Abstract
This chapter explores the distinctive dilemmas that volunteers of color face as they move across a new Jim Crow color line created by mass incarceration. College students of color make sense of race and come to understand their own racial identities through their work as volunteers in a Southern California juvenile hall where they come face-to-face with several interlocking racialized images of youth: the “teenage mother,” the “high school dropout,” and especially the “thug.” Exploring the diverse experiences of Black and Latino volunteers enables us to see the ways race, class, and gender create distinctive contours of the color line in twenty-first-century America and the ways the criminal justice system is reshaping our ideas about race.
The research for this chapter was in part funded by the University of Redlands. The volunteer program discussed in this paper is supported by the Will J. Reid Foundation
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Notes
- 1.
The “Inside Out” Prison Exchange Model was started by Lori Pompa (2002) at Temple University.
- 2.
I use students’ descriptions of their own racial and ethnic identities to place them in racial categories.
- 3.
Students volunteered this information without being explicitly asked so the numbers may be higher. Interestingly, two White volunteers had served time on juvenile probation themselves, while no students of color had, an indication of the ways White privilege could pave the way to college in spite of a history of criminal trouble.
- 4.
This is a common term for the cultural style of street-affiliated Mexican American kids.
- 5.
Famous gangta rap group of the 1980s and 1990s from South-central Los Angeles.
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Tilton, J.R. (2016). Crossing the Color Line into America’s Prisons: Volunteers of Color Reflect on Race and Identity in a College Service Learning Project. In: Abrams, L., Hughes, E., Inderbitzin, M., Meek, R. (eds) The Voluntary Sector in Prisons. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54215-1_12
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