Kids in Custody
The fifth chapter shows how the child safety issue further splintered federal juvenile justice and youth policy along racial fault lines. Tracing the movements of rightwing luminary Alfred S. Regnery, chapter 5 illustrates how public fears about stranger danger served to lengthen the punitive, policing arm of the federal welfare state, to undercut the children’s rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and to bolster the politics of “family values.” As OJJDP director, Regnery used the child safety scare to “toughen” juvenile justice policies targeting working-class, nonwhite youth, while simultaneously embellishing the severity of moral threats facing “innocent” children (coded as white and middle-class). To that end, Regnery employed racialized language that cast virtually all juvenile offenders as nonwhite. The “typical candidate for juvenile arrest,” he claimed, was “most likely black, possibly Hispanic.” Such rhetoric prefigured the “superpredator” discourse that crystallized in the 1990s and helped exacerbate racialized mass incarceration.