Abstract
A startling, 2010 report by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) shows that Hawai‘i is not immune to the US carceral state’s robust expansion, as the incarceration rate on the islands has multiplied eightfold since 1980, while the United States imprisonment rate has increased fivefold since the 1970s (National Research Council, 2014). While Hawaiians comprise 24% of Hawai‘i’s general population, they represent 39% of its incarcerated people, and 41% of the inmates shipped to facilities out of state. Hawaiian women face an even greater disparity, representing 44% of Hawai‘i’s incarcerated women (OHA, 2010). Further, Hawaiian youth account for 46% of admits to detention home facilities, while Hawaiian girls comprise 52% (Chesney-Lind and Bilsky, 2011).
In Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies, Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto paint a vivid portrait of the penetration of this racist and gendered penal state into the life fabric of Pacific Islander youth. Their research counters John J. DiIulio’s alarmist, 1995 “super-predator” thesis that pins juvenile offenses on “moral impoverishment” that Hilary Clinton later echoed in 1996 to justify law and order policies—a statement that 23-year-old Ashley Williams famously confronted during the 2016 presidential election. In its place, Irwin and Umemoto’s empathetic and compelling ethnographic study focuses on Hawaiian, Samoan, Filipino, and other economically marginalized youth in Hawai‘i, and the enormous structural challenges they face. Their book contributes to critical scholarship less concerned with the acts of violence themselves than the relations of power that propagate them and their responses, particularly the “wider historical context” in which both occur (Hall et al., 1978: viii; see also Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Gilmore, 2009; LeBaron and Roberts, 2010, among others). Irwin and Umemoto similarly argue that we cannot understand youth violence in Hawai‘i, or the entire United States for that matter, without examining it through the lens of its “broad historical and … immediate situational” setting (p. 23). By theorizing what Irwin and Umemoto call “colonial patriarchy,” Jacked Up and Unjust provides a powerful account of youth violence as an outcome of the painful and destabilizing intermeshing of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy amidst a contemporary penal state.
Through several years of research at two public high schools that entailed focus groups, interviews, and active involvement in a school youth program called the “lunch bunch”—a “supportive environment” that opens a space for teens to discuss everyday challenges—Irwin and Umemoto show the many forms of uncertainty confronting young Pacific Islanders. They include institutional failures, the retrenchment of youth-oriented services and institutions, deindustrialization, overworked parents, financial strain, the alienation of community leaders from policymaking, substance addiction, oppressive gender norms, racist stereotypes, familial violence and instability, premature death, homelessness and other forms of housing precarity, mass incarceration, isolation, mental health challenges, inaccessible health care and elder care, and other forms of “life stress.” It should be no surprise that, in these “jacked up” circumstances, youth occasionally act up. A notable strength of this book is the ease with which it describes this conglomeration of challenges while moving between the personal and structural-historical, including the many gradients between.
The textured and in-depth ethnographic data and analysis provide fertile grounds for implementable initiatives. Irwin and Umemoto comment that lack of resources in cash-strapped schools cannot fully explain the structural issues that fuel youth violence. Rather, failures are also “tied to flawed ideas within institutions about what interventions are needed” (p. 49), particularly punitive strategies that target girls. As one potent example, female students face disproportionate disciplinary actions for violence due to sexist norms that authorize feminine docility, while boys frequently tease, taunt, bully, or provoke with impunity. In this sense, Irwin and Umemoto pin ideological problems, or faulty value systems imbricated in policy, to the heart of schools’ shortcomings addressing youth violence. They also emphasize that caring adults, particularly institutional agents within schools, the juvenile justice system, and the foster care system, often ameliorate the structural violence many youth face. In this context, Irwin and Umemoto advocate for culturally relevant, “compassionate and constructive policy and practice” (Chapter 9) that follows a restorative justice framework. Such holistic programs can widen institutional spaces for conflict reconciliation and healing from trauma to end a seemingly perpetual cycle of violence propagated by the theft of land and livelihoods that propel colonialism. These proposals open capacious paths for “nonreformist reforms” that hold potential to improve the life chances of today’s young people while requiring neither the buildup of inherently violent structures nor the immediate upending of an entire system (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2008).
The foregrounding of research participants’ trials and tribulations portrays Irwin and Umemoto’s genuine investment in the young people with whom they conducted research. As a reader, I too found myself intensely drawn in by these youth, and found many of their confrontations with authority and broader social norms infuriating. To provide one example, girls experienced patriarchy through a heavy load of unacknowledged household labor and denunciations at home, combined with an emphasis on sexual purity and heterosexuality that privileged those in monogamous heterosexual relationships. Such relationships offered the (usually unfulfilled) promise of a caring space denied by schools and families. At the same time, community expectations demanded assertiveness, or “realness” from these girls. As a result, they often fought and policed each other to elevate their positions relative to each other. (It is important to note that Irwin and Umemoto’s data show that this imposed self-reliance enabled girls to fare better than boys as they transitioned into adulthood.) Further, Irwin and Umemoto describe how the values of honor and independence enabled men to discuss how racism and colonialism harm their communities, while women were too burdened with the workings of sexism to see this part of the picture. As an ethnographic researcher myself, I found it hard to believe that the girls lacked awareness of their intersectional position forged in relation to colonialism, as the authors themselves point out that girls saw their conditions as “unjust” (p. 5).
Further, while some youth volunteered in the foster care system or broader community, none seemed to see themselves capable of enacting change by channeling their “critical consciousness into collective action” (p. 159), a possibility that the authors only cursorily mention. I wondered if and how their methods could have more fully accounted for the youth’s awareness of colonial patriarchy and capacity to change their environments. For example, facilitated discussions about Irwin’s and Umemoto’s findings related to racism and sexism in places such as the “lunch bunch” could enable data gathering from the young people regarding their awareness of their conditions. Also, presenting policy recommendations in this setting regarding a “capabilities approach to an ethic of care” (p. 107) could enable youth to consider the sort of systemic change they could help advance.
In addition, I found myself craving a more fleshed out analysis of Irwin and Umemoto’s theorization of colonial patriarchy and its imbrications with the contemporary carceral state as it relates to longer histories. How did Hawai‘i’s iterations of plantation agriculture, militarism, tourist-oriented service economy, suburbanization, and today’s intensely high cost of real estate produce the contours of the islands’ colonial and patriarchal penal state that has ballooned from the late 1970s into the present? What is the relationship between Hawai‘i’s intensely uneven distribution of wealth and its notable racial and gender hierarchies? These questions pose ripe areas of future inquiry for the authors or for other scholars conducting research about Hawai‘i.
Overall, this is an important book that brings a much-needed contribution to scholarship on Hawai‘i as a critical site for the study of colonialism and violence while foregrounding gender oppression. Their work proposes policy recommendations salient for Hawai‘i that extend beyond its parameters. I hope that scholars build upon Irwin and Umemoto’s significant research to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the multiple workings of the carceral, penal state in Hawai‘i, and the capacity of indigenous knowledge to advance justice and reconciliation for present and future generations on its islands while staging an example for the rest of the Pacific and for the entire world.