UCLA Law Review Prison Row: a Topographical History of Carcerality
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U.C.L.A. Law Review Prison Row: A Topographical History of Carcerality in California Julia A. Mendoza ABSTRACT U.S. Highway 99 is often coined the Golden State Highway and the Main Street of California. The road originally extended from the U.S.–Mexico border all the way to the Oregon border while passing through the Central Valley. When you travel along this route, you pass a little over half of all California prisons. By using U.S. Highway 99 as an entry point, this Article is a topographical study of California’s carceral history. The first Part of this Article gives a brief history of the various forms of incarceration—from California’s gold rush era in 1949, to the massive multimillion-dollar prison expansion during the 1980s and 1990s. The second Part narrates the carceral landscape that surrounds U.S. Highway 99 when you are driving along the route, starting from the Calexico East Port Entry near California’s southern border and following the original road all the way to the north where the road eventually traces the Siskiyou Trail. Intertwined with this narration is a description of the various ways California has disproportionately incarcerated communities of color and how the reliance on carceral practices affects education. AUTHOR Julia A. Mendoza is a Thomas C. Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School, and currently working on her book manuscript, The Miseducation of the Barrio: The School to Prison Pipeline in Stockton, California (under contract with Stanford University Press). She would like to thank the following people for their generous thoughts and comments: Michelle Wilde Anderson, George Fisher, Elaine Freedgood, Craig Gilmore, Cory Greene, Joss Greene, Shannon Guillot-Wright, Marie Legge, Michelle Lipinski, Joel Shields, David Sklansky, Patricia J. Williams, and the participants of the Stanford Grey Fellow Law Forum (2019). This Article is dedicated to her grandfather, whose travels along Highway 99 were driven by survival. 66 UCLA L. REV. 1616 (2019) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................................................1618 I. A Short History of California’s Carceral Practices .............................................................1619 II. Driving Up Prison Row .......................................................................................................................1624 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................1632 1617 1618 66 UCLA L. REV. 1616 (2019) INTRODUCTION Once upon a time, U.S. Highway 99 was the transit backbone of California. Formerly known as the Golden State Highway and the Main Street of California, the highway route originally began at the U.S.–Mexico border and extended north all the way along the traces of the Siskiyou Trail toward Oregon.1 What was once the path migrant farmers used to travel as the seasons changed is now the road many families take to visit their loved ones in prison and detention centers. From the Imperial Regional Detention Facility near the Calexico East Port of Entry all the way to Folsom State Prison where Johnny Cash once sang “Cocaine Blues,” the Golden State Highway has now become Prison Row.2 Driving along U.S. Highway 99 takes you through the heart of California.3 When driving along the route, you may pass through fields of alfalfa in Imperial, grapes in Delano, and almonds in Fresno. Home to more than 230 crops, the soil of the Central Valley nourishes people all over the United States.4 Driving at highway speeds past these farms, the workers laboring in the fields blur out. In Don Mitchell’s words, “The pattern and color of the California landscape are mortgaged on the backs of an endless stream of workers.”5 And alongside these laborers is a carceral landscape, also hidden in plain sight. The following narrative describes the various layers of California’s carceral history that exist along U.S. Highway 99. Although California’s incarcerated population has dropped in the last fifteen years,6 the rate of incarceration in the state remains significantly higher in comparison to countries such as Canada, France, Portugal and the United Kingdom.7 1. STEPHEN H. PROVOST, HIGHWAY 99: THE HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA’S MAIN STREET 5 (2017). 2. I was first introduced to this term by Sammy Nunez, the Executive Director of Fathers and Families of San Joaquin Valley. With that said, it is important to note that the notion of “prison row” is analogous to “prison alley” as described by Ruthie Gilmore in her foundational work, Golden Gulag. See RUTH WILSON GILMORE, GOLDEN GULAG: PRISONS, SURPLUS, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION IN GLOBALIZING CALIFORNIA 129 (2007). 3. See generally PROVOST, supra note 1, at 172–250. 4. Mark Bittman, Everyone Eats There, N.Y. TIMES MAG. (Oct. 10, 2012), https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/californias-central-valley-land-of-a- billion-vegetables.html [https://perma.cc/QVR4-GLV5]. 5. DON MITCHELL, THE LIE OF THE LAND: MIGRANT WORKERS AND THE CALIFORNIA LANDSCAPE 15 (1996). 