Stranger Danger

Stranger Danger combines a skillfully constructed, richly detailed narrative of the moral panic about missing and exploited children in the 1970s and 1980s with an analysis of its political and policy consequences that persuasively ties it to the expansion of the carceral state. Paul M. Renfro's consideration of those put in the shadows by the glare of attention given a handful of white, middle-class children ensures that this powerful book offers much more than a picture of a moral panic. He persuasively demonstrates that the concern to protect children did not extend to nonwhite children; that Ronald Reagan conservatives used that concern to justify punitive correctional custody for working-class, nonwhite children; and that the affective politics of “stranger danger” shielded laws that expanded state surveillance from criticism. To tell the story of what propelled the moral panic, Renfro concentrates on three cases. These narratives are compellingly populated by carefully identified

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Criticism · Literature · Moral panic · Narrative · Panic · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Punitive damages · Sociology · State (computer science · History · Law · Psychology