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A Tremendous Problem for Generations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2012
In 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois warned of an approaching backlash of racialized crime control and the two-pronged threat this posed to Black civil society. These were not altogether new threats—American criminal law and crime control practices had always been mechanisms of racialized societal exclusion—but Du Bois anticipated unprecedented levels of Black criminalization and incarceration in the second half of the twentieth century, and some of the collateral damage that would ensue. Du Bois's (1930) warning focused on juvenile crime and justice, “a problem which one can easily see among the better colored people of New York and Philadelphia, of Indianapolis and Chicago, of Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and all of our major cities” (p. 352). Du Bois (1916) had long been concerned with issues of child development and youth justice, since the fate of the “immortal child” inevitably defined the prospects and conditions of the race (Diggs 1976).