For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

264 Pages·2016·2.472 MB·English

by  Erica R. Meiners

For the Children?
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For the Children?
Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
Erica R. Meiners
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Trouble with the Child in the Carceral
State,” in Social Justice: A Journal of Crime Confl ict and World Order 41, no. 3 (2014).
Reprinted by permission.
Portions of chapter 5 were previously published as “Never Innocent: Feminist Trouble
with Sex Off ender Registries and Protection in a Prison Nation,” in Meridians: Femi-
nisms, Race, Transnationalism 9, no. 2 (2009): 31– 62, and as “Off ending Children,
Registering Sex,” in Women’s Studies Quarterly 43, nos. 1 & 2 (2015): 246– 63. Copyright
2015 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Used by permission of
Th e Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the publishers, www.feministpress.org.
All rights reserved.
An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as Jane Hereth, Mariame Kaba, Erica
R. Meiners, and Lewis Wallace, “Restorative Justice Is Not Enough: School Based Inter-
ventions in the Carceral State,” in Disrupting the School- to- Prison Pipeline, ed. S. Bahena,
P. Kuttner, and M. Ng, 240– 64 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Educational Review, 2012).
Copyright 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
Th e University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Meiners, Erica R., author.
Title: For the children? : protecting innocence in a carceral state / Erica R. Meiners.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2015036896| ISBN 978-0-8166-9275-0 (hc) |
ISBN 978-0-8166-9276-7 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Children— Eff ect of imprisonment on— United States. | Youth— Eff ect
of imprisonment on—U nited States.
Classifi cation: LCC HV9104 .M43 2016 | DDC 365/.420973— dc23 LC rec ord available
at http:// lccn . loc . gov / 2015036896
Contents
Introduction 1
I. Childhoods
1. Magical Age 31
2. Th e Trouble with the Child in the Carceral State 57
II. School and Prison
3. Beyond Reform: Th e Architecture of Prison and School Closure 81
4. Restorative Justice Is Not Enough 103
III. Adulthoods
5. Life and Death: Reentry aft er Incarceration 129
6. Registering Sex, Rethinking Safety 157
IV. Aft er and Now
7. Not Th is: Building Futures Now 185
Acknowledgments 205
Notes 209
Bibliography 217
Index 249
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Introduction
Facing what news outlets proclaimed one of the worst fi scal crises in the
history of Illinois, in 2011 the governor, Pat Quinn, targeted a number of
prisons for closure. On the list to be shuttered was Illinois Youth Center
(IYC) in Murphysboro. With a capacity to confi ne 156 people, in 2011,
Murphysboro warehoused 75 detainees at an annual cost of $84,403 each
(Illinois Department of Corrections Facilities Information 2011). A small
and scrappy network of Chicago- based justice organizations supported
these prison closures through community forums, e- mail blasts, and poster
campaigns: Educate, Not Incarcerate! School Counselors, Not Cops! Books,
Not Bars! Schools, Not Jails!
We were not the only child savers. More than two hundred local resi-
dents, including prison employees and their families, many sporting
T- shirts emblazoned with “Save IYC Murphysboro,” packed a public
hearing to testify about how prison closure would harm their communi-
ty. “We can’t balance the budget on the backs of working families,” said
State Representative Brandon Phelps (Norris 2011). Th e “Save IYC Mur-
physboro” Facebook site included photos from rallies featuring families
and children holding signs that said “Take MY Mom and Dad’s Job and
Where Does that Leave Me?” Closing the prison harms families, and a
community needs jobs. A majority white town in southern Illinois, this
prison off ered unionized employment for some of the approximately eight
thousand residents of Murphysboro. Families in Murphysboro and be-
yond imagine a thriving economic future where their sons are on the
right side of the prison bars (or perhaps their daughters marry a unionized
prison guard). Why not?
Murphysboro’s response to the eventual closure of its prison is not
unique. Th e United States has the world’s largest prison population: At
the end of 2014 over two million people were locked behind bars and
6,851,000 people under some form of correctional supervision (Glaze,
Kaeble, Minton, Tsoutis 2015) Th is prison nation, to use a term from activist

