Ten Cuidado: Gendered Carceral Care Work & Miseducations of Love in Latina/o Youth Intervention

This dissertation is an ethnography of a juvenile “delinquency deterrence” program housed in a California police department that I call the Protecting Kids Program (PKP). The program is run by Latina/o officers with the goal of keeping Latina/o youth in school and out of trouble. Through a year-long ethnography, consisting of over 700 hours of observations of mentorship sessions, intake interviews with families, field trips, life-skills classes, and community programming, I analyze how the PKP works to redirect youth labeled as “at risk” while simultaneously reproducing forms of surveillance, discipline, and control. Building on scholarship across carcerality, Black feminist thought, juvenile justice, Latino/a Studies, and youth intervention, I show how the PKP functions as a “soft” arm of crime prevention that merges care practices with institutional policing mandates. Using a theoretical framework based on bell hooks’ “miseducations of love,” I suggest that punishment and care become inextricably linked in programs like the PKP. I argue that the PKP embodies a form of carceral care work that merges emotional labor with policing, using ethnoracial kinship to legitimize control. Latino officers’ attempts to help youth are deeply shaped by their own histories of marginalization, aspirations for mobility, and desires to improve their communities. Yet, these efforts reproduce carceral logics that frame success as compliance and belonging as conditional. Through the daily practices of the PKP, care becomes another pathway through which carcerality enters the lives of Latino/a youth.

Author dc:creator

• Alexia Palomino (23292175)

• Sociology
• General

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-01-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451944.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451944