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Low-income Black Mothers Parenting Adolescents in the Mass Incarceration Era: The Long Reach of Criminalization

Sun, August 12, 8:30 to 10:10am, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 9

Abstract

Over several decades, US politicians and other elite actors have harnessed and cultivated racist perceptions of a deviant Black urban underclass as a threat to law and order to justify increasingly punitive and disciplinary methods of poverty governance, an approach legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow.” Prior research has found that in this political and cultural context, controlling images cast Black mothers as deviant and suspect parents, and controlling images of Black children cast them as “adultified” criminals. In this paper, we analyze in-depth interview data collected from 46 low-income Black mothers of teenagers in two urban areas in the northeast and southeast to examine how Black mothers themselves discuss and make sense of the surveillance and criminalization context in which they and their children live, how they engage with that context in their parenting practices, and how their children’s criminalization extends to mothers. Informed by critical race feminist theorizing and symbolic interactionism, findings reveal that mothers experienced their own and their children’s lives in a context of ubiquitous and unpredictable surveillance and criminalization. Within this reality, mothers commonly spoke of using three strategies in seeking to protect their children from the criminal justice system – telling cautionary tales, sheltering, and enacting compliance. In doing so, mothers both ambivalently drew on and resisted criminal justice metaphors and systems and faced collateral sanctions when their children got caught up in “the system.” Our analysis advances the study of the long and complex reach of criminalization through bringing together two related but often separately examined areas of inquiry: Black mothering and the criminalization of Black adolescents.

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