Race, Recognition and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice

The Intractability Malleability Thesis

Esmorie Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138488793
• eBook ISBN: 9781351039444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Race, Recognition and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice provides a cross-national, sociohistorical investigation of the legacy of racial discrimination, which informs contemporary youth justice practice in Canada and England. The book links racial disparities in youth justice, especially exclusion from ideologies of care and notions of future citizenship, with historical practices of exclusion.

Despite the logic of care found in both rehabilitative and retributive forms of youth justice, Black inner-city youth remain excluded from lenience and social welfare considerations. This exclusion reflects a historical legacy of racial discrimination apparent in the harsher sanctions levied against Black, innercity youth. In exploring race's role in this arrangement, the book asks: To what extent were Black youth excluded from historic considerations of the lenience and social care, built into the logic of youth justice in England and Canada? To what extent are the disproportionately high incarceration rates, for Black, inner-city youth in the contemporary system, a reflection of a historic exclusion from considerations of lenience and social care? How might contemporary justice efforts be reoriented to explicitly prioritize considerations of lenience and social care ahead of penalty for Black, inner-city youth?

Examining the entrenched structural continuities of racial discrimination, the book draws on archival and interview data, with interviewees including professionals who work with inner-city youth. In concert with the archival and interview data, the book offers the intractability/malleability I/M thesis, an integrated social theoretical logic with the capacity to expand the customary analytical scope for understanding the contemporary entrenched normalization of racialized youth as punishable. The aim is to advance a historicized account, exploring youth's positioning as constitutive of a continuity of racialized peoples', in general, and youth's, in particular, historic exclusion from the benefits of modern rights, including lenience and care. The I/M logic takes its analytical currency from a combined critical race theory (CRT) and recognition theory. The book argues that a truly progressive era of youth justice necessitates cultivating policy and practice which explicitly prioritizes considerations of lenience and social care, ahead of reliance on penalty.

This multidisciplinary book is valuable reading for academics and students researching criminology, sociology, politics, anthropology, critical race studies, and history. It will also appeal to practitioners in the field of youth justice, policymakers, and third-sector organizations.

1The intractability/malleability (I/M) thesis

On the historic construction of Black, racialized youth as intractably deviant outsiders

DOI: 10.4324/9781351039468-2

Introduction

Stigma and social identity. Students, however, have made little effort to describe the structural preconditions of stigma, or even to provide a definition of the concept itself. It seems necessary, therefore, to try at the beginning to sketch in some very general assumptions and definitions.

(Goffman, 1968: 11)

Chapter 1 introduces the I/M thesis. This is an analytical framework originated to expand beyond the crime and punishment storylines with which Black youth’s disproportionately high incarceration rates, in the English and Canadian contexts, is customarily bound up. The role of the I/M framework is to assemble a proficient vocabulary, which can offer a more expanded examination of Black youth’s disproportionately high incarceration rates. According to the central premise of the I/M thesis, historically Black youth were outside the imaginings of early twentieth-century English and Canadian youth penal reform efforts. This outsider status remains pertinent to the recognition these youth receive in contemporary YJ and the wider society. This exclusion is discussed in Chapter 1 as a status consistent with being denied one’s transformative potential, being deemed intractable. In the contemporary arrangement, the youth whose transformative potential has been denied are also the youth for whom disproportionate punishment is rationalized. Disproportionate punishment, therefore, gives a concrete character to a greater problem of exclusion from the benefits of modern rights, of which lenience forms only one part. In this scenario, youth’s disproportionate punishment rates indicate a greater exclusion from benefits and resources, associated with the modern purportedly progressive arrangement, prioritizing universal equality.

The I/M framework contributes racial specificity to what is commonly understood about deviance invention in early modern youth penal reform history. It is informed by the proposal that while what is commonly known about deviance invention in early modern English and Canadian youth penal reform focuses on gender and class, reformers were similarly implicated in the invention of Black racialized youth as deviant. This invented status is the basis of the I/M logic, developed here as an oppositional, outsider positioning, discussed as intractability. To date, race’s place in early penal reform, in these two contexts, remains underrepresented within criminological histories. Yet the rich deviance invention scholarship on class and gender reveals the importance of knowing the historical roots relevant to our contemporary concerns. The suggestion that Black youth’s institutionally invented deviant identity saw them classified as intractable starts from the apparent focus of early modern penal reformers on the malleability of the youth considered normal recipients of reform support. This transformative potential, according to the I/M logic, is one that rendered youth a reliable future investment. To be excluded is discussed in Chapter 1 as something consistent with the denial of one’s transformative potential, of being classified intractable. Consistent with sociologist Erving Goffman’s (1968) outsider conception (referenced in the opening quotation), the I/M thesis outlines the structural basis of being historically attributed a spoiled identity.

