Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys

Notes

[ 175 ] Notes Notes to the Preface 1. In this case “homies” are fellow gang members. 2. Out of respect for where I am from, and for safety concerns, I do not mention what gang I claimed. 3. Mills (1959:3). 4. Elijah Anderson (1999) argues that the “code of the street”—violent actions, symbolic or material, people participate in to gain respect—is “the fabric of everyday life” in the inner city. In the same vein, I argue that the culture of punishment, or what I later define as the youth control complex, is another organizing principle in the lives of marginalized youths. 5. Sociologist Paul Hirschfield (2008a) defines criminalization in a similar vein: “as the shift toward a crime control paradigm in the definition and management of the problem of student deviance. Criminalization encompasses the manner in which policy makers and school actors think and communicate about the problem of student rule-violation as well as myriad dimensions of school praxis including architecture, penal procedure, and security technologies and tactics.” Legal scholar Jonathan Simon (2007) argues that everyday social problems, such as student truancy , workplace conflict, and parenting, are symbolically criminalized through the use of criminal justice metaphors and through the use of criminal justice policies and resources. Notes to Chapter 1 1.DespitemyinformingSlick’smotherandotherparentsthatmystudywouldhave littletonobenefittotheirchildren,perhuman-subjectsrequirements,manyofthem stillsawmeasamentorandrolemodeltotheirchildren.Inreturn,Itriedtohelptheir childrenasmuchasIcouldbyconnectingthemwithprograms. 2. Hall et al. (1978). 3. See Wacquant (2009). Notes to Chapter 1 [ 176 ] 4. Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1978) argue that moral panics are created not only as a way of building a Durkheimian solidarity among white middle-class populations but also as a means of managing underemployed populations and racial threats in times when capital is in crisis. Hirschfield (2008b) argues that inner-city black youth are indeed constructed as moral panics and, as a response, are being pipelined by schools into the criminal justice system. 5. Smith (1990:25). 6. Alice Goffman (2009) reminds us that most urban ethnographies have been written prior to the increase in punitive criminal justice policies and mass incarceration . 7. Thomas and Thomas (1928:572). 8. Anderson (1999). 9. The “Superpredator” thesis, created by Princeton professor John DiIulio, catalyzed national media coverage and congressional legislation on youth crime and the need for punitive policy in 1996. DiIulio claimed that “Superpredators”—juvenile criminals with an unprecedented potential for violence—were an emerging risk to society and that serious punitive policies had to be generated to “deter” and “incapacitate” them at as early an age as possible: “Try as we might, there is ultimately very little that we can do to alter the early life-experiences that make some boys criminally ‘at risk.’ Neither can we do much to rehabilitate them once they have crossed the prison gates. Let us, therefore, do what we can to deter them by means of strict criminal sanctions, and, where deterrence fails, to incapacitate them. Let the government Leviathan lock them up and, when prudence dictates, throw away the key” (DiIulio 1996:3). Pushing the “Superpredator” thesis a step further, in 1996 DiIulio and former U.S. secretary of education William Bennett coauthored Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America’s War against Crime and Drugs, in which they introduced the idea of “moral poverty.” According to Bennett and DiIulio, “moral poverty” stems from the increase in single-parent households and homes where one or more of the parents are “deviant” or “criminal” themselves. Specifically, the authors argue that “in the extreme, it is the poverty of growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in a practically perfect criminogenic environment—that is, an environment that seems almost consciously designed to produce vicious, unrepentant predatory street criminals—that repeats the cycle” (Bennett, DiIulio, and Waters 1996:14). 10. “At-promise” youth are those youth who have traditionally been labeled “atrisk ”—youth who lived in marginalized conditions. An issue with labeling young people as “risks” is that this may generate the very stigma that I am analyzing in this study. Therefore, I am calling them what many community workers call them: “at-promise.” 11. Weiss (1994). Notes to Chapter 1 [ 177 ] 12. Mario Luis Small (2008) argues that unique cases are a crucial area of study. In the following hypothetical scenario, he explains how unique cases matter: “Suppose that Bill had chosen a neighborhood with a 40 percent poverty rate but little garbage or graffiti and a unique architectural...