Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State by Paul M. Renfro (review)

In a novel contribution to the fields of the history of childhood, carceral studies, gender and sexuality, and recent American political history, Renfro deploys cultural and political methods to track the development of the "image of endangered childhood" in the 1980s and 1990s. By linking moral threats and the expansion of child safety to punitive state building, Renfro centers how culture, gender, and sexuality shaped carceral governance in the late twentieth century.

The first three chapters of the book are the most fascinating, as they recount struggles by parents and communities in pursuit of state support for the parents of missing children. Chronicling how white parents of missing boys effectively used the press, images, and misinformation to mobilize politically and create an unassailable politics, Renfro captures the confluence of populist anti-statism, racism, and homophobia that motivated concerns over child kidnapping. Renfro humanely addresses how the value of Black children's lives was diminished through their portrayal in the media as "street hustlers." In a remarkable contribution to a victim's rights literature often focused on white adult women, Renfro compellingly shows that efforts to protect white boyhood figure into this history. This allows Renfro to address how fears of queer sexuality underpin child safety politics, revealed in the struggles of North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to defend their members against charges of child murder and kidnapping, as well as the broader vulnerability of LGBTQ people in the face of sexually charged safety politics.

The second part of the book depicts the rising power of murdered children's' parents as political actors. Analyzing their belief that the federal government was especially callus, Renfro provides rare insight into a Department of Justice criminal justice program operated rather than focusing on the research that has often privileged grant-based funding as a mechanism of carceral state building. Still firmly couched in cultural power, Renfro's work highlights that the "affective politics" of child safety that highlighted children's' value and worth, how these informed the passage of laws as memorials to child victims, and, ultimately, the incontestability of the issue. The emotion, misinformation, profiteering, and "aggrieved whiteness" at the heart of these politics is useful for identifying the origins of the rise of Trumpism. Particularly striking is the extent to which parents and their political allies were willing to forfeit civil liberties, chiefly privacy, in the service of their anti-crime agenda.

Renfro does not define "carceral state." Referring to it alternately as a carceral net, sphere, buildup, machinery, and apparatus is somewhat confusing as, at the core of the stranger danger panic was a critique about the poor coordination and function of the justice apparatus. Yet through his engagement with critiques of how justice systems failed children and families that formed the bedrock of child safety politics, Renfro highlights how ongoing state failure attended carceral state building. The lack of definition does not hamper Renfro's thrilling frame, as he demonstrates ably that the carceral state is carceral culture and vice versa—suggesting, to some extent, that the power to control and prevent crime is something we will know when we see it. The ubiquity of the symbols Renfro is working with—among them, photos of missing all-American children on milk cartons that he situates as "the visual architecture of endangered childhood"—helps readers appreciate the extent of carceral culture in everyday life, as does the long-standing media presence and activism of the parents Renfro portrays, notably John Walsh of America's Most Wanted.

Chapter 5, on federal juvenile justice policy in the 1980s, was the most difficult to square with the book's argument. In focusing on federal programs that in part criminalized children, Renfro addresses the plight of incarcerated children at the local level and indeed, reinforces the notion of federal determinism in the hands of a small number of conservative policy makers. Framing punitive juvenile...