Chapter 1 is structured in three parts. The first part reiterates the rationale informing the I/M thesis, reflecting on how it answers the need for a proficient analytical vocabulary with the capacity to explore Black youth’s particular ontological marginalization, within the contemporary YJ regime, as a continuity of history. Historicization gives scope for thinking about these youth’s positioning as a matter of the historic unequal status of Black peoples in modern western history. The second part frames the ideas from which the I/M thesis adapts: CRT, particularly Derrick Bell’s (1980) interest convergence thesis; and RT, particularly Honneth’s (1995) tripartite framework of the modern social arrangements which remain relevant to contemporary experiences. Ideas about recognition are one way to investigate the rules which have structured social arrangements, through the race-specific lens contributed by CRT. The third part adapts Honneth’s love, rights, and solidarity lens, as possibilities for conceptualizing how the historic trajectory of institutional exclusion remains relevant to Black youth’s contemporary deficit positioning as the most punished. According to the I/M logic, being the most punished also indicates being the most excluded.

Part I

The I/M thesis: expanding the analytical scope

To understand the marginalization faced by racialized youth, it is not enough to merely generalize the known histories, such as that of class and gender. Where racialized youth are concerned, approaches that generalize the historic discrimination meted against them risk perpetuating the distorted representations proliferating the contemporary context about them. Chapter 2 addresses notions of distortion consistent with the logic of intersectional feminism, exploring how features like race, gender, and class intersect and compound, through authoritative and ambiguous (mis)representations (Crenshaw, 2013; Crenshaw, 1991). Emphasizing the need for an I/M thesis, therefore, starts by reiterating that it is a framework that responds to nonattendance, specifically to race, in criminological histories.

An embryonic literature on this erasure implicates England and Canada, as noted in the introduction of the book. The I/M thesis is an expanded analytical framework for exploring the particular historic construction of Black peoples, in general, and Black youth, in particular, as deviant, suspicious, outsiders. In this way, it corresponds with the established narrative of deviance construction, in relation to class and gender, as noted previously. Indeed, the terms intractability, malleability themselves encourage consideration that modern conceptions of youth have historically taken shape according to various differentiated categories (Cox, 2018). For instance, while the youth who customarily populate institutional tiers can be assessed according to notions like Goffman’s (1968) outsider conception, this outsider status is differentiated along various lines: there is, for instance, the youth relevant to this book, whose outsider status is constructed around race; the youth whose outsider status is constructed around gender; and the youth whose outsider status is constructed around class, and so on (Pearson, 1983). That youth’s outsider status is most likely differentiated according to intersections, denoting simultaneously inhabiting multiple subaltern statuses, including Black, female, and working-class (Hills-Collins and Bilge, 2020; Parmar, 2014; Crenshaw, 1991, 2013) demands consideration for further research.

Against this backdrop, the I/M thesis contributes racial specificity to what is already known about YJ history, with intractability emphasizing racialized youth’s differentiated status of a historically grounded and enduring socio-political impasse. This designation stands antithetical to the malleability underpinning the rationale for originating a distinct system of justice for youth. The proposal of race as an impasse, which I claim here, can be understood according to Goffman’s (1968: 14) diagnosis and prognosis of how race has operated as a stigma ‘transmitted through lineages and [which] equally contaminate[s] all members of a family.’ The I/M thesis, however, remarks specifically upon this transmission and contamination of racial stigma as both historically and socially contingent. In this way, the I/M logic is also developed through tracing the wider historic and social transformations and continuities informing the phases of YJ, itself. This is key to understanding what the expanded analytical scope involves. Starting with the historic transformations and continuities corresponding with the initial rehabilitative, treatment model, the rationale similarly considers how these continuities inform the subsequent retributive, punishment model, in the contemporary YJ arrangement.

In this way, racialized youth’s adverse positioning is represented, according to the I/M logic, as the outcome of a system already rife with adversities for youth, in general. Criminologist Barry Goldson’s (2005: 79) impassioned condemnation of YJ for its ‘institutionalized’ ‘irrationality’ admonishes the systemic reproduction of adversity for youth, in general, including the punitiveness characterizing the contemporary penal arrangement. Goldson’s admonition of YJ is a position well established in the criminological literature (Cunneen and White, 2006; White and Cunneen, 2006; Owusu-Bempah and Luscombe, 2020; Owusu-Bempah, 2017; Parmar, 2014; Scraton and Haydon, 2002; Warde, 2013). The expanded explanatory vocabulary offered with the I/M thesis specifies the racial dynamics, examining the character of the particular adversities faced by racialized youth, against the backdrop of an already remarkably adverse system. Racial specificity, crucially, attends to a broad non-attendance in the scholarship, emphasizing that Black youth’s outsider positioning is not a matter of criminal justice alone, but a matter of the wider, historically embedded exclusion of racialized peoples from the ideals, including proportionality, underwriting modern justice. Indeed, addressing absence is part of a broader, developing endeavour to contribute much-needed epistemological equalization. This is key to chronicling the historic continuities informing racialized youth’s contemporary ontological marginalization for what it is—a historic denial of youth’s transformative potential, as malleable—undermining their potential for personhood, citizenship, and social partnership.

