Abstract
Female delinquency and the treatment of girls by the justice system have been historically underexplored areas in punishment and criminological studies. With his ethnographic examination of California’s efforts to meld systems of juvenile incarceration with institutions of education, Jerry Flores’s monograph, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration, addresses this absence in the literature. Overall, he achieves two important goals: (1) to understand Latina girls’ pathways into and out of the justice system, focusing on turning points and “hooks” for change and paying particular attention to the ways race, class, gender, and sexuality structure their experiences at home, in placement/school, and after exit from the system; and (2) to develop his concept of wraparound incarceration by examining the integration of community surveillance with alternative educational institutions that can often lead to additional punishment. Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration illustrates how extensively formal social control and scrutiny penetrate the girls’ lives and how easily minor infractions are detected and unforgiven by the many institutions controlling them—home, foster and group home placements, school, alternative education environments, and detention facilities. Flores also underscores the many challenges his interviewees face inside and outside the justice system as well as the many layers of violence and trauma in their lives.
The main limitation to Flores’s work is in his underdevelopment of the concept of wraparound incarceration. He argues that the connection between community day schools (alternative educational settings for expelled and/or high-risk students) and detention reflects less the well-intentioned, designed system of wraparound support from social service professionals and more the continued surveillance of youth. He then argues that such continued supervision leads to additional capture of youth in his study, thus amplifying the pipeline between school to alternative day school placement to detention (often with several points of contact with probation officers and other justice professionals throughout the pipeline). Yet, what the girls experienced (and what he describes) was often not wraparound incarceration. What Flores often detailed instead were institutions performing supervision of the girls (particularly of their bodies and movements) as well as being hyperinspective of girls’ choices and behaviors (especially sexual), as has been historically the case with reform schools for wayward female youth. In this sense, Flores’s book would benefit from an expansion of his concept of wraparound incarceration to one that more clearly aligns with his data: wraparound punishment and embodied surveillance.
Despite such criticism, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration is an important work in the field of criminology for several reasons. First, ethnographic studies of juvenile correctional establishments in any form are uncommon, and studies that dually focus on the offender as well as the institution(s) are likewise rare. To examine how structure shapes behaviors and choices and to unpack how institutional policies affect offending trajectories are important scholarly endeavors. Second, in the gender and crime as well as juvenile justice literature, there exists a true paucity on Latina girls and the multiple forms of marginalization they experience throughout their lives. There is also limited information about how the school to prison/detention (and back to school) pipeline works for girls, especially Latina girls. Third, whereas much has been discussed in the social work discipline about wraparound services, very little work has been critical of the approach as it has been implemented in alternative education schools and correctional facilities, especially how such services serve as a conduit to continued punishment and, possibly, secure confinement. Through these major ways, Flores’s study adds value to the discipline and to the understanding of a population that has been neglected and invisible in criminological research. Rich in detail, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration also has the potential to guide future conversations about school to prison pipeline practices (as well as prison to school practices) and juvenile justice supervision.