Youth, Community and the Struggle for Social Justice

Tim Goddard, Randy Myers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138210004
• eBook ISBN: 9781315456195
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Activists, policymakers, and scholars in the US have called for policy reform and evidence-based efforts to decrease the number of people in jail and prison, improve hostile police–community relations, and rollback the "tough on crime" movement. Given that poor people, particularly poor people of color, make up the majority of those under carceral control in Western, industrial countries, can technical solutions, gradual reforms, and individual-level programming genuinely change the deeply entrenched carceral state that has been expanding in the US for over 40 years?

In this book, the authors offer an examination of the creative ideas that twelve US-based social justice organizations put forward for how participation in social change might spur not only individual-level change in young people, but community-wide mobilization against the harms resulting from the "tough on crime" movement and neoliberal policy. Using alternative programs grounded in political and social consciousness-raising, these organizations provide important and novel methods for how we might roll back carceral expansion. Their approaches resonate with scholarship in criminology and related fields; however, they sharply contrast with popular notions of "what works". The authors detail how community-based organizations must navigate not only these scientific forces, but the bureaucratic and financial ones consistent with neoliberal governance as well as the more formidable, less navigable political barriers that activate when organizations mobilize young people of color for social and carceral reform.

While aware of the formidable barriers they face, the authors highlight the emancipatory potential of community-based social justice organizations working with the most marginalized young people across several major US cities. Written in an accessible way, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, progressive policymakers, practitioners, and activists and their allies who are deeply troubled by the class and racial disparities that pervade the carceral state.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book is about the work of twelve social justice organizations that orient to youth crime as a product of social injustice, their creative ideas about how working to bring about social change can foster personal change, and their efforts to transform the social and penal policies aimed at poor, young people of color. Drawing on qualitative interviews with organizational staff, this book explores how the work of these grassroots groups relates to criminology and the governance of crime in the neoliberal moment.

Recently, scholars have called for grassroots efforts that transform the carceral state, recognizing that to end mass incarceration, we will need to look beyond technical solutions put forth by expert panels or scholarly findings. This book documents such a movement. It engages with the creative ideas that social justice organizations put forward about how participation in social change might spur individual-level change in young people. Some of these groups conduct creative forms of intervention grounded in political and social consciousness raising while others focus on mobilizing young people for social change. As ambitious and creative as these ideas are, our study also uncovered the larger power dynamics that both allow their existence and threaten their autonomy and survival.

These organizations continue a long history of grassroots campaigning for social change. Throughout history, community-based grassroots efforts have fought for social change in the US and around the world (DeFilippis, Fisher, & Shragge, 2010). Whether the grassroots approach is struggling for workers’ rights, racial integration, women’s rights, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) rights, community is almost always at its core. In the US today, mass incarceration represents a pronounced social problem ripe for such community mobilization (Miller, 2013). And, indeed, since the late 1990s, a growing number of grassroots organizations have worked to protest mass incarceration, stop the increasingly punitive way of dealing with young offenders, and create less harmful, community-based alternatives for dealing with the concentrated nature of violence in the US (Currie, 2016).

The twelve organizations differed in their tactics, politics, and approach. Most of the youth-oriented organizations we visited delivered services, often using political consciousness and participation in community change as a catalyst for personal change in young people; however, a smaller portion of our sample focused only on organizing young people for social, educational, and justice system reform. Whether organizations were focused on service or organizing (or both), this book is about how the organizations’ insights, victories, and limitations relate to criminology, illustrating the challenge of doing social change as crime prevention and justice reform work in the neoliberal moment—a moment where economic inequalities are widening, criminal justice has become the face of the state in poor communities, and the social is devolving (Winlow & Hall, 2013). An account of a research site visit in 2013 illuminates some of the issues we try to unpack in this book:

