For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

by Erica R. Meiners

“Childhood has never been available to all.” In her opening chapter of For the Children? , Erica R. Meiners stakes the claim that childhood is a racial category often unavailable to communities of color. According to Meiners, this is glaringly evident in the U.S. criminal justice system, where the differentiation between child and adult often equates to access to stark disparities. And what is constructed as child protection often does not benefit many young people or their communities. Placing the child at the heart of the targeted criminalization debate, For the Children? considers how perceptions of innocence, the safe child, and the future operate in service of the prison industrial complex. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, with incarceration and policing being key economic tools to maintain white supremacist ideologies. Meiners examines the school-to-prison pipeline and the broader prison industrial complex in the United States, arguing that unpacking child protection is vital to reducing the nation’s reliance on its criminal justice system as well as building authentic modes of public safety. Rethinking the meanings and beliefs attached to the child represent a significant and intimate thread of the work to dismantle facets of the U.S. carceral state.  Taking an interdisciplinary approach and building from a scholarly and activist platform, For the Children? engages fresh questions in the struggle to build sustainable and flourishing worlds without prisons. 

Genres: Nonfiction

280 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2016

Reviews

[Quin Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, sui generis book, but does not quite live up to its promise. Despite the title and cover blurb, this book barely discusses themes of the child, innocence, or futurity. These themes are touched upon in passing, and there are some interesting ideas presented, but these are not at all developed. Instead, the book reads like a collection of separate essays loosely organized around the theme of prison abolition. To be sure, this discussion is invaluable, as are the extensive discussions of anti-prison/abolitionist organizing work that the author provides. However, scholars of childhood will have to do some extensive analytical work to make the connections between childhood/adulthood/futurity/innocence and the prison-industrial complex that the author promised were to be central to the argument. Disappointing in this regard. Still worth reading as a sustained discussion on the complexities of opposing both interpersonal violence and the prison-industrial complex and as a review of several relevant bodies of literature.