“I Didn’t Grow Up to Be a Square, You Feel Me?” Latine Youth Captivity and Unruly Outlawed Envisioning

Bibliographic Data

ID24237247
AuthorsBrian Cabral (0000-0003-1317-0757, The University of Texas at Austin)
Year2026
Publication date2026-10-21
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociological Perspectives (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0731-1214 • E-ISSN: 1533-8673
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/07311214261487186
OpenAlexW7223144544
LanguageEN
References cited87

This article shifts our sociological attention to narratives by and from 19 Latine-identifying formerly incarcerated youth who were part of a community-based nonprofit reentry program in the San Francisco Bay Area. Insights within are focused on formerly incarcerated youth’s perspectives regarding the shaping contours of their life due to experiencing state custody, inclusive of their retrospective articulations related to their educational and reentry experiences post-incarceration. Throughout, I argue that formerly incarcerated youth develop and deploy “unruly outlawed envisioning,” which entails an accumulated set of practices, knowledges, and perspectives that involve informed sets of ideological, institutional, and structural arrangements post-custody that we must understand as strategic refusals to varying iterations of anticipated prolonged captivity via the youth carceral state. Ultimately, I showcase how Latine-identifying youths’ unruly outlawed envisioning refuses longstanding narratives of ethnoracialized passive state capture, gesturing instead toward relentlessly instructive abolitionist dispositions that we must take notice of.

Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Criminal Justice and Penology · Education Discipline and Inequality

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