Introduction

The contemporary youth justice (YJ) landscape pulsates with concerns about deviance and punishment amplification. The historic vision to secure society by assuring youth’s developmental needs—whether viewed as egalitarian or utilitarian—slopes unfavourably towards a criminogenic orientation succeeding in undermining the wellbeing of the most vulnerable youth. The disproportionate incarceration of Black, racialized youth, in Western states like England and Canada, occupies a central place in these concerns. This book provides an analysis emphasizing that Black youth’s position as the most punished, problematically, simultaneously situates them as the most punishable. This positioning sustains their vulnerability, by organizing a series of problematic binaries informing their recognition in the institutions they navigate and within the broader community: as punished but punishable; as victims and perpetrators—as reluctant deviants, but deviants, nonetheless. The book takes the position that Black youth’s disproportionate incarceration is not merely a matter of criminal justice, but a broader matter of the historic unequal status of Black peoples in western society. Following the tradition of deviance invention scholarship, the book writes race into early modern English and Canadian youth penal reform. To date, race’s place in early penal reform, in England and Canada, remains variously hidden, minimized, or erased, within criminological histories. This is despite what the rich scholarship on class and gender reveals about the importance of knowing the historical roots which remain relevant to our contemporary concerns.