For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

Abstract

For the Children argues that the child is a critical figure to the understanding of the struggle to dismantle America’s prison nation. The child--and all producing institutions including schools, families, and juvenile justice systems--is a key technology of a shifting carceral regime. New forms of surveillance are invented to safeguard children, and new categories of crimes are required to mold the child into an appropriate adult. Childhood has historically never been available to all. Yet in the work to challenge or dismantle this carceral apparatus all too often naturalizes and invokes the very artifacts and technologies--the child--that reproduces and expands the logics at the core of the prison nation. As the nation begins to engage in rethinking facets of our prison nation, the child represents a significant and intimate thread, one that anti-prison organizers, prisons, and educational studies scholars must examine.