Weaponization and Prisonization of Toronto’s Black Male Youth

Wesley Crichlow

doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v3i3.120

Abstract

Informed by Galtung (1969), Anderson (2012) and Wacquant (2001), this paper argues that a lifetime of spiralling and everyday state structural violence and overtly racist criminal profiling principally targeted at young Black men living in the Toronto Community Housing Corporation prepares them for prison. Moreover, it contends that interpersonal violence, transmitted from generation to generation and producing a vicious cycle, is a manifestation of institutionalized and systemic inequity. In the context of a hypermasculine culture, young Black men are both victims and participants in a dialectic of interpersonal-structural violence. Routinely precipitated by powerful state actors and agencies of criminal justice, public policy and assorted ‘moral entrepreneurs’, young Black men have their masculinity weaponized and prisonized by the state’s low-intensity declaration of war against them, and, among others, the poor, LGBTQ, immigrants, and First Nations and other people of colour.

Highlights

Against the backdrop of unfettered markets and enfeebled social‐welfare programs, when the penal system has become a major engine of social stratification and cultural division in its own right, the field study of the prison ceases to be the province of the specialist in crime and punishment to become a window into the deepest contradictions and the darkest secrets of our age. (Wacquant 2002: 389)The weaponization and prisonization of Black youth’s masculinity is embedded within state structural violence in the form of marginalization, repression, dehumanization, demonization, vilification, exploitation and other forms of discrimination
Tamari Kitossa (2005), in his examination of the criminalization of African Canadians, referred to this characterization, redolent of the Inquisition’s scapegoating of women, as ‘Malleus Maleficarum Africanus’. This inquiry demonstrates that masculinities, weaponized and prisonized through state structural violence, are articulated in narratives that originate with children born into spirals of poverty, colonialist and racist child welfare systems, the school‐to‐prison pipeline, maladaptive interpersonal violence, disenfranchised communities, discrimination, physical and sexual abuse, paramilitary policing, hyperincarceration and everyday racism
This work emerges from my community praxis aimed at developing a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the violence and hypermasculinity of disenfranchised young Black men living in the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC)

Summary

Introduction

Against the backdrop of unfettered markets and enfeebled social‐welfare programs, when the penal system has become a major engine of social stratification and cultural division in its own right, the field study of the prison ceases to be the province of the specialist in crime and punishment to become a window into the deepest contradictions and the darkest secrets of our age. (Wacquant 2002: 389). Reiman and Leighton (1995: 7) suggest ‘the media, criminal justice official and the state would like for the public to see these young men as “criminals”, their race as crime, and as a resurgent dangerous Black urban underclass’ Such a view does not allow for the loving insights offered by Shakur: the possibility for the roses (youth) to grow. Transition to prison does not require adaption, because TCHC living conditions mentally, physically and emotionally prepare youth for life in prisons This form of structural violence or social death brought about by such different housing standards is about poverty. In essence they both experience being continually under suspicion by authorities, while state social violence instil internalized fear that keeps them ‘in their place’

Weaponization and prisonization marriage

Findings

Conclusion