New BSC Blog: Towards a queer utopian criminology that meets the moment, Mark Yin. Reflections from the Roundtable Discussion on Criminology and Criminal Justice Through the Lens of Queer Theory, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, May 2025. thebscblog.wordpress.com
Popping back in to say I’ve written up this interview with James more substantially here for About Time:
www.abouttime.org.au/experiences/...
A 6-year-old boy is missing after ICE arrested him and his dad in NYC last week and shipped them off to separate facilities. www.thecity.nyc/2025/12/02/i... @thecity.nyc @gwynnefitz.bsky.social
“This is the life I’d rather live.”
Dozens of things would help young people like James find those lives sooner. Prison is just not one of them.
In the end, housing was what he needed: "Drug court gives you a chance. Here's a house, here’s some programs to do, they'll help you if you need it. And I needed it.
“That helped me bring myself back to reality, who I am, who I really am, and not have to be all that stuck in that other life.”
"I just wanted a normal life. Couldn't have it. No matter how hard I was trying. Like, I've tried it, put myself in TAFEs, carpentry courses … Didn't go far with it, ‘cause, when you got nowhere to stay … worrying about where you're going next, it's hard to make it to stuff like that”
“I've been three times in youth jail … four times adult jail.”
James returned to prison time after time because it did nothing to help him.
“I’d always get out … nowhere to live, not be able to make my appointments because … couldn't even work out where to fuckin’ lay my head at night.”
"Once I was in, that was that. Like, it just involved me, you know? It's been ten years in and out [...] I've spent fuckin’, like, a lot of my life in jail"
The story of James* – a young man I interviewed for my PhD – highlights everything wrong with this policy 🧵
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...
These are important findings in the context of the upcoming social media ban and nationwide trends towards punitive youth justice laws – for what kind of childhood are we imagining for our young people through these policies and circumstances?
Key findings:
85% of young Australians experienced financial insecurity in the past year.
79% think they will be financially worse off than their parents, up from around half in 2022.
26% rated their mental health as poor or very poor
Around half feel they are missing out on being young.
Sharing this research report – the 2025 Aus Youth Barometer – from a research center I was once involved in. bridges.monash.edu/articles/rep...
A must-read, at a time when Australian governments are failing young people on a number of fronts.
No child should be in prison btw
A former chair of the Law Institute of Victoria’s criminal law section, Mel Walker, described the proposal as “extraordinary, bad policy and counterintuitive”.
Fwiw - if you watch the video all the way through - the participants bring up pretty valid issues that you would broadly expect young people to care about, they aren’t as posh as internet leftists are making them out to be, and good political role models are far and few between in this country 😮💨
This but also @ internet leftists who had to walk back their criticisms after they realised they were sharing a tent with far right
Of course kids have rich inner lives! But we should never think they are beyond understanding, or else we will not even try to understand them.
It’s why a blanket ban like this is such an unsatisfying, barely surface scratching solution to the vast issues that kids and families are facing today.
Wacky tangential thought maybe, but the more we position kids as unknowable, mysterious enigmas always doing *god only knows what* on their phones, the less likely we are to get to know them, or to see that as a goal worth pursuing.
Halloween decoration seen in Philly.
“Justice is Dead”
“Here Lies DOJ: 1870-2025”
Horrible forms of hate-based violence described in this article – but I can’t help but reflect on the alarming uptick of similar incidents in Australia as well.
See e.g. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07...
The legitimation of hate breeds violence, no matter where.
Instead, we must – as always – look to more transformative possibilities, like transforming the way we assess or even abolishing grades altogether...
Anyway, figured sharing this essay was a good enough reason to finally get on BlueSky :)
Young people today have grown up in an environment where $$ is poured into punitivity – police, prisons, but also AI detection and proctoring software – but there somehow never seems to be enough left over for their schools or educators.
A punitive 'crackdown' on AI use will not solve these crises.
My essay in Overland!
In it, I argue that our understanding of students' GenAI use must be situated in the anti-intellectual and anti-youth cultures of our time, which has told them that neither they nor their education matters. (1/2)