The Intractability Malleability Thesis : Writing Race into British and Canadian Interwar Youth Penal Reform

Miller, Esmorie (2023) The Intractability Malleability Thesis : Writing Race into British and Canadian Interwar Youth Penal Reform. In: EUROCRIM 2023, 2023-09-06 - 2023-09-09, Palazzo dei Congressi.

Abstract

Scholars continue to reiterate a need to historicize contemporary concerns about race, crime, and punishment, beyond the American context. This presentation identifies interwar England and Canada as two prescient examples. Indeed, in both these contexts extant scholarship draw attention to Black youth’s increasing rates of incarceration, exposing the normalization of extreme punishment for this demographic. Yet, scholars (Phillips et al., 2019) argue that narratives prioritizing statistical analyses lack both social and historical contextualization and therefore critical rigour. Without contextualization, youth risk being labelled and rationalized as the most punishable. Against the backdrop of 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. 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 and Canadian youth penal reform remains unexplored in criminological histories. Yet rich histories of class and gender contribute to our understanding, by linking past and present.