The Problem Child: Provocations on Dismantling the Carceral State

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-3 - Child Protection? Engaging the Politics of Childhood in a Carceral Landscape

Abstract

Dismantling the carceral state in our communities and our schools requires not only new conceptions of child protection, but a fresh theorizing of the artifact of the child. A life-cycle development stage, an informal social class or grouping, a literary trope, and a historic invention, the category of the child is always in political motion, particularly in this moment of criminal justice reform. As the United States begins to engage in rethinking facets of our prison nation, the child represents a significant and intimate thread, one that educational justice activists must examine.
Childhood is understood as a biological and life-cycle development stage, an informal social class or grouping, a literary trope, a historic invention, and even a bona fide social science category. While childhood is a recent creation - Phillipe Ariès (1962) argues that childhood emerged through social, economic, and political shifts over the previous three centuries - the child and childhood also function as malleable tropes, or the “child-as-idea,” as Stockton writes (2009, 3), to represent a range of potentially contradictory ideas, including reproductive futures, purity, revolutionary potential, incompetence, incapacity, becoming, and also innocence.
While slogans such as “Education, not incarceration” aim to illustrate how many black or brown young people across the United States are denied the resources and privileges attached to childhood, this statement is also a claim, however diffuse, to claim access to innocence. Yet masked are the communities (overwhelmingly nonwhite) who are devastated by this prison. In these struggles we see families, particularly vulnerable children, not claims for or against racialized forms of innocence. The historian Robin Bernstein (2011) describes the “perfect alibi” of the child, or its ability to “retain racial meanings but hide them under claims of holy obliviousness” (8).
Part one sketches this carceral reform moment and its impact on K-12 school policies and practices. Part two explores how ideas of child protection facilitated the build-up of the prison nation and simultaneously produced racialized and heterogendered conceptions of childhood. Part three introduces potential political movements and theoretical frameworks that support a critical analysis of the child and scaffold movements capable of dismantling our investments in a carceral state.

Author

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University