Writing race into youth penal history: racialized youth and the conditions of modern justice

Attendance to a proficient vocabulary does more than simply fill in the blanks. Attendance supports much-needed epistemological equalization (elaborated subsequently), particularly when what is absent and what is added has the greater task of both identifying and exposing evident socio-historically, institutionally embedded caprices implicated in undermining individual wellbeing. This is central to the task for attending to a particularized narrative about how racialized youths have fared, within the institutional frameworks defining and deploying the conditions of modern justice. Where YJ is concerned, for instance, consider the expectation placed on contemporary youth to be responsible social agents, as witnessed in their legislative affirmation as rights’ bearers. There is an orthodox understanding of this arrangement, starting with the understanding that the contemporary state has provided a positive rights framework (Honneth, 1995; Nussbaum, 2006). This is informed by a series of both national and international instruments, fulfilling a statutory obligation to safeguard youth’s wellbeing, as individuals whose development also prioritizes their role as future social participants (Chapter 5). These expectations, in corresponding with ideals seeking to balance support for both youth’s individual identity development and their capacities as socially responsible individuals, can be arguably read as part of modernity’s promise of proportionality, denoting a prioritization of youth’s welfare and care.

But what of Black, racialized youth, who have been positioned historically, as outsiders, denied their transformative potential? How can we do less than attend to their distinct histories, within these differentiated histories? Remarking on the question of racially specific epistemological equalization, Critical Race Feminist Theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1991: 285) observation that ‘it is fairly obvious that treating different things the same can generate as much inequality as treating the same things differently’ is also a commentary on the processes of gatekeeping shaping what knowledge is known and what stories inform this knowledge. In concert with wider feminist scholarship condemning a gendered invisibility, distortion dichotomy, the inequality Crenshaw references is a productive process, remarkable for the levels of ambiguities it normalizes and disseminates about women. These are consistent with ambiguities that stigmatize racialized youth. In correspondence with extant observations, it bears establishing, here, that in the contemporary arrangement, a noted historic struggle with epistemological autonomy has ensured that ideas about the character of racial discrimination contribute to an equivocal understanding of how some, like racialized youth, have fared in this astonishing post-enlightenment journey (Davis, 2016; Glaser, 2015; Gabbidon, 2015; Fanon, 1967).

Feminist theorist Linda Nicholson’s (1996) example of the fleshed coloured crayon usefully adjourns this point, on the place of epistemological equalization. In describing the liberal use of the term flesh, which ruthlessly asserts a standard understanding of colour, what is remarkable is the centrality of the knowledge-making process to how modern justice unfolds. In the context of the YJ system, I address a similar theme in Chapter 5, emphasizing a chief fallacy with the colour-blind neutrality that has guided post-enlightenment thinking, the idea that racism occurs because the racialized do not have the capacity to progress out of nature (Razack, 2014) and, therefore, creates discord with the purportedly normal, standard (my emphasis) efforts at impartiality, equality, and fairness. Nicholson’s analogy forces confrontation with a related set of ideas, specially bound up with binaries marking out the standards for normal, and subsequently for abnormal. In this scenario, the normal, standard flesh is pale pink (a mixture of White and red) as opposed to brown (which is a mixture of blue, red, and yellow) and dark brown (blue, red, yellow, and orange) and Black (the absence of, and opposition to White). White = pure, light; Black = contaminated, dark. A link should begin to form with the logic of I/M, that is to say, the intractable are those determined to be confined to a state outside the standard for normal. Crucially, while epistemological equalization continues to be a challenge, efforts (as indicated throughout, thus far) encouraging the recognition and supplanting of these well-worn fallacies also endure.

The task this book takes on also follows from this equalization logic; that it is not simply about being written in (co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: race, recognition, and retribution in contemporary youth justice, in England and Canada
• 1 The intractability/malleability (I/M) thesis: On the historic construction of Black, racialized youth as intractably deviant outsiders
• 2 Youth justice (YJ) through a historical lens: on the invention of the intractably deviant Black, racialized youth
• 3 What’s it all about Jose? the invention of Black, racialized youth as intractably deviant outsiders, in the English context
• 4 Educating Glovanna: legislating intractability and the seeds of Black, racialized youth outsider status, in the historic Canadian education framework
• 5 Taking stock of contemporary youth justice: ‘the alchemy of race and rights’ in the epoch of punishment
• 6 Intractability, disproportionate incarceration, and the self-fulfilling risk policy framework: the case of the racialized youth gang
• 7 The wider punitive effect of racialization: the informal (retributive) gaze in contemporary youth justice
• 8 Conclusion: the I/M logic and moving beyond crime and punishment
• Reference list
• Appendices
• Index