Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity
| Date | 01 July 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520952141 |
| Author | Aaron Kupchik |
| Published date | 01 July 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
As we stand in the tree’s bloody shadow, we are all implicated in ecologies of
violence. From our perspective as researchers and practitioners, embedded in an
activist and knowledge-based institution, Celermajer’s book gives us pause for
thought and grounds for action.
ORCID iD
Ergun Cakal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5184-6589
Ergun Cakal , Andrew M Jefferson and Tomas Max Martin
DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, Denmark
Patrick Lopez-Aguado, Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting
and the Spillover of Carceral Identity, University of California Press:
Oakland, CA, 2018; 226 þxi pp. (including index). ISBN
9780520288591, $29.95 (pbk)
A good ethnography describes how social status creates meaning, so that the
audience can understand the depth of experiences of the group being studied.
Early prison ethnographies, for example, taught us about “prisonization” and
how incarcerated people make sense of their surroundings while managing
safety risks. Stick Together and Come Back Home is an excellent ethnographic
work that follows this tradition. In it, Patrick Lopez-Aguado describes how
California’s preoccupation with preventing gang violence results in a racialized
“carceral social order” that creates meaning for respondents, shapes their behav-
ior, and impacts how they and their communities are policed and punished.
Over the course of fifteen months, Lopez-Aguado spent time in a juvenile deten-
tion facility, a continuation high school for youth on probation, and a reentry
center for formerly incarcerated people – three sites where neighborhoods and
punishment systems converge. His observations, interactions with clients and stu-
dents, and interviews with almost 80 respondents provided him with rich data
describing the futility and harms of California’s penal practices. The main problem
he describes begins with the state’s assumptions that youth and adults who enter
penal facilities (including prisons, juvenile detention, and continuation schools) are
gang members. This assumption – which is usually incorrect since relatively few are
actually gang affiliated – justifies racial sorting, where facility staff label the youth
and adults as belonging to specific gangs based on their race and what part of the
state they come from. Facilities segregate people according to these assumed gang
identities, and in the process create a series of rules and affiliations that incarcer-
ated people (and students) must follow to protect their safety and maintain order
within the system created by the facilities. In the process, the state actually creates
the gang identities that often didn’t exist before incarceration, but that pervade
Book reviews 439
To continue reading
Request your trial