Tasseli McKay, Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, & Anupa Bir, Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry
Published date | 01 July 2023 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211057334 |
Author | Rosemary Ricciardelli,Sara MacNaull |
Date | 01 July 2023 |
and deprivation into stories of aimlessness and failure (p. 71). Perhaps most telling was
that despite the scale of the Atlanta tragedies, no milk carton campaign emerged, prob-
ably in part because few photographs of these persons likely existed at all (p. 70). And
while parents of the murdered youths in Atlanta, along with others in the Black commu-
nity, undertook major actions to bring attention to their individual cases and also the
bigger picture of racism, the “Atlanta saga”did not fit into the child safety regime’s racia-
lized narrative of protecting (white) innocence, and quickly faded away (pp. 86–87).
The last part of Stranger Danger focuses on some of the key figures in the political
maneuvers starting in the 1980s (and continuing through the 2000s) that created some
of the laws and policies responsible for mass incarceration. Here we learn, for
example, about the figure of Alfred S. Regnery, a Reagan administration zealot for
child safety who stoked the moral panic and spearheaded policies with severe conse-
quences for marginalized, non-white juveniles. This section also details post-1980s
policy-making, such as ‘three strikes’and ‘Megan’s Law,’that capitalized on fear and
produced tough-on-crime policies.
Stranger Danger is an excellent piece of scholarship, clearly the result of deep and
wide archival research. It is essential reading for knowledge about the origins of legal pol-
icies that rely on fears over threats to ‘white innocence’that have had such monumental
consequences for mass incarceration. The book also raises fascinating questions about
multiple levels of exploitation that drove the child safety regime at its beginnings in
the 1980s.
ORCID iD
Paul Kaplan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9022-1816
Paul Kaplan
San Diego State University, USA
Tasseli McKay, Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, & Anupa Bir, Holding
On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry, University of
California Press: Oakland, California, 2019; 212 pp. (including index).
ISBN: 9780520305250
Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry is a must-read
for anyone interested in families, relationships, fatherhood, and the trying effects on
each of incarceration. It is a seminal, deeply thoughtful, and methodical book that sets
the stage for what is possible when the realms of criminological studies and family
studies converge. In Holding On, the authors examine the experiences of both incarcer-
ated or reentering fathers and their partners or co-parents. McKay et al. emphasize the
need to study the family, not solely as a unit of measurement but as a constellation
made up of various –and often different –perspectives. Rooted in the findings from a
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