Your World of Legal Intelligence
 United Kingdom | +44 (0) 20 7284 8080

Paul M Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State

Document Cited in Related
Published date01 July 2023
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211056146
AuthorPaul Kaplan
Date01 July 2023
Book Reviews
Paul M Renfro, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American
Carceral State, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2020; 312 pp. (including
Index): ISBN: 9780190913984
As the concept of mass incarceration has matured into a broad reference for the conse-
quences of neoliberal punitiveness that overtook the US in the 1980s, the details of its
origins and growth are important to know. During a time when ‘defunding the police’
is taken seriously, it is important to remember how the police got funded in the f‌irst
place. Paul M. Renfro’s book Stranger Danger analyzes one branch in the roots of
mass incarceration by focusing on the cultural, political, and legal ramif‌ications of
high prof‌ile ‘missing and exploited children’cases from the 1980s. These cases
spawned a moral panic that Renfro calls ‘the child safety regime’(p. 9) that had a signif‌i-
cant impact on criminal justice policy from the early 1980’s through the 2000’s.
The f‌irst part of Stranger Danger revisits a handful of high-prof‌ile cases from the
1980’s, such as those of Adam Walsh and Etan Patz, two six-year-old boys who disap-
peared from public places (a department store in Florida and a street in New York City)
and were later found dead, victims of homicide. Adam Walsh’s story was soon eclipsed
by his father John’s notoriety as host of the TV show America’s Most Wanted, although
John Walsh’s celebrity is not Renfro’s primary focus. Rather, Stranger Danger investi-
gates the racialized and heteronormative concept of ‘endangered childhood,’which
overtly refers to the physical safety of kids but also implies a moral threat to white, het-
erosexual children. This moral dimension comes into focus through Renfro’s analysis of
the cultural impact of widely distributed photographs of Etan Patz and others (some of
which are included in the book). The gist is that these images of missing and ostensibly
photogenic white boys resonated with people in the cultural center of the US: white, het-
erosexual, family-types with middle-class aspirations. Etan Patz’s father, Stanley,
summed up this idea in a revealing quote unearthed by Renfro:
It happened to middle-class people with a father who was a photographer and who just hap-
pened to have an unusual cache of interesting kiddie pictures …If I hadn’t been a photog-
rapher with those pictures—if we had been a poor, black family with blurry Polaroids—this
case would have come and gone with the rest of them (p. 42).
Moreover, and key to the concept of ‘endangered childhood,’these cute white kids
were victimized by strangers, not family members nor other known parties, although
as Stranger Danger makes clear, it is the latter who are largely responsible for abduction
and sexual abuse of children in the US (p. 4). Etan Patz, Adam Walsh, two Iowan paper-
boys named Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin, and a few others depicted on posters and
Book Reviews 811

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT