Title: Just for kids? How the youth decarceration discourse endorses adult incarceration
Date: 14th November 16:30
Location: Fulton 107 or online (link sent to email)
Abstract: In this talk, Hedi Viterbo will lay bare three overlooked pitfalls of calls to reduce or abolish the penal confinement of youth, particularly in the UK and the US. First, despite their anti-carceral semblance, such calls persistently portray most people in trouble with the law—namely, adults—as deserving of imprisonment. Second, this ageist rhetoric often disregards adult vulnerability. Thus, despite adults’ greater medical vulnerability to COVID-19, some organisations pushed for youth to be prioritised for release from prisons during the pandemic. Third, the youth decarceration discourse reproduces essentialist assumptions about youth, which rest on questionable science and downplay the socially constructed dimension of age differences. Doubtless, there are compelling arguments against penal confinement, but it is only decarceration across the age spectrum that can truly challenge carceral thinking—and ageism.
Bio: Dr Hedi Viterbo is Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London, and the Founding Director of the Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN). His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective. Among his recent publications are: Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine(Cambridge University Press, 2021); ‘Critical Childhood Studies Meets Critical Legal Scholarship,’ in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies(2023); and 'Just for Kids? How the Youth Decarceration Discourse Endorses Adult Incarceration,' Criminology & Criminal Justice (2023).
