Globalizing the Streets

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Youth, Social Control, and Empowerment

Fabiola Salek, David C. Brotherton

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231502269
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto penale

Not since the 1960s have the activities of resistance among lower- and working-class youth caused such anxiety in the international community. Yet today the dispossessed are responding to the challenges of globalization and its methods of social control. The contributors to this volume examine the struggle for identity and interdependence of these youth, their clashes with law enforcement and criminal codes, their fight for social, political, and cultural capital, and their efforts to achieve recognition and empowerment. Essays adopt the vantage point of those whose struggle for social solidarity, self-respect, and survival in criminalized or marginalized spaces. In doing so, they contextualize and humanize the seemingly senseless actions of these youths, who make visible the class contradictions, social exclusion, and rituals of psychological humiliation that permeate their everyday lives.

Part 1. Youth, Social Control, and Surveillance

Martin Ruck, Anita Harris, Michelle Fine, and Nick Freudenberg

1. Youth Experiences of Surveillance

A Cross-National Analysis

As the long arm of late capitalism stretches globally, with a neoliberal agenda of privatization and “choice,” we witness a concomitant and not coincident proliferation of state-sponsored surveillance mechanisms, systems of criminal (in)justice that increasingly shape state relations with local communities of color through the particularly heavy scrutiny of youth. This chapter invites a global conversation about the proliferation of state-sponsored strategies of surveillance on youth, particularly youth of color and poverty, and their suspect relationship to creeping global capitalism.

We report common findings of youth experiences of police surveillance across three studies in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Across contexts, we document spikes in surveillance and arrests, and we document the subterranean erosion of youth belief in and commitment to state-sponsored democratic institutions and practices. We argue that youth in general, and youth of color and in poverty in particular, today develop in contexts of heavy scrutiny, with high penalties imposed disproportionately on those most disadvantaged. The future of democracy as vision and practice is jeopardized.

Developmentally, the consequences of such targeted surveillance and criminalized scrutiny, on the streets and in schools, have yet to be determined but need to be theorized. Public authorities supposed to protect and public sites supposed to educate have morphed into sites and relations suffused with suspicion, vulnerability, and betrayal. Those who presumably protect (ironically or not) place many youth at great risk; sites in which help is supposed to be available are, at best, marbled with liberatory possibilities and predatory surveillance. Young women, more than men, with their own fears on the streets, voice ambivalence about this creeping surveillance, and youth of color—even more than white youth—feel under siege. Although we as critical researchers may believe it is healthy for youth to be skeptical about the claims of a democratic and free state, particularly with respect to its police and its schools, we also worry that the current generation of young people is growing up and through a profound mistrust of the state, with causalities including a diminished belief in democracy, cynical views about a broad-based “common good,” and little memory of or imagination for a public sphere for the public. In their stead are seeds of betrayal and distrust; at best, we hear about local organizing for what could be meaningful communities of trust and respect.

In the United States, as is increasingly true around the world, recent debates about policing in urban areas are themselves part of several national and international trends: growing reliance on criminal justice to solve social problems (the United States now has more than two million people behind bars); an increasing concern about youth violence and school shootings, even in the face of declining crime rates; an increasing privatization of public spaces and a reliance on private security forces to maintain order in many urban areas; and a continued concentration of poor and immigrant youth of color in cities, even as these cities also attract and cater to whites (for further information see Poe-Yagamata and Jones 2000; Fine et al. 2003a).

As urban zip codes gentrify and elite interests and families occupy long-neglected neighborhoods, we witness an infusion not only of carpenters and real estate developers but of police and security who constitute the front-line troops ordered to clear out what is in order to reclaim what will be. Neither streets nor schools are exempt from the infusion of state power, watching and targeting youth, in the cleansing of urban America, Canada, and Australia.

On Moral Panics, Youth, and Surveillance

Little of this dynamic is new, but its intensity has generational consequence for citizenship and democracy. National anxieties typically attach to youth; moral panics have long targeted youth as the source of national troubles. Today, as in the past, concerns over crime, sexuality, and education focus on the “failures” of youth. In such panics, it is not unusual for a nation to construct technologies of surveillance, embodied in machines and people, often the very people entrusted with public authority (see Ayers et al. 2001 for contemporary and historic analyses of youth as a target of national moral panics). Youth of color attract a disproportionate share of the watching, the catching, the arresting and serving time.

Foucault (1979:205) argues that surveillance works “to impose a particular form of conduct on a human multiplicity.” According to Foucault, surveillance is a strategy to discipline the public. Our studies seek to reveal the consequences, from an urban youth perspective, of aggressive policing and adult surveillance of young people in many corners of public space, with particular concerns about youth alienation and disengagement from adult society in three nations.