 . INTRODUCTION
scholar Beth Richie (2012), disproportionately targets communities of
color. While many use the term mass incarceration to refer to the gro-
tesque expansion of punishment in the United States, I prefer “targeted
criminalization.” Black adults are four times as likely as whites and al-
most two and a half times as likely as Latinos/as to be under correctional
control, and close to 70 percent of incarcerated women are nonwhite. A
growing percentage of people in prison are migrants, overwhelmingly
from Mexico (Escobar 2010; Lopez and Light 2009; Pew Center on the
States 2009; Glaze, Kaeble, Minton, Tsoutis 2015). Th is incarcerated pop-
ulation required a corresponding prison construction boom, the world’s
largest. Between 1984 and 2007, California built forty- three new prisons,
largely in rural communities, a global record (Gilmore 2007). Despite evi-
dence that newly built prisons fail to provide a sustainable boon to local
economies (J. Fraser 2003; Gilmore 2007; Gottschalk 2015), communities
like Murphysboro across the United States continue to push for immi-
grant detention centers and to hamper decarceration and prison clo-
sures, citing economic concerns and the impact on local families.
Th is theme of saving our children refracts across the criminal justice
landscape. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes in Golden Gulag, an analysis
of prison expansion in California: “In fact, people who organize against
prisons invoke the same benefi ciaries (‘the kids’) as those who organize
for prisons” (2007, 177). Jobs, protection, and better lives for our children
are cited in arguments for new prisons or against closures, and these
themes also surface repeatedly in antiprison messaging: “Educate, Not In-
carcerate.” Invoking real or imagined children produces an irreproachable
purity, a trump card. Speaking against the future of any child is almost
unthinkable — tactically impossible, an intimate violation, a dead end. While
I recognize signifi cant diff erences between a six- year- old and a fi ft een-
year- old, I deliberately use child, youth, minor, and juvenile somewhat in-
terchangeably, as these are constructed and dynamic categories with no
clear borders.
While references to child saving are laced throughout campaigns both
to keep open and to close prisons, each side invokes diff erent conceptions
of childhood. In the push to shut down Murphysboro, one group fought
to have the (nonwhite) young people warehoused within the prison rec-
ognized as children painfully separated from families. Th ose fi ghting to
keep the prison open used their (white) children — present and future — as
INTRODUCTION . 
proxies for the town’s economic and political future. Neither group names
and problematizes the fragile boundaries among or between adult, child,
and juvenile in this political moment, including who might be eligible
for the benefi ts associated with childhood. Notably, the core artifact asso-
ciated with childhood, an a priori association with innocence, is buried,
unacknowledged. In these child- saving struggles — the demand that
black and brown youth count as children or the need to provide econom-
ically for white babies — innocence is brazen but imperceptible, never on
the table.
Also masked is the cascade of eff ects associated with representations
of children and childhood. For example, demanding that police view se-
lect youth as more childlike, therefore deserving of leniency or diff eren-
tial treatment, does not interrupt why so many adults are culpable, are
not viewed as valued and do not merit rehabilitation, and are therefore
unfree. If only a select few — the children — merit care, access to resources,
or a future, what of the rest of us? As an infl ux artifact invoked in politi-
cal work across the carceral landscape, the child can get us all into
trouble, including those bodies that qualify as children. While a strate-
gic tool in these struggles, the child also masks key social and political
transactions.
Not a new phenomenon, child saving emerges in multiple social, po-
litical, and economic struggles. As the geographer Cindi Katz (2008)
writes: “Childhood, as has been well realized in the literature of virtually
every social science and humanities discipline, is a social construction of
multiple dimensions — as a spatial life stage, as itself internally segregated,
as a reservoir of memory and fantasy, and as always mobile — “becoming”
defi nes its limits. As such, childhood and youth have proven to be readily
available for mobilization around moral panics and the defi nition of
social ills” (7). For the sake of the child, women (particularly poor, dis-
abled, and/or nonwhite women) have been sterilized and continue to be
denied reproductive and parenting rights (Garland- Th omson 2002; Silli-
man and Bhattacharjee 2002; Roberts 1997). Child welfare facilitated the
development and implementation of judicial and criminal institutions
and systems (Feld 1999), the expansion of policing and surveillance, and
the restriction of First Amendment and privacy rights (E. Bernstein
2010). Th e need to protect girls has emerged as a powerful rationale to
deny transgender and non- gender-conforming people gender- affi rming