Challenging mass incarceration in the City of Care: Punishment, community, and residential placement
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Author | Amy Smith,Elizabeth Brown |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480616683794 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480616683794
Theoretical Criminology
2018, Vol. 22(1) 4 –21
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480616683794
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Challenging mass incarceration
in the City of Care:
Punishment, community,
and residential placement
Elizabeth Brown
San Francisco State University, USA
Amy Smith
San Francisco State University, USA
Abstract
Challenges to mass incarceration often come from places seeking to bolster
“community” sanctions and community-based alternatives to punishment. In the City
of Care, local community activists challenged growing rates of juvenile incarceration
and the overrepresentation of youth of color in juvenile detention by advocating for
a community-based “circle of care”. These efforts resulted in the local juvenile court
embracing the “least restrictive interventions”. In cases where juveniles could not be
helped “in the community”, residential placement replaced the practices of sending
young people to juvenile hall or the California Youth Authority. This article examines
how the use of placement sought to unseat the ethos of punishment, but inadvertently
incentivized young people to stay in juvenile hall. Thus, in the City of Care the extension
of “community-based” services is often no different from practices of punishment, and
must be interrogated as part of the state repertoire of control and exclusion.
Keywords
Case study, community penalties, ethic of care, juvenile justice, race
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Brown, School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, San Francisco State University,
San Francisco, CA, USA.
Email: eabrown@sfsu.edu
683794TCR0010.1177/1362480616683794Theoretical CriminologyBrown and Smith
research-article2017
Article
Brown and Smith 5
Introduction
The well-known turn in juvenile justice toward social control led to increased numbers
of young people-children tried in adult court and their minor infractions punished with
severe sentences (Bilchik, 1999; Fagan and Zimring, 2000; Feld, 1999; Hawkins and
Kempf Leonard, 2005; Henning, 2013; Shook, 2005). Such trends, however, did not go
unchallenged, as they met resistance from local groups; as a result, several systems
around the country sought to embrace new forms of juvenile punishment (Butts and
Mears, 2001; Mendel, 2009; Wordes and Jones, 1998). This article examines how one
such city—called by local officials and named here as the “City of Care”—sought to
decrease juvenile incarceration, especially among youth of color, by institutionalizing a
“community orientation” to juvenile delinquency.
As the history of the juvenile court has shown, community-oriented reforms can
entrench and recreate the carceral state in benevolent guise. In the City of Care, residen-
tial placement1 was supported as a means of decreasing punitive approaches to juvenile
crime and in particular, a way to reduce the overconcentration of youth of color in deten-
tion. These intentions, though, conflicted with the reality of placement, resulting in youth
being placed far outside their “community” and in group homes around the country.
Contrary to its goals, placement further entrenched racial disproportionalities and became
an institutional mechanism as critical to the sorting of “us” from “them” as traditional
mechanisms of incarceration (Hawkins and Kempf Leonard, 2005; Pickett and Chiricos,
2012). Thus, rather than disrupting the ethos of punishment, these community reforms
frequently created an institutional reversal where young people preferred juvenile hall to
the supposedly less punitive residential care.
We trace four themes challenging the divide between residential placement as social
welfare and care and juvenile detention as retribution and punishment. First, many of the
children we interviewed experienced group homes as inherently insecure places that
often subjected them to greater violence and uncertainty than on the “outs” or in juvenile
hall. Second, youth saw group homes as industries built on making money from their
misfortune. Third, our research participants were often placed far from family and
friends. Finally, many experienced group home placement as greater punishment than
time in juvenile hall.
Instead of providing reintegration and restoring bonds with the community, in other
words, for many young people residential placement evolved into an institutional laby-
rinth in which spatial distance was deployed as a controlling governing tactic. Rather
than providing benevolence and security, youth found group homes to be indifferent, and
insecure sites that increased their sense of alienation. While some had placement experi-
ences, this had less to do with the actual placement than the relational connections forged
and fostered within.
While community-based services do not necessarily net-widen criminal justice pro-
grams, evidence suggests that community-premised reforms increase the intractability of
juvenile justice. As scholars have long documented, juvenile incarceration leads to
harsher case dispositions and more likely involvement in the adult criminal justice sys-
tem (Bernburg and Krohn, 2003; Frazier and Bishop, 1985). For those subject to the
“community orientation” in the City of Care, the practices of punishment and social
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