For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State by Erica R. Meiners (review)

The practical promise of abolitionist praxis during both ostensibly progressive reformist and more hard line law-and- order moments is made evident by For the Children?, a book that is a significant contribution to the theory and practice of abolitionist political work. Meiners brings together abolitionist, Black feminist, and queer theories to situate the figure of the child and the shifting racialized, gendered, and sexualized contours of this category within historical and contemporary contexts. Meiners draws out the interrelations among sites that consistently are thought of as separate. Meiners explains, “LGBTQ justice work is the struggle against police brutality. The work to end our nation’s reliance on prisons is the work to dismantle white supremacy. Decolonization is gender and sexual self-determination. Fighting for access to educational opportunity is a part of a gender justice movement” (19–20; emphasis in original).

Meiners follows the definitions of abolition developed by Angela Y. Davis and Critical Resistance (CR). For CR, abolition is a “political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment” (18). In the introduction, Meiners explains why she steers away from the widely used term “mass incarceration,” and instead uses “carceral state,” “prison-industrial complex” (PIC), and “prison nation.” Although “mass incarceration” may signal the immense scope of imprisonment in the contemporary United States, it also obscures how criminalization, policing, and surveillance target particular groups and places. Instead, the idea of a PIC, popularized by CR and other abolitionist organizers, draws attention to the linkages among state, economic, and civil society institutions through which power and money flow and accumulate, and people are sorted, trapped, and governed. “Prison nation,” a concept developed by Black feminist scholar Beth Richie in Arrested Justice, likewise highlights the ways in which policing and imprisonment are not institutions on the margins but are centrally entwined with social welfare, public schooling, and child protection. Building on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work, these institutions are all part of racial capitalism, making the project of abolition one of transforming all the institutions through which the “ideological work of dehumanization and disqualification” take place (19).

The arc of For the Children? exemplifies why it is so important to critically examine how the figure of the child undergirds the carceral state and projects for building meaningful safety and social justice. Meiners’s crucial argument is that the current modality of “child protection is tethered to a disposable adulthood” (130). In Chapter 1, she builds on Fred Moten, Lee Edelman, and Robin Bernstein’s works to ask, “What enables children to be afforded certain rights and privileges, and not adults? What are the costs, to children, and to others, of these privileges?” (58). She traces key moments since the eighteenth century during which the construction of childhood and innocence have been racialized and heterogendered. The too-often deadly consequences of childhood being constructed as a natural developmental category and yet one that is hegemonically white are evident in the case of Trayvon Martin and the criminalization of youth of color.

In Chapter 2, Meiners explores tensions in efforts to marshal childhood to remedy or prevent the harms of the school-to- prison pipeline (STPP), sexual violations of children, bullying of queer youth, and exclusion of undocumented young people from the polity. In each case, organizing has tended to reinforce the carceral state by individualizing harms and remedies and by obscuring the state’s role in creating vulnerabilities to harm. Building on the work of Damien Sojoyner, who argues that public schools and prisons are intertwined and that both function as enclosures for Black people’s freedom, Meiners develops one of the key insights of the book in Chapter 3. Terms of discipline and safety undergird reforms in both institutions, yet these shifts do not signal a lessening of surveillance and punishment. She concludes that advocating for more money for...