On a summer day in a major US city, we visited Youth United (YU)—a nonprofit, violence prevention program for “at-risk” youth founded by grassroots activists who have lived in this community for many years. Like many of the 12 organizations we visited across the US, YU sees itself as carrying on a tradition of social justice service and organizing. Similar to many of the organizations in this study, and in contrast to most mainstream crime control and delinquency prevention programs, YU utilizes consciousness-raising lessons, which help youth to better understand the social problems that shape their individual biographies, including the public drug use and street violence that happens just outside the YU doors. While the program is more service-oriented than it was at its inception, YU still involves youth in community improvement projects and public protests as part of its curriculum. It cites the Black Panthers as inspiration, especially for the service elements, which tend to be forgotten. Various public and private sources fund its violence prevention work, some of which takes place in local schools.
Recently, YU added lessons on gentrification to its curriculum to help youth better understand the profound changes that are occurring within the social ecology of their neighborhood. In the midst of new conference centers, posh retail shops, and securitized streets, enduring social problems, including street violence and public drug use, still remain in this community. Indeed, on one of our visits, we learn from the program’s director that less than two blocks away from YU two hours before we arrived, a drive-by shooting left a man dead. The organization’s founder explains to us how he simulates gunshots with handclaps, coaching youth on what furniture is best to duck behind—couches are particularly sturdy, he tells us.
In interviews with staff, we learn about the backgrounds of the kids who run around the two-story YU facility: Some of them live in low-income apartments, which sit uneasily beside the newly built, glittering business towers, hip restaurants, and trendy shops; others, more precariously, live in single-room-occupancy hotel rooms. Many of their families have no work, though some have too much work, mostly as low-wage service workers in this global city. In addition to seeing the riches of the “new economy” on a daily basis, all of these youth confront the lived realities of homelessness and drug abuse as they make their way to school and back; some of them, given the stressed nature of some of their families, likely see violence, drug abuse, and criminal justice intervention from a more personal vantage point.
As was the case throughout our fieldwork, we are struck by the profound decency of the YU staff. There is clear warmth in the interactions between staff and the young people they serve (whose ages are mainly between 12 and 17 years). Although we only made two visits to YU, this warmth seems undeniable. When the staff begins to tell us about the backgrounds of the kids YU serves, one of the staff members begins to tear up: The poverty that they so often live in, the drug use and violence that they see, their stressed and strained families—the lived realities of the sort of “checked boxes” of structured disadvantage that make youth “at-risk” in today’s phrasing. Clearly, YU staff members have relationships with these youth—these are not “at-risk” “clients” to them—although the violence prevention contracts that fund YU may use such language. Staff members tell us about YU programs that they continue to operate long after grant money has dried up—the need is still there, the relationship with the young person is still there, and so they figure out other ways to fund, for instance, afternoon snacks for the youth.
Like many of the organizations we visited, funding, which is a mix of foundation grants and city and county violence prevention contracts, is multifaceted and precarious. We sit down with the organization’s staff to ask them about how they manage to find funding to do consciousness-raising and community-action projects as youth crime prevention. They tell us that while there is pressure to adopt evidence-based programs, they still manage to keep on doing what they have always done, even when they take money attached to, say, the implementation of cognitive-behavioral programs. “We don’t change what we do”, says one staff member, “it just changes sometimes what we call it”.
From the organization’s financial officer, we also learn that the city—one of the richest in the world and most progressive in the country—is not currently funding the YU summer program. This does not mean that the summer program is not happening; it just means that YU is not being paid for the programming, which we can see taking place right outside the offices we are interviewing in. A recent site visit from a city officer revealed, to him at least, that the neighborhood YU serves had no need for such a program. One respondent feels that the city has a plan for this rapidly gentrifying, traditionally working-poor community, and keeping the community intact is not part of that plan. The presence of the young people who fill the YU facility on the days we visit—youth who, we are told, often go home to modest apartments and hotel rooms crammed between liquor stores and soup kitchens as well as encroaching art galleries, boutique coffee shops and high-tech software firms—suggests that the need is still very much there.
While there appear to be many young people from the community who need YU’s services, the effects of gentrification are all around. YU is trying its best to adapt to this reality, both in how it interacts with youth and how it assures its organizational survival. On our second visit, we were told that the founder of the organization was meeting with a local developer about the possibility of a partnership that would allow the YU building to remain in the community. Other staff members talk about the possibilities of other partnerships with real estate developers, which would require builders to hire a certain percentage of youth from the neighborhood to build the new lofts and offices that are rapidly replacing older storefronts and the more modest housing that once sustained the community. In the short term, hiring local craftspeople and laborers seems like a positive development. What will happen to the youth and their families once the new buildings are complete, however, is not discussed. We wonder aloud about how long what remains of the working-class families will be able to hang on in this rapidly changing neighborhood. Thus, this short-term benefit seems to lead inevitably to the disappearance of this community.
As we leave the organization, we begin to make sense of what we just saw and heard: the humanity and creativity of this instance of community crime prevention and how this contrasts with the individualized approaches of the “crime sciences”; the financial precariousness brought on by the neoliberal way of funding and holding accountable community-based organizations; the impending gentrification set off by global forces, which now reverberate through the lives of YU youth and staff; and the lived realities of the modest and uneven investment that the richest nation in the world is willing to make toward basic services for its most vulnerable young people. As we talk about these themes and others, needless to say, we are left with more questions than answers—but also the sense that there is much that criminologists can learn from organizations like YU as our field tries to say something of substance about issues of crime and justice in these troubling times.