Recent research on youth in public and private spaces suggests that urban youth, especially low-income youth of color, are being squeezed out of public spaces and placed under scrutiny and threat of criminalization when they are in public sites, and even at home (Jacobson and Crockett 2000; Kerr and Stattin 2000; Li et al. 2000). Some suggest that these policies may make it more difficult for young people to turn to teachers, police, or other adults in positions of public authority for help (Freudenberg et al. 1999).

Several studies in the United States have compared the attitudes and sometimes the experiences of white, Hispanic, and African American adults. In general, these studies show that whites trust police more and have more positive interactions than blacks and that Hispanics fall between these two populations (Norris et al. 1992; Spitzer 1976; Wilson 1996). Norris et al. (1992) note that of all groups studied, black youth tend to have the most “negative” and “hostile” feelings toward police (see also Anderson 1992, 1994; Wilson 1990, 1996).

Heightened surveillance breeds heightened suspicion. In an ethnography of fifty young urban black men in gangs, Patton (1998) reports that these men perceived police as a force of oppression, not as a force of community protection. Wilson (1996) concurs, arguing that these young men often equate street-level police officers with laws they are hired to uphold. A Quinnipiac University survey found that 64 percent of New York City blacks, 52 percent of Hispanics, and 21 percent of whites rate police brutality as a very serious problem (Quinnipiac University 2001).

Wortley and Tanner (2001) examined how race and ethnicity of Canadian youth affect their likelihood of being stopped and searched by police. In a study of more than thirty-three hundred Toronto high school students, they found that black youth who were not involved with drugs or other delinquent activities were still more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white youth who admitted involvement in illegal behavior. Even black youth who do not participate in suspect behaviors suffer from police scrutiny. Studies worldwide have found that indigenous, migrant, and ethnic minority youth experience disproportionately high levels of police contact (see Blagg and Wilkie 1995). In Australia young people of indigenous, Islander, or non–English-speaking backgrounds are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, or injured in contact with police than youth who self-identify as being from “an Australian cultural background,” that is, white and Anglo (Youth Justice Coalition of NSW 1994; see also Cunneen 1995).

We are well aware that the surveillance of youth of color does not stop at school doors. Minority students suffer in terms of more disciplinary problems and higher dropout rates as compared to white students. Across contexts of schooling, students of color, especially African American males, are much more likely to be suspended from school than their white counterparts (Banks and Banks 1993; Bennett and Harris 1982; Calabrese and Poe 1990; Darling-Hammond 1994; England et al. 1990; Felice 1981; Kaeser 1979; Sheets and Gay 1996). Although schools can take a variety of disciplinary actions, suspensions are one of the most severe in that they result in the removal of students from the school and thus a decrease in students’ instructional time (Williams 1989), highly correlated with dropping out. Disciplinary problems, such as suspensions, are a major factor contributing to the high incidence of early school leaving among minority students (Children’s Defense Fund 1974; Dei et al. 1997; Rumberger 1983; Williams 1989; Wu et al. 1982).

Although there is some evidence that racial and ethnic minority students often believe that they will receive harsher or more public punishment for engaging in the same behavior as white students (Marcus et al. 1991), there has been little systematic research directly exploring racial and ethnic minority students’ views and beliefs pertaining to school disciplinary practices and the use of police at school. Recent Canadian work provides some direct evidence of racial minority high school students’ views in this area. In an ethnographic study with a group of black, predominantly male, low socioeconomic status, urban high school students, Solomon (1992) found that with regard to school disciplinary practices, these students tended to view school discipline as being administered arbitrarily by school authorities. These students perceived that they were more often suspended than white students for engaging in the same types of behaviors. Black students were more likely to report that the schools’ regular use of police at school-related events was designed primarily to control and supervise their behaviors.

With heightened surveillance comes a series of spikes in arrests and ultimately incarceration rates. These patterns are grossly racialized (and classed) in the United States. Indeed, once youth are involved with the juvenile justice system, race and ethnicity dramatically influence outcomes. A recent study tracking youth through the U.S. juvenile justice system by race and ethnicity (Poe-Yagamata and Jones 2000) found that 26 percent of young people who are arrested in the United States are African American, representing rates slightly higher than their representation in the general population. At every point in the criminal justice process, being African American increased the likelihood of negative outcomes for youth. The most chilling finding of this analysis reveals that a full 58 percent of the youth who end up in state adult prisons are African American, more than doubling their original overrepresentation in the arrest rates. In Australia, a similar scenario faces Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. Indigenous youth make up 36 percent of the total numbers in juvenile detention centers but only 2.6 percent of the ten-to seventeen-year-old Australian population. They are twenty-one times more likely to be held in legal custody than nonindigenous youth, and this figure is increasing (Australian Institute of Criminology 1997).

