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Crime, Governance, and Knowledge Production: The ‘Two Track Common Sense Approach’ to Juvenile Criminality in the United States

The United States Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 2002 asserted a ‘two-track common sense approach’ to juvenile criminality that consisted of prevention programs to rehabilitate juvenile offenders and measures that hold youth accountable. This article highlights two moral panics on youth violence during the 1990s, gang and school violence, and their construction within congressional hearings on youth violence. In doing so, this article argues that attention to the micropolitical production of liberal and democratic law suggests how the law becomes implicated within the sustained and regenerative production of social differentiation. Using congressional discourses of gang and school violence, this article argues that the two-track approach is indicative of how the micropolitics of racial differentiation within state policies is produced through the practice of liberal legalism.

juvenile justice, race, JJDPA 2001, United States Congress

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 36, No. 1 (2009): 102-121