ABSTRACT
That Black youth, in the contemporary English and Canadian YJ system, are disproportionately incarcerated has been represented in this book as a historic continuity of racial discrimination, running parallel to the expansion of rights, in the early modern system. This has been noted as a paradox of rights expansion, according to the I/M logic inaugurated in this book. Racialized peoples positioning on the contemporary socio-political and socio-economic margins, according to I/M, is illustrative of their historic exclusion from the benefits of modern rights. In this sense, the very modern institutions which were inaugurated to enable progressive treatment of people as people became the crucible within which racial discrimination, antithetically emerged. As Razack notes, the youth justice system is an offshoot of this larger modern project of institutionalization, denoting how the institutions which emerged to support youth’s transformative potential as discrete persons and social participants wrote racialized youth out of consideration as normal recipients. This antithetical characterization has been noted in the book as the I/M positioning. This was the original self-fulfilling prophecy, undermining racialized youth by failing to avail them of resources to fulfil their potential. When viewed as synonymous with exclusion, the disproportionate punishment of racialized youth, in the contemporary context, represents a continuity of this formative relegation as intractable. The I/M logic, therefore, illustrates the claim that youth’s encounter with punishment represents a far greater problem with exclusion than what is customarily understood.