Strikingly absent in this literature are the perspectives of young people themselves, with a thorough analysis of race, ethnicity, and gender. These are the empirical and theoretical holes that we sought to address. In this chapter we report on three studies conducted in the United States, Canada, and Australia, conducted collaboratively with youth researchers (in United States and Australia), designed to assess youth perspectives and experiences with police, security, guards, social workers, and educators—on the streets and in schools.

Surveilling the Globe’s Youth

Study 1: New York City

In order to assess youth and young adults’ perceptions and experiences of their interactions with police, security guards, and other adults in positions of authority, we designed a street survey of 911 young people found in public places in New York City (Fine et al. 2003b). In addition, we conducted open-ended structured telephone interviews with a subsample of 36 youth who reported, on their original survey, an instance of a difficult encounter with an adult in a position of public authority. A participatory action research (PAR) model was implemented for this two-part quantitative and qualitative study of New York City youth and young adults. In preparation for instrument design, the senior authors met with two focus groups of youth in two New York City high schools. Out of these discussions, four primary research questions evolved: To what extent do urban youth experience adult surveillance as evidence of mistrust and harassment versus comfort and safety? To what extent do race, ethnicity, and gender differentiate youth experiences of adult surveillance, particularly by teachers, police, and security guards? Can we begin to identify the consequences of surveillance on urban youth? and To what extent does the perception of adult surveillance affect youths’ trust in adult society, civic institutions, and democratic engagement?

Two dozen New York City youth and young adults, representing a racial, ethnic, and gender mix, were hired as co-researchers. Six 4-to 6-hour workshops were organized to train them on PAR methods, quantitative design, and ethics and to seek their wisdom, cautions, and language for instrument design. Over the course of these workshops, the youth and university-based researchers constructed a 112-item survey, “Young Adults and Public Spaces,” a multidimensional measure developed to document the attitudes and experiences of New York City youth and young adults with adults in positions of authority (e.g., police, teachers, parents, store personnel, and security guards). Measures of trust, alienation, harassment, and help seeking were also included in the surveys.

In summer 2000, using flyers and street outreach, ethnically diverse teams of high school and college student interviewers approached and recruited respondents in public places throughout New York City: in parks; on street corners; outside schools, libraries, and community colleges; and in other public sites. We sought a range of sites and youth, seeking to maximize generalizability for type of youth and type of setting in which they would be found. Interviewing sites were selected to enable us to fill each cell in our ideal sampling framework (calculated from the 1990 census). The distribution by borough approximated the distribution by race and ethnicity of young adults (ages sixteen to twenty-one) in the five boroughs of New York City. As we achieved our desired sample size in one group (e.g., Latino males in Manhattan), interviewers selectively sought participants to fill open cells (e.g., Asian females in Queens).

To gain insight into the complexity of and response to adverse interactions with police and other adults in authority, we interviewed, by telephone, a sample of young people who had reported troubling interactions with police or other adults in the street survey and volunteered to discuss the incidents further. A total of 113 accepted this offer, and we were able to reach 36 (32 percent) by telephone. This sample was 39 percent male and 61 percent female; 75 percent were African American or Latino. The sample was quite representative: 48 percent female, 23 percent white (compared with 30 percent white in the New York population under age 18), 30 percent African American (compared with 32 percent from the census), 30 percent Latino (compared with 32 percent from the census), and 10 percent Asian and Pacific Islander (compared with 7 percent from the census). It should be noted that our sample included 22 percent African Americans and 8 percent African Caribbeans. In addition, our sampling method selected for young people who spent time on the street and therefore may be at higher risk for interacting with police.

The design, methods, and findings are detailed in Fine et al. (2003b), and we offer here a summary of the results. Relying on qualitative and quantitative methods, and gathered with the deep participation of urban youth, the data reveal a multifaceted youth perspective on aggressive public surveillance, with ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Youth, Social Control, and Surveillance
• Part 2. Street Youth, Homelessness, and Displacement
• Part 3. Gangs and Street Cultures in the Globalized City
• Part 4. Youth, Violence, and Subcultures of Whiteness
• Part 5. Innovative Interventions and Youth in Crises
• Appendix: Agents of Change Responding to Violence and Exclusion
• Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Index