No Longer Locking Up Their Own: Reconceptualizing Juvenile Probation Officers in the Era of #DefundThePolice

• In Event: Holding Kids Captive and Imprisoning Education: Abolitionist Research on Youth Incarceration and Carceral Schooling

Abstract

Objective

Los Angeles County leads the nation in incarcerating youth. Its juvenile camps, like its adult prisons, hold captive disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown kids. This study expands understandings of staff in carceral settings and proposes an alternative path to care for youth without caging them. By highlighting the subversive thoughts and actions of juvenile probation officers (JPOs), this study charts a new avenue for abolitionist change.

Literature

JPOS have had an evolving set of multiple, conflicting roles over time. A group of scholars (Ohlin, Piven, & Pappenfort, 1956) distinguished between two types of POs: a punitive type and a rehabilitative type. This dichotomous construct has since been conceptualized as law enforcement versus social service provision (Viglione et al., 2018). This project complicates this literature by considering a third pathway forward for JPOs.

Framework

This project is grounded in abolitionist literature, conceptualizing it as aspirational ethic (McLeod, 2015), pedagogy (Rodríguez, 2010), and social movement (Davis, 2003). This perspective understands abolition as not simply the tearing down of physical structures, but as a creative re-imagining of society. This project puts abolition in conversation with Stanton-Salazar’s (2011) theorizing of nonparental adults who support marginalized youth in navigating oppressive institutions. Stanton-Salazar’s (2011) ideas are employed alongside Rios’s (2011) concept of a “youth support complex” in order to rethink the role of JPOs in the era of abolition organizing.

Methods

This project is guided by the following questions: 1) How do JPOs affect the educational experiences of incarcerated youth?; and 2) how can the subversive actions of JPOSs create new possibilities for reenvisioning their roles and abolishing youth prisons?

To answer these questions, I worked with a team of researchers to carry out a multi-site case study of two juvenile camps. At each site, we observed classrooms, student support meetings, and staff meetings. We also interviewed students, teachers, administrators, probation officers, and leaders of community-based organizations.

Findings

This paper will present two major findings:

JPOs’ Interventions on Behalf of Youth: JPOs initiated interruptions of what they saw as problematic practices. This included giving youth a heads up regarding an impending locker search and confronting an educational administrator for not respecting a student’s rights. These moments revealed JPOs to be more invested in the youth than the carceral regime under which they worked.

JPOs’ Critiques of Camps and Society: In interviews, JPOs offered incisive critiques of camp practices and how camp practices contributed to persistent inequality in the impoverished neighborhoods from which many of their youth were taken. This critical thinking opens up possibilities for rethinking JPOs’ roles in a larger campaign of youth prison abolition.

Significance

This study opens up a new line of research to explore the future of marginalized youth through an abolitionist framing. It sheds light on the desire among JPOs to serve youth in ways that respect their dignity and promote their development. The findings inform abolitionist theorizing and organizing, as well as offer new perspectives on operationalizing abolitionist theory to inform juvenile justice policy.

Author

• Julio Ángel Alicea, Rutgers University - Camden