Abstract
The most recent book from scholar Erica R. Meiners, For the Children, provides a multipronged approach of the issues related to the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon. In this work, she attaches racial, ethnic, gendered, and nonheteronormative meaning to the inherent repercussions stemming from the use of “new forms of surveillance” (p. 6) purportedly developed to protect children by showing the reader that they are actually harming youth. Through the development of a carceral state, such surveillance is growing and dominant among increasingly younger age-groups, particularly in urban area schools. Surveillance and attempts at state control over childhood often takes the form of police officers in hallways, metal detectors, arrests on school grounds, and (due to high numbers of school-aged youth on probation) remote probation centers dedicated to students at individual schools. The key issue with the increased reliance on such surveillance techniques is that they really are just old wine in new bottles and serve to propagate established discrimination practices against minorities. Meiners succinctly outlines how these newer methods mirror historical practices, such as slavery, Black codes, and the Mann Act, while operating to deny certain youth rightful access to childhood; a social construct that has deep connotations of innocence and malleability. By demarcating nonminority heteronormative youth as needing more protections than their racially, ethnically, and nonheteronormative counterparts, they are granted the luxury of childhood, and the vicious cycle of the carceral state begins earlier for those not afforded a childhood.
Meiners clearly demonstrates the link between earlier involvement in the criminal justice system, as a function of increased focus on policing childhood, and straight-lining the path to incarceration. The racialized, gendered, and heteronormativity of current practices in the criminal justice system disproportionately affect minorities who are labeled as unworthy of experiencing childhood. What is strikingly novel in this book is the discussion moving beyond color lines to highlight parallels between the racialization of criminal justice involvement of juveniles with those experienced by females and youth identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning (LGBTIQ+). Meiners’s analysis underscores the extension of discrimination beyond persons of color to also include others who do not conform to White, male, or heterosexual expectations. It is this extension of discrimination that perpetuates and expands the carcaral state through additional prisons and development of practices to manage special populations.
Not only are these groups of racial, ethnic, and gender minorities at risk of early, more frequent, and disproportionate rates of incarceration through the school-to-prison pipeline because they are denied access to childhood, Meiners subtly suggests that perhaps childhood is displaced. In Chapter 5, she discusses how postincarceration surveillance mimics a state of childhood, suggesting that because childhood was interrupted, there is a belief that society is at risk unless postcarceral time is closely supervised. Meiners suggests the continuation of supervision through reentry programs are enacted as a way to maintain control over individuals deemed incapable of managing on their own. Rather than being helpful to reentrants, the carceral state simply continues beyond prison walls. In a sense, it is this punishment across the life span that exacerbates the issues related to the revocation of childhood during the early years of life.
Moving beyond the data, Meiners draws on her work in the community developing transformative justice programs for youth who, as a result of increased efforts to extend police-like surveillance and sanctions to school settings, often prematurely end up in the criminal justice system. She offers a framework for the social justice issues facing youth who encounter the criminal justice system. One of the major contributions of this book is the discussion, introduced in Chapter 2, on the relationship between state-sanctioned violence and interpersonal violence. It is this comparison of violence at the state level, propagated through police and corrections, to violence that is perpetrated by youth themselves where readers can see the importance of addressing this cycle of violence through alternative means such as restorative justice or transformative justice. Relatedly, she calls for a defunding of police (p. 101) not as a way to destabilize communities but rather to reinvest in the communities affected by the current state of affairs. More police-esque surveillance is only adding to the problem, rather than providing solutions. She suggests a varied approach to countering current practices such as the need to invest in communities and schools and more immediate measures such as peace circles and other forms of restorative justice. It would be valuable to learn more about these processes and their benefits for the varied subpopulations discussed by Meiners.
Meiners acknowledges her professional investment in the work she describes, although it is this real-world practitioner–academic slant that provides much needed insight into the problem at hand. Often policy makers are unable or unwilling to use scholarly research in developing new programs because it lacks a translational aspect that enables access by those unfamiliar with scientific jargon. It is this realm where she uses her experience in the field combined with academic depth to offer For the Children as a bridge between science and implementation. The use of human stories and experiences, as well as contemporaneous news stories, as demonstrated in the book provides a natural mechanism to convey Meiners’s message to those who can support programs such as those described in the Chapter 7. Meiners is to be commended for providing a new lens through which to explore the school-to-prison pipeline. This 2-fold approach contributes to the emerging literature on this issue by, first, extending the discussion beyond color lines to include gender and LGBTQI+ in the discussion of interrupted childhood and, second, incorporating a much needed discussion on the myriad alternatives to the carceral state that are easily accessible to policy makers.