Youth in a Suspect Society

[Hannah Bell]

"As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society."

Giroux, Henry. "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a "willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future... But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn't responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn't be established as law without a media complex that has "habitually" reinforced representations, however false, of young people as "variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative." It's important to note that these suggestions "do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability"; they also "legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government..."

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State....Kids would also have to get used to "a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)"; a society unable to "define youth outside of market principles determined largely by ... market growth and the accumulation of capital..."

http://www.truthout.org/091309A