ABSTRACT
Little is known about the role of race, racism, and racialization in early youth penal reform, in modern western states such as England and Canada. The extant literature focuses on the role of class and to some extent on gender. The dearth of race in these criminological histories has been addressed in the literature as part of a wider erasure of Black presence in these two contexts. Erasure or minimalization operate to obviate the role of racism and racialization in the nascent principles and practices of youth penal reform, specifically, but correspondingly, within the wider framework of expanding enlightenment ideals of universal equality. One main aim guiding this book is importance of explicating the disproportionate incarceration of Black, racialized youth within the contemporary system as a continuity of historic racial discrimination, institutionalized against the backdrop of early youth penal reform. Chapter 2 engages the I/M thesis to fill this gap on the role of racialization in this history. Following from the logic of the I/M thesis, I propose that historically, racialized youth were outside the imaginings of early twentieth-century youth penal reform, and this outsider status pertains to contemporary YJ. Racialized youth’s disproportionate incarceration, within the contemporary YJ regime, is explored as a continuity of what is proposed to be a historic categorization of Black youth as intractably deviant outsiders.
