Super-Predators, Articulation, and Mass Criminalization in the United States

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table Nine: Race and Racism as Structured within and Culturally Propagated through the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

In the late twentieth century, U.S. cities were engulfed in an “urban crisis” that political leaders and media framed not as the result of deindustrialization, inequality, or state neglect, but as the consequence of dangerous young men of color. The “Super-Predator” myth crystallized during this period, casting Black youth as folk devils whose alleged pathology justified punitive policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration. Now, in another historical moment of nationwide and global protests bringing people to the streets to denounce the disregard for young Black men’s lives, this paper explores the interconnectedness of the lives of three Black Bostonian men within the larger context of the “Super-Predator” scare of the 1980s and 1990s. Heavily influenced by Stuart Hall’s Theory of Articulation, this article explores the organizational contexts of police brutality that shape these two vastly differing cities. Drawing on newspaper articles, government and legal papers, and oral history collections from that period, I find that the Super-Predator narrative and the increasing militarization of domestic policing are class-race-gender articulations of structures of dominance in the United States whose normal outcome is mass criminalization. Hall offers criminologists a framework for analyzing how ideological phenomena like the “Super-Predator” both legitimate punitive governance and conceal the political economy of urban decline.

Author

• Daniel Gascón, University of Massachusetts-Boston