Policing Wageless Life in Detroit’s Carceral Era

This paper narrates a history of the carceral era from the perspective of black adolescent boys involved in Detroit’s informal heroin economy. The political economy of urban crisis excluded a generation of black youth from waged employment while at the same time criminalizing their participation in the informal economy. In Detroit, young people responded to these circumstances by developing an innovative approach to heroin sales utilizing juveniles, a development most closely associated with a group called “Young Boys, Inc.” These “young boys” posed a challenge to the administrations of the first generation of African American mayors in large American cities. Elected in the aftermath of urban insurrection, many had a mandate to implement wide-ranging police reforms. For Coleman Young, Detroit’s “young boys” created unforeseen difficulties in carrying out this political project. Rather than recognizing this emerging cohort of young people as a challenge to how capitalism structured economic inequality by race in urban spaces, and hence an attempt to redefine what counted as crime, the fabrication of order amid urban crisis criminalized that participation. This paper functions as a “cohort biography” of the young people involved in Detroit’s informal economy at this time, told through court records and vernacular texts that circulated in the city. By exploring the spatial, emotional, economic, and linguistic experiences of these “young boys” as they encountered the city’s penal institutions, it reveals the emergence of a new urban subject that posed a profound challenge to attempts to govern the nation’s cities during the carceral era.