In “Them,” John Adams recounts how he came to realize he was an “enemy of society” as a homeless child. Throughout his piece, Adams identifies institutions that have reinscribed his status as a “them” as opposed to “us,” like the foster care system, the police, and the military.
The relationship between welfare and carcerality has been explored by scholars like Julily Kohler-Hausman, who argues that “Welfare policy and criminal policy were principal sites where society negotiated the state’s responsibility to the poor and socially marginalized peoples… The penal system and the welfare system have long coexisted–sometimes symbiotically–and their gendered systems interacted and developed together.” As a child, Adams made the decision to live outside the foster system because he “refused to gamble.” Why? Although he acknowledges that he could have lived in a foster home that was possibly loving and nurturing, Adams’ experience with the unpredictability and failures of the system led him to “choose” homelessness.
Although Adams did not discuss his parents, his situation mirrors that of children whose parents were or are imprisoned. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice, of the 1.25 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 47% are parents to roughly 1.23 million minors in the U.S. Many of these parents experienced hardships in their own childhood; 17% were in foster care, 11% were homeless before 18, and 43% came from families who received public assistance before the age of 18. After arrest, their children are often placed with other family members, though 1.8% of parents who lived with their child prior to arrest reported that their children were placed in the foster care system. To Adams, the foster care system was corrupted by authority: “I despised authority; I saw it as a disease that mutated ordinary people into monsters.” Statistical data and Adams’ personal narrative indicate failures of the state to properly address homelessness and inherent violence the state commits through displacement.
Before he turned fourteen, Adams commented that he had been assaulted three times by police officers, once to the point of hospitalization. Adams links police brutality to his homelessness, writing, “The establishment and its police have always victimized people without status or property.” Here, the link between policing, welfare, and class is distinct. In a 2008 study, researchers found that between 2002 and 2006, there was a 12% increase in laws prohibiting begging in certain spaces, 18% increase in laws against “aggressive panhandling,” and a 14% increase in laws prohibiting squatting. Young people interviewed by researchers in the study noted that a majority felt fearful toward the police because of violent interactions they had experienced. They also noted that policing often perpetuates homelessness through debt and the creation of a criminal record.
As an adult, Adams joined the military as a bid to become “us.” He describes the dehumanization and alienation that the U.S. military conditioned soldiers to see themselves and their “enemies;” he “surrendered to their indoctrination.” But Adams criticism of the Iraq invasion also points to a commentary on U.S. society writ large: “the privileged always initiate wars, but it’s the underprivileged youth that fight and die in them; it is the poor and their children who pay the direct price.” His critique further illuminates how state narratives are crafted to give “them” the possibility to become “us” through the rhetoric of protection and safety. However, through his experience, Adams reveals how “war between governments is a farce of the rich,” and does not provide a pathway to becoming “us.”
Adams opens his piece with a quote from 1984 writer George Orwell: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when it is committed by our side.” Like Adams, Orwell offers a critique of state violence; by opening with this quote, Adams unveils the many faces that carcerality can take–foster care, policing, and the military–and critiques the legitimization and normalization of state violence against “enemies of the state.” Adams moves beyond a critique of the individual (“as individual people, those cops may have had empathy or children my age”) to institutions that facilitate and deploy state violence (“but as a group they were evil, able to suppress the slightest compassion and unconsciously dehumanize outsiders”).
For more information, see “Both side of the bars: How mass incarceration punishes families,” by Leah Wang at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/08/11/parental_incarceration/ ; “Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States, by Julily Kohler-Hausman at https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/102/1/87/686676 ; Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (Tantor Media, 2017) by Victor Rios and Rudy Sanda; For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnestoa Press, 2016) by Erica R. Meiners,
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