Editors' Introduction Youth under Control: Punishment and "Reform" in the Neoliberal State

Given the entrenched social inequalities and punitive justice policies facing young people in the United States, a more theoretically informed and principled scholarship on youth criminalization and punishment is sorely needed. A goal of this special issue of Social Justice is to provide examples of such work from scholars working at the intersections of criminology, justice studies, and the sociology of punishment. Using various theoretical lenses connected by a critique of neoliberal logics, the articles explore the lived realities of punitive social and penal policies aimed at young people in the United States. Individual articles focus on particular aspects of the punitive turn: schools Juvenile justice, and community-based programs. But they also historicize their inquiries to make sense of these local lived realities in and beyond the contexts of neoliberal constraints on funding and constructions of responsibilization, the rise of the carceral state and racialized criminalization and punishment, and the increasing securitization of youth spaces. Neoliberalism remains a critically important phenomenon through which to consider youth punishment (Ossei-Owusu 2012; see generally Harcourt 2010). In taking a moment to define neoliberalism, we identify at least three ways in which authors within this volume observe the relevance of neoliberalism to contemporary projects of youth punishment. All three also index the importance of considering neoliberalism--a term often (mis)used to identify the shrinking role of the state--as working in and through a reconstituted state. First, as a political-economic project of privatization, deregulation, and accumulation, neoliberalism has produced dramatic shifts in production during the latter decades of the twentieth century that have underdeveloped urban and rural areas, reduced the amount of semi-skilled work available, and maintained low wages for what labor remains (Harvey 2005; Smith 1984). Yet sectors of the economy that remain solvent and even expanding are decidedly part of the problem under study in this volume. The growing scope of police and carceral power, part of the emergent security state (Hallsworth and Lea 2011), is visible inside secondary schools through the rise of the "punishment Industry" (Simmons, this volume), but is also palpable in the halls of university criminology departments, where job fairs and classes prepare the next generation of police, probation, and correctional officers (Schept, Wall, and Brisman, this volume). Second, neoliberalism has not only structured job markets in favor of police and carceral power, but has also diffused into the micro-operations and discourses of criminal justice agencies and actors. This has resulted in technocratic and managerial approaches to an expanding juvenile justice apparatus (Wacquant 2009; Schept, this volume) that affirms youth "disposability" (Giroux 2008) and reinscribes earlier forms of racialized punishment (Cox, this volume). Finally, the retreat of the welfare state under neoliberalism and the "penalization of welfare" have meant fewer community programs and opportunities for young people and a restrictive tethering of remaining programs to neoliberal standards, vocabularies, and assessments (Gray 2013; Myers and Goddard, this volume; Wacquant 2009). As the articles in this issue theorize through various lenses, these global shifts in political economy--and the ideologies that justify and drive them--have transformed sites of youth socialization. From the school to the workplace to the detention center, mantras of personal responsibility, contingency, and competition animate the workings of social institutions in which youth find themselves. For youth justice and juvenile justice, this can be seen in programs that urge young people to see myriad social problems as personal problems. This approach, inscribed now into the discursive and material fabric of programs and institutions, can depoliticize youth and further sediment narratives of personal responsibility that obfuscate structural relationships that impose marginality (Cox 2011; Phoenix and Kelly 2013). …