UC Santa Barbara

Transcarceral Care: Racialized Girlhood, Behavioral Diagnosis, and California’s Foster Care System, examines Santa Barbara County’s foster care system as a microcosm of the California foster care system, to argue that this system increasingly relies on carceral tactics and criminalizes Latina girls, through what I term transcarceral care. Building on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “police humanitarianism,” transcarceral care refers to programs, interventions, and placements meant to reform, modify, and discipline the behaviors of racialized youth, under the guise of care, through therapeutic services that are offered to youth housed in kinship placement, state run group homes, or with resource families. I ask four key questions: 1) What do the experiences of racialized Latina girls in foster care teach us about the carceral state? 2) How does gendered racialization impact the way the state responds to, criminalizes, and disciplines Latina foster girls of color? 3) How does the state's conceptualization of home and kinship impact racialized Latina girls in foster care? I approach these questions from a feminist abolitionist framework, addressing three major fields of inquiry: girlhood studies, carceral studies, and feminist abolitionist studies. Most social science literature regarding the foster care system focuses on the experiences of parents who are targeted by the foster care system or on the funneling of foster youth into the criminal justice system. The unique ways that gender and sexuality, not just race and class, shape the carceral tactics of foster care remains undertheorized. Transcarceral Care theorizes at the intersections of these conversations and gaps; it looks at the experiences of racialized foster girls who cannot fit the mold of normative childhood and asks how criminalization marks them well before they ever enter the criminal justice system. Transcarceral Care puts in conversation the theorizing of Black and Chicana feminist anti-carceral scholars including Dorothy Roberts and Miroslava Chavez-Garcia with girlhood scholars like Lena Palacios and Elizabeth Escobedo, to address the criminalization of racialized foster girls.