ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 takes on the task of mapping an account of race into early modern English youth justice reform. I ask, how can mapping race into early youth penal reform history provide crucial explanatory scope for contemporary concerns, including disproportionate punishment? In response, I suggest that it does so by showing the scope for moving narratives about racialized youth’s disproportionate punishment beyond crime and punishment. This approach corresponds with the centralizing logic of the I/M thesis: racialized youth were historically excluded from the welfare care principles and practices built into early youth penal reform. Corrections, in the form of rehabilitation, were only one part of this arrangement. Going beyond crime and punishment is part of the aim to demonstrate how this established the positioning of racialized youth as intractable instead of malleable. As established in Chapter 2, looking beyond crime and punishment corresponds with the argument that youth’s intractable designation reflects the larger exclusion of racialized peoples from the benefits of universal rights.
