Book Review: For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State 170 For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State Erica R. Meiners (2016) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 255 pages£19.16 (paperback); ISBN 978 0 8166 9276 7 This is a really important book for childhood and educational researchers. Its central argument concerns how well-intentioned commitments and practices to protect children turn out to perpetuate all kinds of oppressions, especially for women, poor and minoritized populations, including children and youth. The particular focus is what Meiners calls the “carceral state,” drawing on analyses of the “prison-industrial complex.” This designation derives from Foucauldian analyses of disciplinary and regulatory institutions that have come to structure modern societies and which have now acquired intensified coercive force under widespread global neocapitalist conditions of further marketization and securitization. In a sense, this book begins where Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish ends: Meiners unpacks the forces at play that produce what used to be called juvenile delinquency and give rise to the criminalization of children and youth, as well as their families and communities. Biometrics now play an increasing role in tracking and surveying stigmatized groups, while anxieties around security are increasingly migrating from individual bodies to families, neighborhoods, communities, and even states. The key recurring trope that Meiners critically interrogates (especially across the first section of the book) is the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline,” mobilized by various campaigning groups whose strategies to exceptionalize or otherwise account for young people’s problematic trajectories inadvertently re-inscribe normalizations and pathologizations of various characteristics of children and childhood. Drawing on both a comprehensive critical historical review of U.S. policies and practices as well as an impressively wide range of examples, including her own involvements in various community education programs with children and youth in marginal situations, adult education initiatives in prisons, post-prison educational programs and more, Meiners systematically highlights how gendered heteronormativities intersect with classed racializations to render especially AfricanAmerican children, youth and families under greater threat of intervention and incarceration. The book is structured into three substantive sections—Childhoods, School and Prison, and Adulthoods—with a final, more utopian chapter entitled “After and Now.” While children and youth figure explicitly throughout most of the book, once the trope of innocence has been queried (and indeed queered), racialized, gendered and heterosexed normativities are then available to be explored: “New sites of resistance and mobilization are created by unpacking what counts as a child in this political moment and how heterogendered and racialized forms of innocence are reproduced through the use of the child in campaigns” (p. 26). Various other key myths (as in Barthes’ (1972) sense of tropes anchoring assumed constellations of social norms) are shown to be secured by “the artefact of the child” (p. 27) that Book Review: For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State 171 have consequences for adults, communities, professional and institutional practices and state policies. Substantive examples are discussed at all levels—history, current policy and provision, and personal practice in specific projects and settings—and include campaigns for public safety, prison reform, and campaigns for and against prison closure, educational provision for prison inmates (both juvenile and adult), and post-prison educational initiatives. On the way, restorative justice programs come in for very critical treatment as merely re-personalizing and thus foreclosing analysis of the structural and institutional conditions that gave rise to these situations. I found the discussion of the school-to-prison pipeline very helpful in unpacking how educational initiatives collude in the perpetuation of social inequalities by limiting the domain of explanation and thus of intervention. Perhaps a particularly graphic but indicative chapter is the penultimate one, concerned with the construction and consequences of acquiring the label of being a sex offender (which, shockingly for this British reader, can arise for young people who engage in consensual sex but who are considered under-age or where certain sexual practices—oral sex, for example—are considered criminal within state legislation). The asymmetries of treatment and trajectory through the criminal justice system according to fateful intersections of age, gender, sexuality and racialization are shown through recent cases...