No abstract

Analyses of the criminal justice system have revealed the racialized nature of crime and punishment in the United States. We know little, however, about how race, crime, and punishment are also experienced as gendered phenomena by marginalized adolescent males. Drawing from ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, the author proposes that important insights about crime, race, and gender are gained by analyzing the experiences of adolescent males as they navigate through the criminal justice pipeline. Thus, the author examines how policing, incarceration, and probation offer masculinity-making resources that young men use to develop a sense of manhood. This study shows that one of the consequences of enhanced policing, surveillance, and punitive treatment of youth of color is the development of a specific set of gendered practices. One outcome of pervasive criminal justice contact for young black and Latino men is the production of a hypermasculinity that obstructs desistance and social mobility.

Stop-and-frisk and other punitive policing practices disproportionately affect marginalized communities of color. In response to calls for reform, police departments have implemented community policing programs aimed at improving relations with racialized communities. This study examines how a police unit used courtesy and respect in its engagement with a criminalized population, gang-associated Latinos, while relying on the stop-and-frisk practice. Our study reveals contextual and situational contradictions between modern police departments’ attempts to establish legitimacy and the hegemonic practice of investigatory stops. Drawing on observations and interviews conducted during a ride-along study, we find that stop-and-frisk, simultaneously used with reform practices like courtesy policing, yield a paradoxical policing approach, “the legitimacy policing continuum.” Officers regularly articulate a goal of respectfully interacting with courtesy to build community and trust—what we term “the mano suave”—while practicing a dominant logic of crime prevention through punitive measures—what we term “the mano dura.” We argue that community and courtesy policing are drawn on strategically in interaction and ultimately intertwined with and constrained by the racial bias at the heart of punitive policing practices like stop-and-frisk.

The ability to use cognitive emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal may be a core component of emotional competence across development, but due to methodological challenges in measuring such strategies, they are rarely studied in young children. One neurophysiological measure, the late positive potential (LPP) has been examined in response to reappraisal as a potential neurosignature for emotion regulatory capacity in adults. The association between the LPP and emotion regulatory capacity in children is unknown. The present study examined whether the LPP during reappraisal could predict greater observed adaptive emotion regulation strategy use in school-aged children over a two-year period. Thirty-two five- to seven- year- olds participated in two identical lab visits spaced two years apart. EEG was continuously recorded during a computerized reappraisal task in which children viewed unpleasant images paired with either reappraisal or negative stories. Next they completed a disappointing and a frustrating task during which emotion regulation strategies was observed. As predicted, children who showed reappraisal-induced reductions in the LPP at the first assessment used significantly more adaptive ER strategies concurrently and two years later. These findings provide observation-based evidence that the LPP may be a viable neurosignature for emotion regulatory capacity in children.