TY - GEN

T1 - Race, Recognition, and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice

T2 - The Intractability/Malleability Thesis

AU - Miller, Esmorie

PY - 2023/6/30

Y1 - 2023/6/30

N2 - The Lammy Review (2017) revealed Black, British youth’s disproportionately high incarceration rates, exposing the rationalization extreme punishment. Yet, scholars (Phillips et al., 2019) argue that revelations prioritizing statistics lack both social and historical contextualization and therefore critical rigour. Without contextualization, youth risk being labelled and rationalized as the most punishable. Drawing on the deviance invention logic well established in youth justice, the presentation offers an expanded explanatory scope in the Intractability, Malleability (I/M) thesis (Miller, 2022). This is an original, integrated social theoretical logic with the capacity to progress the customary analytical scope beyond the statistical analyses. The I/M thesis advances a socio-historical account, exploring Black youth’s positioning as constitutive of the continuity of racialized people’s historic exclusion from the benefits of modern rights, including lenience and care. The I/M logic takes its analytical currency from a combined critical race theory (CRT) and recognition theory. Youth’s disproportionately high punishment rates are examined as a greater issue of exclusion. It is theorized to be part of a process institutionalized against the backdrop of early modern twentieth-century youth penal reform. To date, race’s place in early twentieth century British youth penal reform remains unexplored in criminological histories. Yet rich histories of class and gender contribute to our understanding, by linking past and present.

AB - The Lammy Review (2017) revealed Black, British youth’s disproportionately high incarceration rates, exposing the rationalization extreme punishment. Yet, scholars (Phillips et al., 2019) argue that revelations prioritizing statistics lack both social and historical contextualization and therefore critical rigour. Without contextualization, youth risk being labelled and rationalized as the most punishable. Drawing on the deviance invention logic well established in youth justice, the presentation offers an expanded explanatory scope in the Intractability, Malleability (I/M) thesis (Miller, 2022). This is an original, integrated social theoretical logic with the capacity to progress the customary analytical scope beyond the statistical analyses. The I/M thesis advances a socio-historical account, exploring Black youth’s positioning as constitutive of the continuity of racialized people’s historic exclusion from the benefits of modern rights, including lenience and care. The I/M logic takes its analytical currency from a combined critical race theory (CRT) and recognition theory. Youth’s disproportionately high punishment rates are examined as a greater issue of exclusion. It is theorized to be part of a process institutionalized against the backdrop of early modern twentieth-century youth penal reform. To date, race’s place in early twentieth century British youth penal reform remains unexplored in criminological histories. Yet rich histories of class and gender contribute to our understanding, by linking past and present.

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

BT - British Society of Criminology Annual Conference 2023 University of Central Lancaster, Preston

ER -