Background for the study

While the data for this book was collected mainly in the spring and summer of 2013, our interest in community organizations like YU began in 2008. During the fall semester of that academic year, while enrolled in a graduate-level, anthropology methods course, we began attending the weekly meeting of a social movement organization, which organized young people for justice system reform. While attending these meetings, we learned a great deal about the organization’s newly formed charter high school. This school reached out to young people who had been pushed out of mainstream schools and had often spent time in the juvenile and criminal justice systems or been affected by the incarceration of a family member. The federal government funded the school through the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), and it was accredited as a charter school by a school district in the northern part of the state, hundreds of miles away.

Like all WIA programs, the school imparted to youth a marketable skill along with the remedial education they needed to attain a high school diploma; unlike other WIA programs, which focused on teaching traditional trades such as air conditioning repair, cosmetology, construction and the like, this school taught youth the skill of social movement organizing, and students honed this skill by organizing campaigns, specifically against issues of criminal and economic injustice. On their way to a high school diploma, the students marched on police stations, took over abandoned libraries, held town hall meetings with high-level probation officials, conducted workshops for police officers on citizen’s rights and excessive force, and marched on the state capital for juvenile justice system reform—and the school was funded, in part, by public money.

Several aspects intrigued us about the school. Its existence went against what we thought possible in modern delinquency prevention under neoliberalism as the existing literature (with good reason) tended to focus on how the governance tools that accompanied the “turn to communities” stifled community creativity and undermined local autonomy in favor of top-down command and control (Braithwaite, 2000; Crawford, 2006; Garland, 1996; Herbert, 2005). But here was an organization that seemed to be the antithesis of this—they were taking federal funds, were subject to benchmarks and audits by their state funders and accreditors, and yet they were doing protest and popular education as a form of crime prevention and intervention.

This linking of personal change to political action resonated with what we’d read while in reading groups and classes at University of California, Irvine, where we’d been exposed to Paolo Freire and heard of programs like Mobilization for Youth and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, which suggested social consciousness and social action could be used as a vehicle for personal change, including for delinquent youth. This school served as a modern example of using popular education principles to effect personal and social change, despite being subjected to the coercive governance inherent in public–private partnerships under neoliberalism.

