Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221076768 |
| Author | Alexandra L. Cox |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in
Postwar New York, New York University Press: New York, 2019; 233 pp.
ISBN 978-1-4798-0675-1, $19.95
There is a gap in the historiography of youth punishment in the United States in the period
“from the Great Depression to the Great Society”(p. 8), yet this is a crucial period to
study in part because of shifts in public perceptions and models of youth and childhood
and the emergence of legally and socially structured forms of racial stratification and
oppression that happened during this time. Carl Suddler seeks to fill this gap through
his focus on the case study of Black youth in the justice system in New York from
1930 until the late 1960s. Suddler’s work contributes to our knowledge about the key
socio-legal forces in criminalizing young Black people, and charts the history of resist-
ance to racialized forms of criminalization.
Suddler draws from archival research, including an analysis of public discourse about
youth crime and offending, to shed light on the structure and functioning of punishment
in the period after the Great Depression, analysing key debates in the court context about
the role of social history and ‘race’in sentencing, and the contributions of the first Black
female judge in America, Justice Jane Bolin, who served on the New York City Domestic
Relations Court. He then analyzes the phenomenon of street crime in wartime Harlem,
examining the role of citizen-led resistance to overpolicing and criminalization, as well
as the evolution of the ‘hoodlum’narrative about Black youth. His work focuses on
the ways that social scientific disciplines, the public media, and legal authorities came
together to construct Black youth criminality. Finally, his book uses the case study of
a group of young Black men from Harlem—the Harlem Six—whose wrongful conviction
in 1965 sheds light on the broader context of post-war overpolicing of young Black men.
Linking to important earlier work on the role of social science disciplines in contributing
to the criminalization of Blackness (Muhammad, 2010), Suddler traces the history of ideas
about ‘prevention’and ‘treatment’during this period, and how they constructed images of
delinquency. For example, he writes about the foundation of the Police Athletic League as
a crime prevention program that emerged in the 1930s in part in response to theories that
delinquency could be prevented through young people’s engagement in recreation. Yet
Suddler details the ways that preventative organizations and strategies like this became a
vehicle for the expansion of surveillance of young people, particularly racialized young
people. He also charts the development of the Lafargue clinic, which opened its doors in
Harlem in 1946, and was aimed at providing Black New Yorkers with mental health
support, building on the psy-disciplines’emerging interest “in the psychological roots of
prejudice and discrimination”and the connections between “inadequate social conditions”
and “biological characteristics”(p. 88). Suddler charts the ways that the clinic sought to
offer preventative assistance to young people who might later be deemed delinquent, and
filled some gaps in care that emerged because of racism in the broader health care system.
However, he also points to the ways that the clinic was a “participant in the postwar crimin-
alization of black youths in Harlem”(p. 92) in part because of its positivist emphasis on iden-
tifying the roots of delinquency in and through a child’s mental pathologies.
822 Punishment & Society 25(3)
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