, violence is ubiquitous, a central part of life behind bars. Most research in this area focuses on the violence that takes place among fellow inmates (Davis, 2003). My time observing the girls at El Valle suggests the behavior of the correctional staff contributes to violence and fighting in secure detention. In the following chapter, I demonstrate how this institution and its staff promote problematic behaviors (like fighting) and create an atmosphere where these behaviors are necessary. Encouraging these actions might help keep girls safe in detention, but it ultimately further entrenches these young women in the El Valle–Legacy Community School cycle and the larger criminal justice system, contrary to the stated goals of wraparound services. Most of the young people in this study were initially arrested for nonviolent, drug-related offenses, but they earned more time in secure confinement because of fighting. In other words, girls began participating in violent behavior after entering El Valle juvenile detention center.

Author(s):  
Jerry Flores

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.


Author(s):  
Jerry Flores

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the treatment girls received at their “regular” schools puts them in situations that landed them back in detention. The challenges of attending school were exacerbated by the lack of positive support girls received from wraparound services once they left Legacy Community School. In fact, the little wraparound support they did receive, like probation supervision and electronic monitoring, actually made them targets for mistreatment at the hands of their peers and educational staff alike. Along with this, the girls were also stigmatized because of the time they spent at Legacy Community School and in El Valle Juvenile Detention Center. In Sandra’s case, those challenges proved too great, and she eventually ended up back in El Valle. Like at home, in detention, and at Legacy, the girls in my study continued to experience interpersonal violence at the hands of their peers, and they received little protection from school or criminal justice officials. Instead, they experienced institutional harassment and targeting shaped by administrators’ gendered and racialized perceptions of these young Latinas as gang members and criminals.


Author(s):  
Jerry Flores

The book opens with a description of the two key sites in my study: El Valle Juvenile Detention and Legacy community school. I describe the focus of the project and the questions I address. Here, I emphasize how these two institutions and wraparound services shape the pathways of my participants and how these young women navigate these interlocking entities. I then discuss why understanding these new educational and penal connections is important, especially the role they play in the lives of the Latina girls in my study. In this chapter I introduce the term wraparound incarceration, which I coin in the book. I draw on previous research on intersectionality, the school-to-prison pipeline, life course theory and work on gender and crime to situate my own intellectual contributions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the major components of the book, providing readers a “map” of what to expect in the text. Finally, I introduce my primary respondents who will lead off and end every chapter in this manuscript. This introduction as a whole reminds the readers of the importance of studying the processes that lead this growing group of girls into the juvenile justice system.


2022 ◽  
pp. 380-404
Author(s):  
Melissa Marini Švigelj

This chapter draws from the experiences of a veteran educator teaching and learning with youths in a public high school located within a juvenile detention center between 2014-2018. Integrating the discourse of five young people who graduated from high school while in the juvenile detention center, the author demonstrates how the young people confront and re-mediate deficit-based narratives laden with the stereotypes that often surround students with exceptionalities in simultaneous, intersectional ways. Research specifically focused on young people who manage to graduate from high school while attending schools in JDCs (especially youth who identify as disabled or have been identified as having a disability) is significantly sparse. Furthermore, disability is often missing during analyses of incarceration and resistance. This chapter seeks to contribute to this understudied domain.


Author(s):  
Luz Anyela Morales Quintero ◽  
Jairo Muñoz-Delgado ◽  
José Carlos Sánchez-Ferrer ◽  
Ana Fresán ◽  
Martin Brüne ◽  
...  

Numerous studies have shown that emotion recognition is impaired in individuals with a history of violent offenses, especially in those diagnosed with psychopathy. However, in criminological contexts, there is insufficient research regarding the role of empathy and facial emotion recognition abilities of personnel employed in correction centers. Accordingly, we sought to explore facial emotion recognition abilities and empathy in administrative officers and security guards at a center for institutionalized juvenile offenders. One hundred twenty-two Mexican subjects, including both men and women, were recruited for the study. Sixty-three subjects were administrative officers, and 59 subjects were security guards at a juvenile detention center. Tasks included “Pictures of Facial Affect” and the “Cambridge Behavior Scale.” The results showed that group and gender had an independent effect on emotion recognition abilities, with no significant interaction between the two variables. Specifically, administrative officers showed higher empathy than security guards. Moreover, women in general exhibited more empathy than men. This study provides initial evidence of the need to study emotion recognition and empathy among professionals working in forensic settings or criminological contexts.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 697-697
Author(s):  
L. Harris

Today, when some critics of our juvenile-justice system are complaining that the system is incompetent in dealing with violent young criminals, other critics are complaining that it is showing amazing efficiency in locking up—often for long periods—troubled young people who have not been charged with committing any crime, violent or otherwise. Such young people, they point out, represent approximately forty per cent of the hundred thousand-odd children who will be sent to jail this year for at least twenty-four hours and of the twelve thousand who will be placed in juvenile-detention centers every day. These children, who are variously labelled Persons in Need of Supervision (PINS), Children in Need of Supervision (CINS), Juveniles in Need of Supervision (JINS), or Wayward Minors, depending on the state they live in, will be guilty of nothing more serious than being a burden or a nuisance. They are not juvenile criminals—they have committed no act for which an adult could be prosecuted. Mainly, they are children who are truant from school, who have run away from home, or whose parents (the majority of them poor) find them too difficult to manage. Under one name or another, the PINS judicial category is written into the laws of forty-one states, and children who are assigned to it occupy, according to one estimate, as much as forty-one per cent of the case load of juvenile courts.... Underlying all the state statutes [is] the doctrine of parens patriae drawn from English chancery law—that the court could act to resolve the problems of troubled children as if it were a parent.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeananne Nichols ◽  
Brian M. Sullivan

Though many pre-service music teachers have received exemplary instruction in their high school music programs, these programs may not be representative of the social, cultural, and economic diversity of their broader communities. This insularity may hinder their perceptions of their community as they step into an increasingly diverse school environment. The Champaign County Juvenile Detention Center (CCJDC) Arts Project was adopted as a critical service-learning course in order to introduce pre-service music teachers to students and ways of teaching that may be different from what they typically encounter through their university field experiences. Participants in the project designed and facilitated music and arts experiences with the incarcerated youth once per week over an entire semester. In this case study we examine the experiences of six pre-service music teachers who participated in the CCJDC Arts Project during 2012, looking for moments of “dissonance,” which Kiely defines as incongruities between participants’ past experiences and the challenging reality they encounter through the project. Entry into the facility, interactions with the youth at the facility, and the musical practices shaped by the needs of the facility all worked in tandem to challenge participants’ latent expectations and beliefs about their community, and to heighten their awareness of the sociocultural systems that shape their future students, their developing teaching practices, and their own privileged positions in school and society.


1987 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dembo ◽  
Mark Washburn ◽  
Eric D. Wish ◽  
James Schmeidler ◽  
Alan Getreu ◽  
...  

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