Introduction -- Childhoods -- Magical age -- The trouble with the child in the carceral state -- Schools and prisons -- Beyond reform: the architecture of prison and school closure -- Restorative justice is not enough -- Adulthoods -- Life and death : re-entry after incarceration -- Registering sex, rethinking safety -- After and now -- Not this: building present futures -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Exempt from the current bipartisan reassessment of the US carceral state are people with convictions for sex offenses. While movements against public registries for sex offenders are scant, a grassroots movement is underway. This article offers a preliminary analysis of the complex consequence of women's political work to extract their sons from the US carceral state. This gendered advocacy is mapped against shifts in the racialised US criminal justice system, where the fluid category of child/juvenile is often unavailable to youth of colour and/or queer youth, and criminalisation is offered to regulate sexuality, consent, age and potential harm.
The invocation of 'the child' represents a significant thread in prison-related issues, one that anti-prison organizers and critical prison studies scholars must examine. This article examines how the child, as a flexible signifier, frames transactions within the US carceral sphere. The first part defines the frameworks of prison abolition and movement assessment, which shape the political landscape underpinning or informing this analysis. The second part briefly identifies the contemporary flexibility of the child. The third part tracks how the child is deployed in ways that elide such complexities through three examples of how representations of the child operate across the spectrum of pro-punishment and anti-prison movements. Finally, the opening frameworks are revisited to demonstrate how an abolition epistemology can assist organizers and scholars to address issues concerning the child. Throughout this article, the child is used to represent a constructed developmental category and to signify representations and tropes of the child or children evident within campaigns or organizing. Adapted from the source document.
AbstractAt this political moment within the university, mass incarceration and its most recognizable constituents, the prisoner and the prison, are at a predictable tipping point: the violence of inclusion. Neoliberal multiculturalism appears capacious enough to hold select representations of mass incarceration in its pursuit of new markets and deft enough to deploy this difference to whitewash other forms of institutional violence. Building from a long genealogy of scholarship and organizing that maps the coconstitutiveness of the university with our prison-industrial complex, this essay makes visible emergent lines and arrangements of power and resistance that inhibit and build abolition.
