Abstract
The voracious discourse and deformities of war as an organizer of collective experience took an ominous turn under the administration of George W. Bush. In response to the tragic attacks on September 11, the Bush administration not only made war and preemptive military strikes central to its foreign policy, but it also transformed the discourse of war into a regulatory principle for organizing everyday life. Against the threat of a terrorist attack, the Bush administration unleashed a Manichean imperative that short-circuited thought and gave free rein to the daily mobilization of mass-induced fear, rendering inessential the constitutive mechanisms of politics, particularly deliberative exchange based on reason and evidence, critical debate, shared responsibility, and ethical accountability. The discourse of the post-9/11 Bush administration was hypermasculine in tone and militaristic in response, legitimated in simplistic contrasts between good and evil. Rather than invite deliberation and dialogue, abstract yet powerfully emotive language stifled thinking and squelched dissent. Bush-speak proved a profoundly antipolitical discourse, because it was incapable of imagining—and in fact disdained—a notion of politics based on judgment, meaningful criticism, and multiple public spheres.2
[I]n a time when punitive crime control measures have drastically increased, youth of color experience this hypercriminalization not only from criminal justice institutions but also from non-criminal justice structures traditionally intended to nurture: the school, the family, and the community center. Ultimately, in the era of mass incarceration, a “youth control complex” created by a network of racialized criminalization and punishment deployed from various institutions of control and socialization has formed to manage, control, and incapacitate black and Latino youth.
—Victor M. Rios, “The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration”1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11 (London: Polity Press, 2005).
See, for example, James K. Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: Free Press, 2008).
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 331.
Glenn Greenwald, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok (New York: Working Assets Publishing, 2006).
See the stinging critique and condemnation of the use of torture sanctioned by politicians at the highest level of the Bush administration in Editorial, “The Torture Report,” New York Times (December 18, 2008), p. A34; see also Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
The rise of the warfare state has been well documented. See Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New York: Metropolitan, 2008)
Norman Solomon, Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State (New York: Polipoint Press, 2007)
Robert Higgs, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 (Washington, DC: The Independent Institute, 2005).
Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007)
Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan, 2006)
Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
For an insightful commentary on the Bush administration’s war against constitutional rights, see Greenwald, How Would a Patriot Act?; Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law (New York: Allan Lane, 2008)
Of course, there are some notable exceptions. See Jerome Miller, Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: The New Press, 1999)
Michael Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999)
Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999)
Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: The New Press, 2002)
David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Mary Pattilo, David Weiman, and Bruce Western, eds, Imprisoning America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004)
Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
Manning Marable, Ian Steinberg, and Keesha Middlemass, eds, Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007).
I take this up in Henry A. Giroux, Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth (New York: Routledge, 1996)
Cited in Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), p. 4.
Linda S. Beres and Thomas D. Griffith, “Demonizing Youth,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 34 (January 2001), p. 747.
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Reflections of Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony,” in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, ed. Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 267.
Garland, The Culture of Control; and Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Phil Scranton, Power, Conflict and Criminalisation (New York: Routledge, 2007).
For a brilliant analysis of the racist state, see David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (London: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 126, 128.
This issue is taken up in a number of important books. See Christopher Robbins, Expelling Hope (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008)
Valerie Polakow, Who Cares for Our Children (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007)
William Lyons and Julie Drew, Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006)
Valerie Polakow, ed., The Public Assault on America’s Children: Poverty. Violence, and Juvenile Justice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000)
William Ayers, A Kind and Just Parent (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
I have argued that the prison-industrial complex has to be analyzed within the rise of a new mode of authoritarianism that emerged under the Bush-Cheney administration. See Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
On the issue of the racial biopolitics of neoliberalism, war, violence, authoritarianism, and everyday life, see Leerom Medovoi, “Global Society Must Be Defended: Biopolitics Without Boundaries,” Social Text 25:2 (Summer 2007), pp. 53–79
Jonathan Michael Feldman, “From Warfare State to ‘Shadow State,’” Social Text 25:2 (Summer 2007), pp. 143–168
Nikhil Singh, “The Afterlife of Fascim,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105:1 (Winter 2006), pp. 71–93
Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, “War Rhetorics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105:1 (Winter 2006), pp. 175–205.
David Clark, “Schelling’s Wartime: Philosophy and Violence in the Age of Napoleon,” European Romantic Review 19:2 (April 2008), pp. 139–148.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979 (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 323.
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives (London: Polity Press, 2004), p. 6.
See, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005).
Jennifer Warren, One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (Washington, DC: The PEW Center on the States, 2007), pp. 3
Jason DeParle, “The American Prison Nightmare,” New York Review of Books 54:6 (April 12, 2007), p. 33.
Paul Street, Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 82.
Pew Center on the States, One in 31:The Long Reach of American Corrections (Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, March 2009). p. 11.
Under such conditions, as Derrida points out, the Arab became the “ultimate figure of exclusion and dissidence in the post-9/11 era.” See Giovanna Borradori, “Foreword,” in Mustapha Cherif, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. x.
Douglas Kellner, Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. 14.
On the dark side of the war on terror and the politics of torture, see Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law (New York: Allan Lane, 2008)
Lindsay Beyerstein Majikthise, “Congress Probes Child Abuse Under Guise of Treatment,” AlterNet (May 7, 2008). Online: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/majikthise.typead.com/84572/. For an in-depth analysis of the tough-love industry aimed at children, see Maia Szalavitz, Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (New York: Riverside, 2006).
Children’s Defense Fund, 2008 Annual Report (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 2009). Online: http://www.childrens-defense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-of-americas-children-2008-report.pdf.
Randall R. Beger, “Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the Vanishing Rights of Students,” Social Justice 29:1 (2002), p. 120.
The best book analyzing all aspects of zero tolerance policies is Robbins, Expelling Hope. See also William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Rick Ayers, eds., Zero Tolerance (New York: The New Press, 2001).
Elora Mukherjee, Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools (New York: American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties, March 2008), p. 9.
For a superb analysis of urban marginality of youth in the United States and France, see Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts (London: Polity Press, 2008).
Children’s Defense Fund, America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 2008), p. 77. Online: http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/CDF_annual_report_07.pdf?docID=8421.
For a moving and insightful book on incarcerating kids, see William Ayers, A Kind and Just Parent (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
Annie E. Casey Foundation, “A Road Map for Juvenile Justice Reform,” in 2008 Kids Count Data Book (Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2008). Online: http://www.aecf.org/~/media/PublicationFiles/AEC180essay_booklet_MECH.pdf.
David Tanenhaus, Juvenile Justice in the Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Copyright information
© 2009 Henry A. Giroux
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Giroux, H.A. (2009). Locked Up: Education and the Youth Crime Complex. In: Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100565_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37784-8
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10056-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)