Crime, governance, and knowledge production: the "two-track common-sense approach" to juvenile criminality in the United States.

• Author: Brown, Elizabeth

Introduction

SINCE THE DAWN OF THE MODERN IDEAL OF "CHILDHOOD," TWO CONCEPTION S OF YOUTH have prevailed--that of the innocent child unmarred by social history and that of the unruly child whose proximity to nature necessitates training in the refined sensibilities of modern society (Aries, 1962). These two historical conceptions often map onto racialized conceptions of childhood that in the juvenile court resulted in a preoccupation with "other people's children" (Platt, 1977; Rothman, 1980). Social geographers, however, argue that social hegemonies are geographically bounded and that processes of racialization often work through conceptions of space (e.g., Anderson, 1991; Delaney, 1998). In this article, I trace how recent federal juvenile justice legislation is situated within a racialized spatial conception of juvenile crime that draws on racialized ideas of why juveniles commit violent acts and spatial assumptions about where--and among whom--violence is normal.

In the most recent reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA, 2001), the United States Congress legislated what the bill termed a "two-track common sense approach" to youth crime. According to the bill, "although the juvenile violent crime arrest rate in 1999 was the lowest in the decade, there remains a consensus that the number of crimes and the rate of offending by juveniles nationwide is still too high" (H.R. Committee on Education and the Workforce, 2001:2). (1) To address this concern, the JJDPA 2001 "reformed" juvenile justice by promoting "quality prevention programs" that addressed the therapeutic needs of juveniles amenable to treatment, as well as programs that increased "juvenile accountability" for their crimes (Ibid.: 2-3).

This two-track approach is situated among broader changes in U.S. judicial systems, and, more specifically, in the definition of juvenile culpability and services. In a massive political transformation since the 1960s, the criminal justice system has gone from an agency that promoted rehabilitation and prevention to a system focused primarily on punishment and incapacitation (Garland, 2001; O'Malley, 1992, 2002). Instead of indeterminate sentencing and job training, the U.S. criminal justice system is now oriented toward a war on drugs, stiffer sentences, mandatory minimums, and an overall punitive orientation (Baum, 1996; Beckett, 1997; Parenti, 1999/2000). Similar trends have been observed within juvenile justice as "get-tough," "zero-tolerance," and "accountability" policies and programs permeate juvenile institutions (Dohrn, 2000; Feld, 1999; Frazier et al., 1999; Polakow, 2000; Polakow-Suransky, 2000; Zimring, 1998). This emphasis on punishment within juvenile institutions marks a significant reappraisal of the juvenile justice system (Bishop et al., 1989; Kempf-Leonard and Peterson, 2000), and has "transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative social welfare agency into a scaled-down, second-class criminal court for young people" (Feld, 1999: 3).

Additionally, criminologists note that this transformation has fallen disproportionately on youth of color, with Latino and black youth often incarcerated at rates vastly disproportionate to that of similarly situated white counterparts (Bridges and Steen, 1998). Despite this transformation of the juvenile court, its original rehabilitative mandate has yet to entirely fade, remaining in part the "common sense" about adolescent crime and juvenile justice. As the name evinces, this approach does not "retreat from rehabilitation" entirely, but rather couples the punitive transformations observed in adult court with an ongoing concern for the prevention of juvenile delinquency. In this article, I argue that this two-track approach is emblematic of the ways in which policy decisions become aligned, both socially and spatially, with discrete populations, thus leaving open the possibility for racially differential application and racially disproportionate juvenile justice dispositions.

Regardless of whether the influx of punitive polices has led to a complete erosion of the parens patriae principle, a broader social tension exists concerning the suitability of juvenile court for certain juvenile crimes, as evidenced in taglines such as "adult crime, adult time." To use the framework of the current JJDPA authorization, this tension is often manifested as an attempt to discriminate between juveniles who are "amenable" to prevention programs and those whose actions demonstrate adult culpability and must be held "accountable." The first approach of the JJDPA, "quality prevention programs," is associated with the discourse of rehabilitation that marks the advent of the juvenile court. Progressive movements at the turn of the century argued that criminal justice procedures further degraded the moral development of children. Juvenile justice thus sought to care for the moral development of the child's character, in contrast to criminal justice, which sought to hold individuals accountable for their actions through punishment (Feld, 1999; Platt, 1977; Rothman, 1980).

