Weaponization and Prisonization of Toronto’s Black Male Youth

• Published in: International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy
• Main Author: Wesley Crichlow
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Queensland University of Technology 2014
• Subjects: Social Sciences; H; Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology; HV1-9960; First Nations
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v3i3.120; https://doaj.org/article/d5f3ef48bafa49a79dd907467a07daa8

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.