the Children?

The children’s early experiences provide a context for assessing subsequent outcomes. Data collected from case files and records presented to the courts show that before separation from birth parents, almost all 210 adoptees had experienced serious and often multiple forms of maltreatment; this was the primary reason for removal. Before entering their adoptive homes, 69% of the adoptees had had four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), 32% had experienced failed reunifications and 48% had had three or more foster placements. Adverse childhood experiences before entry to care, harmful experiences in care and repeated exposure to grief and loss are likely to have contributed to the high prevalence of emotional and behavioural difficulties, displayed by 49% of the adoptees. According to our classification, 57% were at high risk of experiencing adverse outcomes in adulthood.

The practical promise of abolitionist praxis during both ostensibly progressive reformist and more hard line law-and-order moments is made evident by For the Children?, a book that is a significant contribution to the theory and practice of abolitionist political work. Meiners brings together abolitionist, Black feminist, and queer theories to situate the figure of the child and the shifting racialized, gendered, and sexualized contours of this category within historical and contemporary contexts. Meiners draws out the interrelations among sites that consistently are thought of as separate. Meiners explains, " LGBTQ justice work is the struggle against police brutality. The work to end our nation's reliance on prisons is the work to dismantle white supremacy. Decolonization is gender and sexual self-determination. Fighting for access to educational opportunity is a part of a gender justice movement" (19-20; emphasis in original). Meiners follows the definitions of abolition developed by Angela Y. Davis and Critical Resistance (CR). For CR, abolition is a "political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment" (18). In the introduction, Meiners explains why she steers away from the widely used term "mass incarceration," and instead uses "carceral state," "prison-industrial complex" (PIC), and "prison nation." Although "mass incarceration" may signal the immense scope of imprisonment in the contemporary United States, it also obscures how criminalization, policing, and surveillance target particular groups and places. Instead, the idea of a PIC, popularized by CR and other abolitionist organizers, draws attention to the linkages among state, economic, and civil society institutions through which power and money flow and accumulate, and people are sorted, trapped, and governed. "Prison nation," a concept developed by Black feminist scholar Beth Richie in Arrested Justice, likewise highlights the ways in which policing and imprisonment are not institutions on the margins but are centrally entwined with social welfare, public schooling, and child protection.
Building on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work, these institutions are all part of racial capitalism, making the project of abolition one of transforming all the institutions through which the "ideological work of dehumanization and disqualification" take place (19).
The arc of For the Children? exemplifies why it is so important to critically examine how the figure of the child undergirds the carceral state and projects for building meaningful safety and social justice. Meiners's crucial argument is that the current modality of "child protection is tethered to a disposable adulthood" (130). In Chapter 1, she builds on Fred Moten, Lee Edelman, and Robin Bernstein's works to ask, "What enables children to be afforded certain rights and privileges, and not adults? What are the costs, to children, and to others, of these privileges?" (58). She traces key moments since the eighteenth century during which the construction of childhood and innocence have been racialized and heterogendered. The too-often deadly consequences of childhood being constructed as a natural developmental category and yet one that is hegemonically white are evident in the case of Trayvon Martin and the criminalization of youth of color.
In Chapter 2, Meiners explores tensions in efforts to marshal childhood to remedy or prevent the harms of the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP), sexual violations of children, bullying of queer youth, and exclusion of undocumented young people from the polity. In each case, organizing has tended to reinforce the carceral state by individualizing harms and remedies and by obscuring the state's role in creating vulnerabilities to harm. Building on the work of Damien Sojoyner, who argues that public schools and prisons are intertwined and that both function as enclosures for Black people's freedom, Meiners develops one of the key insights of the book in Chapter 3. Terms of discipline and safety undergird reforms in both institutions, yet these shifts do not signal a lessening of surveillance and punishment. She concludes that advocating for more money for schools and less for prisons has the danger of reproducing the idea of schools as safe for vulnerable young people and prisons as spaces for corrupted adults who may otherwise be abandoned. Chapter 4 offers one of the only critical accounts of transformative justice practices that I know. Written with abolitionist organizer and theorist Mariame Kaba and other individuals working with Project NIA, they provide an assessment and self-critique of the "peace room" that they ran in a K-8 grade school in Chicago. The project was intended to interrupt the capture of students by the criminal legal system, yet they grew increasingly concerned about the limits of their efforts given the ease with which such ideas have been coopted even as school closures, school pushouts, and gentrification continue.
Chapter 5 considers "reentry" for adults after prison in a society that tethers safety for some to the disposability of others. In such a world, the wrongdoings 120 ( Book Review of one individual can be used to undermine long-standing reentry housing, as Meiners recounts in the case of a man who sexually assaulted several women following his release from prison. The wrongs he did are real and unacceptable; so are the wrongs of unavailable housing, jobs, and health care. Yet, these forms of structural violence are erased through individualizing carceral discourses of personal responsibility and state safety. The chapter also reflects on who can inhabit a "student body," thoughts based on Meiners's account of her experiences running a free high school for adults who have been released from prison. The embodied effects of structural and state violence become evident in the heartrending disappearances of her students from class when so many become ill or die prematurely.
Interpersonal and sexual violence are perhaps the most difficult issues for abolitionists to confront. The state promises safety in the form of sex registries. Meiners marshals an array of empirical evidence to demonstrate how the state's promise to end violence against children has not been upheld. Rather, registries reproduce ideologies of "stranger danger," which historically have been deployed against LGBT people, and detract from the important work to be done to end violence perpetrated by family members, intimate relations, and known community members. The discussions and organizing efforts that Meiners proposes are long-term, but that does not mean that they are impractical, ungrounded, or unrealistic. The concluding chapter offers important thoughts on and concrete examples of what it means to build for abolition. The examples she provides illustrate that abolition is a grounded activity, which is both locally contingent and yet tuned to systemic transformation.
For the Children? is a brave book that neither shies away from the harms of interpersonal and state violence nor provides simplistic answers to truly difficult and pervasive issues of harm. It represents an important development in queer and trans abolitionist theory alongside Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock's Queer (In)Justice, Nat Smith and Eric Stanley's Captive Genders, Dean Spade's Normal Life, and the work of Against Equality. Organizers, college-level teachers, and political theorists from a range of disciplines will find this work an important theorization and account of contemporary abolitionist theory and practice.