p2034 -
Navigating the Punitive Turn in the Model City
Friday, June 2, 2017: 3:30 PM
BRESL 203 (Hofstra University)
Scholars have defined the punitive turn as the period in U.S. history when federal welfare and social control policies became increasingly retaliatory in nature.[1] Elizabeth Kai Hinton suggests that we can locate this turn in the policies established by Lyndon B. Johnson’s liberal administration. I explore this history through the experiences of black youth whose coming-of-age stories were marked by this moment. Focusing on Detroit, MI, I examine the following questions: How did black students experience and respond to the punitive turn? And what were the ideological contours of their responses? I argue that black high school activists in Detroit fought to realize alternative visions for public safety that did not require the use of police force, but visions that were deeply informed by notions of community and empathy. Using archived materials and oral histories, I demonstrate how black youth’s resistance to the punitive turn was grounded in Detroit’s history of black labor and educational radicalism.
[1] For excellent studies on the punitive turn, see Loïc Wacquant, “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity,” Sociological Forum 25, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 197–220. doi:10.1111/j.1573-7861.2010.01173.x; Elizabeth Hinton, “‘A War within Our Own Boundaries’: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State.” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 1, 2015): 100–112. doi:10.1093/jahist/jav328; and Muncie, John. “The `Punitive Turn’ in Juvenile Justice: Cultures of Control and Rights Compliance in Western Europe and the USA.” Youth Justice 8, no. 2 (August 1, 2008): 107–21. doi:10.1177/1473225408091372.