"Juvenile accountability," however, critiques the underlying assumptions of juvenile court and calls into question the idea that juveniles necessarily have a reduced criminal culpability. Policies of juvenile accountability grew out of moral panics about youth violence in the 1970s and 1990s. They followed discourses of youth violence that asserted a "new breed" of juvenile offenders whose violent crimes and callous behavior cannot be dealt with by the lenient "revolving door" of juvenile court (Zimring, 1998). As the discourse goes, some acts of juvenile violence signal maturity, and thus, criminal culpability. Juvenile accountability measures precipitated juvenile court policies that made waiver provisions easier and often automatic, increased the types of punitive sanctions juvenile court judges could place on juveniles, and decreased the confidentiality of juvenile court proceedings, usually accompanied by racialized "code-words" (Bishop et al., 1989; Bridges and Steen, 1998; Dohrn, 2000; Feld, 1999, 2003; Zimring, 1998). Together, this common-sense logic of prevention and accountability is emblematic of this contemporary attempt to balance amenability and accountability. Further, it legally codifies a differential criminal culpability for juveniles and suggests that some acts committed by juveniles breach the child/adult divide. As a federal mandate, then, the juvenile system currently attempts to combine its original parens patriae mandate with a contemporary concern for punishment--in other words, a program that meets "the needs of individual juveniles and society at large" (H.R. Committee on Education and the Workforce, 2001: 2).

In this article, I interrogate the "common-sense" logic of this tenuous balance between prevention and punishment by juxtaposing two moral panics that appeared in congressional hearings during the 1990s: "gang" and "school" violence. These hearings illustrate that social hegemonies about race, class, and crime and delinquency fuel seemingly neutral legislation. "Gang violence" constructions are noted for their prompting of "get-tough" legislation, punitive political rhetoric, and racialized media imagery that promote fear of the urban black male (e.g., Dohrn, 2000; Hancock, 2000). By contrast, school violence evinced a hyper-concern about the "abnormality" of violence in suburban settings and witnessed a moment for the rearticulation of white, middle-class identity as absent of "race problems" (Aitken, 2001; Kobayashi and Peake, 2000). Thus, I argue that the discursive constructs of "gang" and "school" violence in congressional hearings illustrate how social knowledges about youth violence contain within them racialized subject positions. Juxtaposing these two logics illustrates how racialized imagery can pervade seemingly racially neutral policies. Youth violence through the lens of gangs suggests a population of predators who are most likely found in urban inner-cities, while the lens of school shootings offers the perspective that white, suburban shooters can be dealt with through early intervention and prevention opportunities. The examples of gang and school violence suggest that "common-sense" ideas about crime and delinquency are crafted within a hegemonic social and cultural system that the law is invoked to support.

These constructs of gang and school violence derive from a larger project, a textual analysis of 16 congressional hearings on youth violence held by the 103rd, 104th, 105th, and 106th Congresses between 1995 and 2001, that were located through the key terms "youth violence," "juvenile delinquency," and "juvenile justice." This sample included any hearing that discussed the causes of, conceptions about, or concerns over youth violence. Excluded were hearings about budget appropriation, already existing programmatic reports, and one hearing that focused primarily on the legality of juvenile justice jurisdiction in U.S. reservation territory. From these hearings, in this article I draw upon the congressional characterizations of gang and school violence in the 1990s, two subjects that routinely animated mainstream media, some academic discourses, and popular discourses during this time (Dohrn, 2000). Other instances of youth criminality were discussed within these hearings, but gang and school violence were discourses that focused on the violent criminal acts of juveniles.

To uncover how violent youth were conceptualized, I coded the hearings for what types of juveniles were deemed capable of violence, the social causes of youth violence, and the responsibility of Congress toward youth violence. Using the key words "violent youth," "causes of violent youth," and "governmental responsibility for violent youth," I developed a multistage coding system that produced archetypal frames of school and gang...