6. Peter Wagner, Tracking State Prison Growth in 50 States, PRISON POL’Y INITIATIVE (May 28, 2014), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/overtime.html [https://perma.cc/V6L9-F7RR]. 7. California Profile, PRISON POL’Y INITIATIVE, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/CA.html [https://perma.cc/LS68-Q2V8] (last visited Feb. 4, 2020). A Topographical History of Carcerality in CA 1619 I. A SHORT HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA’S CARCERAL PRACTICES Before the 1920s, migrants were housed in labor camps across the Central Valley.8 Tents and kitchens on wheels arose to house individuals from all over the world.9 Beyond labor camps, tenement towns existed along U.S. Highway 99 from Los Angeles to Fresno to Stockton.10 Although the majority of laborers in the camps were men, the Commission of Immigration and Housing of California counted 1829 children living in the dismal conditions.11 Because of the difficulty in educating transitory children, the Commission of Immigration and Housing of California developed the Home Teacher Act, passed by the 1915 California Legislature.12 The sentiment espoused by the refrain— “Americanize the children and they will Americanize the home!”—characterizes the predominant educational theory of the time.13 Realizing that this educational framework left out the mother’s influence in the immigrant home, the Act developed a series of English lessons for immigrant mothers as a way of placing them “in command of their own situation by correlating them with the best America has to offer.”14 The first lesson instructed parents on how to write five sentences in cursive: “I cook. I wash. I sweep. I mop. I sew.”15 Although the teacher is instructed to conduct the lesson “with so much vivacity and variety that the pupil has no sense of monotony,” the second lesson immediately defeats the purpose with instructions to write the following six sentences: “We cook. We wash. We iron. We sweep. We mop. We sew.”16 During the 1920s, the United States passed a series of laws that restricted immigration for laborers of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. The shifting 8. See OFFICE OF THE COMM’N OF IMMIGRATION & HOUSING OF CALIFORNIA, SECOND ANNUAL REPORT 346 tbl.IV (1916) [hereinafter SECOND ANNUAL REPORT] (demonstrating that the nationalities represented in 107 labor camps inspected between November 1, 1914 and June 30, 1915 included Americans, Italians, Mexicans, Japanese, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, Portuguese, Austrians, Swedes, Irish, French, Russians, English, Swiss, Negroes, Slavonians, Koreans, Porto Ricans, and Filipinos). 9. Id. at 21, 47–49. 10. See id. at 204. 11. Id. at 346. A total of 40,906 individuals lived in the 983 labor camps inspected by the Commission of Immigration and Housing of California between April 10, 1914 and June 30, 1915. Id. 12. See THE COMM’N OF IMMIGRATION & HOUSING OF CALIFORNIA, THE HOME TEACHER: THE ACT, WITH A WORKING PLAN AND FORTY LESSONS IN ENGLISH (1915). 13. SECOND ANNUAL REPORT, supra note 8, at 154. 14. Id. at 158. 15. Id. at 160. 16. Id. at 159, 161. 1620 66 UCLA L. REV. 1616 (2019) racial demographics of the labor pool led California landowners to rely more on Mexican fieldworkers. As one farmer bluntly noted: We want Mexicans because we can treat them as we cannot treat any other living men . We can control them at night behind bolted gates, within a stockade eight feet high, surmounted by barbed wire. We make them work under armed guards in the field.17 The desire for Mexican labor shifted yet again in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Through a series of repatriations, Mexicans (many of whom were also U.S. citizens) were gathered and deported against their will.18 In the wake of these deportations, Dustbowl migrants began replacing Mexican and Mexican American laborers in the field.19 U.S. Highway 99 also passes along the sites of ten of the thirteen Japanese internment assembly centers in California. Under Executive Order 9066 during World War II, the federal government forced Japanese people, including American citizens, to report to repurposed fairgrounds and racetracks.20 After being forced to leave their homes, people of Japanese descent were temporarily incarcerated at an assembly center. A government commission wrote in 1997 that “[e]vacuees often recall two images of their arrival: walking to the camp between a cordon of armed guards, and first seeing the barbed wire and searchlights, the menacing symbols of a prison.”21 Japanese Americans were housed at the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) assembly centers for a few months and then shipped inland to permanent concentration camps.22 Educational programming in the assembly centers was makeshift at best. Classrooms were staffed with evacuee teachers and college graduates. Teachers tried to teach a curriculum that included standard subjects such as English, American history, music, and art, but they lacked books and school supplies. Children attended classes and received grades without having any clue of what their future might hold.23 17.