The school contrasted sharply with the highly individualized community and custodial programs for youth, which we’d both come across while collecting data for other youth justice-related research projects (e.g. Goddard, 2012, 2014; Myers, 2013, 2015) and while writing publicly funded reports and conducting accountability audits on community-based youth crime prevention programs. The school also exemplified a theme we had seen in these other projects: the “messiness” of youth justice on the ground, including youth justice programs, which often seemed “braided” with multiple logics and illogics (Hutchinson, 2006; Muncie, 2006). Moreover, the prescribed evidence-based ideas and neoliberal measures of accountability that we had read about seemed much less totalizing on the ground: We had seen how welfarist sentiments often motored organizations that offered evidence-based programming “on the books” (Goddard, 2012), we had audited youth-serving community organizations paid to deliver cognitive therapies they’d never heard of, and we had seen the homespun sorts of interventions cloaked in evidence-based language (Myers, 2013). These projects attuned us to the chaotic nature of youth justice programming—and the school, with all its contradictions, put a unique twist on this: The relative autonomy afforded by neoliberal governance seemed to be more exploitable than other accounts might have allowed for as here was a case where state monies were being used to mobilize youth protest of the carceral state.

Current study: research questions, methods, and research sites

We knew we wanted to visit other organizations to answer the questions that our initial fieldwork had raised. In particular, we wanted to better understand how organizations that oriented to youth crime as a product of social injustice understood and navigated barriers consistent with neoliberal governance, and we wanted to more fully chart the possibilities and limits of this autonomy. We also wanted to learn how the people who ran organizations that focused on social change as a catalyst for personal change thought the “success” of their programs should be measured—given that their definitions of “success” went beyond individual-level, behavioral outcomes. In addition to the practices of singular organizations, we wanted to better understand how market forces and coercive means of governance conditioned the ways in which organizations related to one another. Specifically, how did competitive funding arrangements—the constant competition for grants and contracts—condition how organizations that championed cooperation and solidarity relate to one another? How did these organizations (and the barriers they faced) compare to popular and institutionalized programs from earlier decades, such as Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and Mobilization for Youth?

To answer these questions, interviews were conducted with organizational actors from twelve organizations operating in major US cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Oakland, San Francisco, and New York. We identified the twelve sites by way of Internet search and subsequent snowball sampling. Nine of the organizations were visited once, two of them twice and one several times. At six of the organizations, we interviewed only the Director or Executive Director; at four organizations, both the Director and one other staff member were interviewed; and at two organizations, we conducted interviews with three or more respondents. In all, we collected eighteen interviews from twenty-four respondents at the twelve sites we visited. An interview schedule guided the interviews, focused on the following four main areas: the history and philosophy of the organization, the services and organizing efforts of the organization, the sources of funding the organization had experience with, and the techniques of governance the organization had experienced. When the need presented itself, we strayed from the guide to explore a topic that arose organically during the interview.

While most of the youth involved in these twelve programs were young people of color, program participants varied in age and criminal history. Some organizations focused their efforts on working with younger youth “at-risk” of crime, while others worked with (and often sought out) older youth with significant histories in the juvenile or criminal justice system. Funding arrangements influenced the profile of youth in a given program as after school programs, case work contracts, charter school agreements and the like “funneled” youth of a particular age—and with a particular criminal history—into an organization.

All of the organizations worked in marginalized communities in major US cities. The communities shared important characteristics consistent with the drift towards extreme levels of economic inequality and the criminalization of poverty in the US. Respondents described how the youth they served often had routine brushes with the police, how many of their parents and extended family had been incarcerated, and how police officers walked the halls of the schools that many of the young people attended.

Many of the organizations worked with young people who were affiliated with local gangs—or, at least, were labeled as gang members by local police. Several organizations, like YU, described how youth routinely saw public drug use—and how some young people suggested that drug use may have occurred in their own homes. These negative characteristics did not wholly define life in these communities, but their presence shaped the lived realities of young people in ways that were distinct from the experiences of young people from more affluent US communities. It was issues related to crime and criminalization that organizations often sought to address through their service and organizing work. The twelve organizations conducted a wide variety of activities: Six were mainly focused on delivering services to young people, four focused mainly on organizing young people for protest and advocacy efforts, while two mainly coordinated grassroots or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Background, context, and description of the social justice organizations
• 3 Source reduction of delinquency and youth violence
• 4 Navigating the dilemmas of funding and reporting
• 5 Negotiating neoliberal governance and the political limits of community
• 6 Grassroots mobilizing and the carceral state
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Index