Available From UC Press

From home, to school, to juvenile detention center, and back again. Follow the lives of fifty Latina girls living forty miles outside of Los Angeles, California, as they are inadvertently caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. Their experiences in the connected programs between “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” Community School reveal the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. The girls participate in well-intentioned wraparound services designed to provide them with support at home, at school, and in the detention center. But these services may more closely resemble the phenomenon of wraparound incarceration, in which students, despite leaving the actual detention center, cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention, and are thereby slowly pushed away from traditional schooling and a productive life course. 

Jerry Flores is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto.

"This riveting ethnography provides readers with a rare look at the experiences of young women within the juvenile justice system. Flores brilliantly demonstrates how schools and carceral institutions become inextricably connected to form a ubiquitous system of punitive control, leading to bleak outcomes in the lives of marginalized girls."—Victor Rios, author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

"Jerry Flores’s compelling ethnography focuses on the lives of fifty Latina girls at a youth detention facility and its associated community (continuation) school. Through analyzing the various pathways to incarceration, Flores illustrates key turning points that can help extricate girls from the criminal justice system. This book questions conventional knowledge about girls in detention and ultimately complicates the portrayal of racially gendered criminalization. It should be carefully examined by practitioners, scholars, policy makers, and students."—Denise A. Segura, coeditor of Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader