Tasseli McKay, Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, & Anupa Bir, Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry

Abstract

that despite the scale of the Atlanta tragedies, no milk carton campaign emerged, probably in part because few photographs of these persons likely existed at all (p. 70). And while parents of the murdered youths in Atlanta, along with others in the Black community, undertook major actions to bring attention to their individual cases and also the bigger picture of racism, the “Atlanta saga” did not fit into the child safety regime’s racialized narrative of protecting (white) innocence, and quickly faded away (pp. 86–87). The last part of Stranger Danger focuses on some of the key figures in the political maneuvers starting in the 1980s (and continuing through the 2000s) that created some of the laws and policies responsible for mass incarceration. Here we learn, for example, about the figure of Alfred S. Regnery, a Reagan administration zealot for child safety who stoked the moral panic and spearheaded policies with severe consequences for marginalized, non-white juveniles. This section also details post-1980s policy-making, such as ‘three strikes’ and ‘Megan’s Law,’ that capitalized on fear and produced tough-on-crime policies. Stranger Danger is an excellent piece of scholarship, clearly the result of deep and wide archival research. It is essential reading for knowledge about the origins of legal policies that rely on fears over threats to ‘white innocence’ that have had such monumental consequences for mass incarceration. The book also raises fascinating questions about multiple levels of exploitation that drove the child safety regime at its beginnings in the 1980s.