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Childhood of the Race: A Critical Race Theory Intervention into Childhood Studies
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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38 The popular defense of processing children under eighteen in the adult criminal justice system instead of the juvenile justice system turns on the nature of the offense: children who commit adult crimes should do adult time. This position highlights the ways in which American cultural constructions of the child are not exclusively child based. That is to say, adult constructions of the child often do not correspond to what children themselves say and do. Paradoxically, children can lose their child status when they do not act like children. The definitions of the child that inform academic inquiry and social policy are not simply objective: a child is what a child does. They function more like standards to which actual children must conform than the empirically based descriptions they purport to be. If childhood studies hopes to be what John Wall (in this volume) aptly describes as a “child-inclusive humanistic methodology,” then it must interrogate the politics of adult constructions of childhood, especially when these constructions overtly conflict with the words and behaviors of individuals under eighteen (68). Here I examine the rhetoric surrounding the growing trend in the criminal justice system of trying children as adults in order to make the point that critical race theory is an essential component of a viable childhood studies methodology. Annette Ruth Appell argues in this volume that a true jurisprudence of childhood must include “an analysis of what political and cultural work the legal category and regulation of childhood performs” and that, ideally, it will “approach the regulation of Childhood of the Race A Critical Race Theory Intervention into Childhood Studies Lucia Hodgson Childhood of the Race 39 childhood contextually and critically” (29, 33). As I attempt to show, critical race theory can provide many of the critical tools needed to achieve such a child-centered jurisprudence. According to the advocacy group Campaign for Youth Justice, “An estimated 250,000 youth are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults every year across the United States.” Processing children in the adult system instead of the existing juvenile justice system is counterintuitive. American law does not treat minors as adults; minors are denied most civil rights on the grounds that they lack the intellectual, psychological, and physical capacity to function in society as adults. In addition, juveniles tried as adults do not simultaneously accrue other adult civil rights, such as the right to vote or to consent to medical treatment. In addition, trying children as adults isolates their legal offenses from their social circumstances in a system that usually considers circumstances to be crucial to the nature of a criminal offense. For example, the legal system construes the taking of human life in a variety of ways depending on whose life is taken by whom under what circumstances and classifies that act along a spectrum ranging from murder in the first degree to manslaughter to self-defense to state-administered execution. Being under eighteen years old in a society in which minors have much less power than legal adults over their own living conditions is necessarily a significant circumstance. For example, many minors are incarcerated with adults simply for having been present at the scene of a crime committed by someone else, even though children as a group have much less control than adults over where they are and with whom they spend their days. Existing child-centered critiques of processing juveniles in the adult criminal justice system have not been particularly effective in stemming the proliferation of state laws that facilitate the practice. Conventional critiques rely on social science research that emphasizes the differences between children and adults: they draw on neurological research on adolescent brain development to argue that children lack the impulse control and foresight of adults. They point to higher rates of suicide among and rape and physical assault of juveniles in adult jails and prisons to argue that children are too vulnerable to be fairly treated in adult confinement settings. And they document incarceration with adults as a factor in the corruption of youth and higher recidivism rates. These approaches can (and should) garner sympathy and even exoneration for particular children. However, they cannot explain why our legal system engages in a practice that is not only clearly [54.174.85.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 17:03 GMT) 40 Lucia Hodgson harmful to children but also, as child advocates point out, inherently contradictory in the sense that it violates its own determination that (in legal terms) the...