ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 develops an account of racialized youth’s disproportionate incarceration, as a contemporaneous continuity of their historic positioning as intractable, deviant outsiders. This signifies their enduring marginalization from resources deemed essential for enabling youth’s transformative potential. This positioning, it has been argued, is best understood for its antithesis to the aims of early youth penal reform which attributed the White, working-class youth a malleability and transformative potential, as future social participants and citizens. Whether viewed as utilitarian or egalitarian, early modern youth penal reform aims were consistent with the broader aims of modern justice, which professed a prioritization of proportionality. This denoted a goal to privilege restraint over brutality, with brutality indicating an outsider status of one excluded from the benefits of equal justice, including lenience. As has been explored, thus far, a paradoxical process of racialization unfolded alongside expanding enlightenment ideals, normalizing the exclusion of racialized peoples from the benefits of modern justice. The I/M framework proffers that the paradox can be read in youth’s antithetical positioning, as outsiders, but more specifically as part of youth’s recognition as intractable compared to the malleability and transformative potential attributed to the White, working-class youth. The stipulation that the past occupies the present, therefore, denotes continuity in Black youth’s contemporary positioning as a reproduction of their historic intractable designation. This, despite the change in contemporary YJ, to a purportedly more progressive system, underpinned by a reorientation of youth’s status from passive paternalist objects of care to dynamic subjects with rights.
