Untethering the Youth Carceral State: Reorienting Toward Decolonial Educational Abolitionism Praxes

• In Event: Praxis and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

This paper advances a decolonial abolitionist praxis against the youth carceral state, which has negatively criminalized racialized youth, especially those who have experienced incarceration. Our paper is separated into two sections. The first includes an invitation to reframe how we name the violence of youth criminalization instead as a ‘youth carceral state.’ The second merges ideas and literatures on decoloniality and educational abolitionism praxes (Author, 2024; De Lissovoy, 2010; Quijano, 2007; Mignolo, 2007). In the first section, we show how discourses of ‘mass incarceration’ and broader conceptions of the ‘carceral state’ across global contexts often hinge on discussions of racial disproportionality, systemic repression of those in captivity within facilities, reproductions of gendered violence, to name a few (Alexander, 2010; Davis, 2003). On one end, these discourses obscure the unique insidiousness of carceral logics that youth experience, while on another, they conflate the experiences of incarceration between those experiencing confinement as juveniles as opposed to adults (Cox, 2021; Meiners, 2010; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019). The second part builds on Rowe and Dowse’s (2023) call for ‘an inclusive decolonial abolition’ that aims to rid us of the Westernized death-making carceral state while reinscribing and reviving Indigenous forms of life-affirming relationality and reciprocity. Here, we center the longstanding relationship between two state-facilitated projects that reproduce ongoing confinement and punishment within the youth carceral state: schooling and juvenile detainment (Annamma, 2017; Stovall, 2018).

Importantly, our paper is informed by our situated epistemological dispositions as former/current youth workers in the realm of ‘juvenile justice’ in the Californian neocolonial context. We ultimately argue for the untethering of the youth carceral state. Thus, our paper contributes and is in synergy with the historically anchored and contemporaneous abolitionist movements against continuous state engineered violence, captivity, and confinement (Kaba, 2021). We coalesce decolonial and educational abolitionism principles that offer experimental reorientations towards re-imagining educative possibilities where otherwise forms of existence for young people are understood as contextual responses to structural problems, sans punitive approaches. Our broader call for decolonial abolition, then, requires the undoing of our normalized societal response to incarcerate our structural problems away, which historically have centrally begun during youthhood for specific migrant and ethnoracially minoritized diasporic youth.

Authors

• Brian Cabral, University of Texas at Austin

• Monserat Vargas, Independent Scholar