UC Santa Barbara

The combination of punitive school policies, racialized policing practices, and the disintegration of social safety nets has produced a highly classed and racialized pattern of youth involvement with the juvenile justice system. Youth of color comprise about 86% of all youth on probation in California. Any attempts to provide rehabilitation services by probation is severely undermined by its focus on surveillance and compliance with terms that are incongruent with and fail to address the social inequality experienced by youth of color in their communities. Instead, any involvement with the juvenile justice system during critical years of adolescence may impact growth, development, and contribute to additional disadvantage. Based on interviews with 22 Latinx youth and over 6 years of fieldwork, I focus on experiences of support or lack thereof within their schools and community. I find that most of the youth involved in the study do not receive adequate support from schools or community-based organizations. Furthermore, this lack of support could potentially increase the probability of becoming system-impacted and support is persistently and gradually withdrawn once involved with the system; a process I have termed exponential neglect. Exponential neglect is a process by which individuals who get in trouble at school or with the juvenile justice system are blamed for their failures and held accountable at every phase of discipline through deeper, more pronounced neglect. The system might tell an individual along the way, “you are a troublemaker therefore, you get no resources” and later, “you have been a troublemaker for some time now, we have decided to ignore you, neglect you, and abandon you.” This framework is nuanced from other theorizations of racialized punitive social control in that it demonstrates how neglect serves as a severe form of punishment in the modern carceral state. Other theories have examined how over-policing and hyper-incarceration serve as punishment. Moreover, exponential neglect helps us see what happens once over-policing and hyper-incarceration have ensnarled themselves around the lives of criminalized populations: they experience forms of extreme neglect. These findings point towards the need to implement restorative justice practices and to develop social programs which support all youth in schools and the community. Additionally, schools and social programs must cut all ties with law enforcement to avoid exponential neglect and embrace and support all youth.