Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and The Justice System in Postwar New York by Carl Suddler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and The Justice System in Postwar New York by Carl Suddler Lashawn Harris (bio) Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and The Justice System in Postwar New York By Carl Suddler. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 256 pages, 15 halftones, 6" x 9". $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper, $15.00 ebook. Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and The Justice System in Postwar New York By Carl Suddler. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 256 pages, 15 halftones, 6" x 9". $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper, $15.00 ebook. Carl Suddler's Presumed Criminal offers an important conversation on the criminalization of New York black youth. Suddler joins an impressive cohort of historians, including Elizabeth Hinton (From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016)), Heather Ann Thompson (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016)), Max Felker-Kantor (Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018)), and Simon Balto (Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (2019)), whose seminal scholarship centers on the nation's long and troubling histories of policing and mass incarceration, crime and punishment, and the various ways in which America's carceral state impacted racially and ethnically diverse urban communities. At the same time, Suddler brings fresh perspectives to scholarly and contemporary discussions on policing and legal confinement. An original and well-researched work, Presumed Criminal deepens interpretations on racial segregation in northern cities, as well as on the lives of black New Yorkers during the mid-twentieth century. Using a rich primary source base, including local and national newspapers, city reports, and the New York City mayoral papers of Fiorella LaGuardia, Presumed Criminal situates the less familiar narratives of a population of New Yorkers typically absent from histories on the carceral state: black youth. Scholarship on the carceral state's varying dimensions and extensive reach tends to focus on black men and women's experiences as incarcerated bodies, as prison activists, and as victims and survivors of unjust bipartisan federal and state policies aimed at caging the nation's most vulnerable populations. Black youths' encounters with the criminal justice system are largely absent. Presumed Criminal fills this historical gap. It contributes to an emerging body of scholarship, including Cheryl Hicks's Talk With You Like A Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935 (2010) and Tera Agyepong's The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago's Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (2018), centered on black youth. Moreover, Suddler's work advances recent scholarship that illuminates how increased state surveillance, tough-on-crime policies, and white media outlets advanced the belief that urban black youth were responsible for city crime and ultimately urban decay. Equally importantly, Presumed Criminal "expands the postwar urban narrative that emphasized the limits [End Page 228] of racial liberalism in the North," challenging "narratives of the urban North as a utopian melting pot and supposed bastion of liberalism" (8). In five chapters, Suddler documents the history of juvenile justice in post–World War II New York, as well as the historical roots of the criminalization of black youth, particularly boys. Illuminating a less-known history of city and state policies that shaped black youths' public and private lives, Suddler examines black youths' varying encounters with New York's criminal justice system between the Great Depression and the 1960s. He convincingly argues that early twentieth-century city lawmakers and enforcers' concentration on controlling youth crime and so-called black delinquents tethered the lives of black boys to a punitive criminal justice system. In turn, increased police power and surveillance "criminalized the behaviors of those who most needed protection, not condemnation" and excluded black youth from fair and equal treatment and restricted their social mobility (12). New York black youth were "categorically branded as criminal—a stigma they continue to endure" (12). In supporting his main assertion, Suddler centers on interwar city officials and reformers' thoughts about youth crime and prevention; citizens and police relations following the 1943 Harlem Uprising; and ordinary citizens, city...