Good Looking Out: Racially Minoritized Youth, Incarceration, and Care

• In Event: Imagining the Future of Black and Brown Youth in (Carceral) Los Angeles

Abstract

California, specifically Los Angeles County, continues to be a place with some of the highest incarceration rates for Black and non-Black Latinx boys. With this in mind, I ask, how do racially minoritized youth complicate societal assertions of themselves and their peers while navigating the sociolegal dynamics of carceral facilities? What role does this complication play within juvenile transfer/fitness hearings and/or trials? In this paper, I draw on over one hundred hours of participant observations at two juvenile halls and numerous juvenile court proceedings within Los Angeles County. Using field notes, I underscore how racially minoritized youth who are routinely deemed as super predators (shout out Hillary Clinton), dangerous, and disposable. Yet, amidst navigation these carceral facilities, processes, and logics, I find that the youth develop spaces of care amongst themselves.
The focus of this paper is not to lionize nor demonize incarcerated, racially minoritized youth. Rather, the focus is to highlight how youth develop ways of meaning-making, care, and supporting one another amongst the onslaught of violence by the carceral state, and at times, the violence they participate in and experience. In a space and place that constantly tries to minimize the agency of youth, violate their rights, and downgrade them, youth continue to find ways to connect and care for each other. Unfortunately, as I argue in this paper, the complexities of racially minoritized youth are usually and their practices of care are ignored by prosecutors, as they attempt to continue to depict these youth as “criminally sophisticated,” “evil,” and “unamenable.

Author

• Anibal Serrano, University of California - Irvine