Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York

Reviewed by Emily Brooks

Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York
By Carl Suddler
NYU Press

As of Fiscal Year 2017, all but 5.2 percent of the children jailed in New York City’s detention facilities were, self-reportedly, black or Hispanic. Yet, as of 2019, the resident population was broken down as 42.7% white and only 24.3% black or African American and 29.1 % Hispanic or Latino. These categories are not fully analogous; the U.S. Census recognizes ethnicity and race as overlapping categories, while the NYC Administration for Children’s Services divides 100 percent of its population into categories including Black, White, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian, Other, and Unknown. But regardless of the divergences, it is clear that black and Hispanic or Latino youth are dramatically overrepresented in the city’s detention facilities. In addition to their overrepresentation in youth detention, black teens are also far more likely than whites to experience police brutality or harassment. Some of the widely-publicized examples include, mostly recently, a horde of NYPD drawing their guns and violently arresting an unarmed black teen on a crowded subway car, and officers filmed punching black teenagers in the face while supposedly breaking up a fight. From cell phone footage and Facebook posts to records produced by youth detention facilities and scholarly research in various disciplines, a substantial body of material attests to the over-criminalization and under-protection of youth of color, particularly black youth, in contemporary NYC. For anyone looking to understand the historical roots of our contemporary regime of racialized youth criminalization, Carl Suddler’s Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York will be essential reading.

Suddler adds to growing fields of scholarship on black youths and the carceral state, punishment and policing in the urban North, and constructions of criminality in the mid-twentieth century. Presumed Criminal tracks interactions between black youths, predominantly boys, and the city’s justice system from the Depression to the 1970s, filling an important historiographical gap between the well-covered Progressive Era and the 1960s. The author argues that in 1930s and 1940s New York, the city’s police department, court officials, and criminologists made important shifts in their understandings of juvenile crime and policing. During these years, police department and city officials devoted increasing attention to controlling “delinquents” and “potential delinquents.” When this attention had been turned on immigrant young people in the Progressive Era, Suddler contends, the “juvenile court system became a protective buffer for white youths that diverted their misbehaviors away from the adult criminal system.” The city’s growing population of black youths in the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond faced no such benefits, according to the author, and rather found themselves “presumed criminal.” For these young black New Yorkers, the presumption of criminality also proved far costlier than for their white peers.

Suddler’s work is geographically focused, but expansive in his sources and actors. He devotes most of his attention to Harlem, which was the city’s most prominent black community and was particularly criminalized by the New York Police Department (NYPD). As Suddler notes, in 1939 the chairman of the Harlem Public Policy Committee criticized the NYPD for a policy of “protecting New York City from Harlem.” Though spatially focused, Presumed Criminal includes a diverse population of actors, including boys themselves, social workers, journalists, and political leaders. Readers familiar with this period of New York City history, or with carceral history more generally, will recognize well-known figures and events; including Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the Harlem uprisings of 1935 and 1943, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and the Kefauver U.S. Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency. Suddler also, however, highlights lesser-known actors and events which serve to illuminate changing trends in youth policing and criminalization. The author’s discussion of Justice Jane M. Bolin, sworn in as the nation’s first African American woman judge in 1939, is one compelling example. Bolin affected significant changes to the racist juvenile justice system in the city during her tenure, pushing to desegregate the city’s many private reform schools and rehabilitation centers. Suddler’s treatment of the Lafargue Clinic, where Harlem residents could meet with psychiatrists and social workers from 1946 to 1958 (when it closed due to lack of funds), is another rich discussion of a little-known piece of Suddler’s larger narrative.

 The author’s tight focus allows him to track subtle changes in the relationship between black youth in Harlem and the city’s authorities, but some readers may wish that the author had expanded his focus in certain moments. For example, how did racialized policing of black youth play out in the growing black communities in neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, or even Staten Island? Furthermore, Suddler notes that “while I have attempted to analyze the complexities for race, class, and gender, young men do constitute the main subjects of the text.” The significant gender differences that structured youth policing and criminalization during this time period make this choice both useful and limiting. Historians like Cheryl Hicks and Ruth Alexander have shown that black girls in New York were criminalized through a racialized and gendered perspective throughout the Progressive Era and the 1930s. Hicks and Alexander also show, however, that for girls across races, who were generally institutionalized for actual or perceived sexual experience including assaults committed against them, being placed in the juvenile justice system did not necessarily serve the same protective end that Suddler attributes to white boys’ interactions with juvenile justice. A greater consideration of the criminalization of black girls in this post-Progressive, pre-mass incarceration period would have complicated the narrative in a possibly fruitful way.

Despite these areas of possible further inquiry, Presumed Criminal will be of much interest to anyone seeking to better understand today’s landscape of racist youth policing. As the author remarks in the afterward, Presumed Criminal finds much continuity in the policing of black youths and resistance among Black New Yorkers throughout the period under discussion and into today. For instance, when discussing the 1960s, Suddler focuses on the case of six young men arrested in connection to the murder of a white woman, based almost solely on the testimony of one later discredited source. The mothers of the young men formed a Mothers Defense Committee to advocate for their children. Readers may see similarities between the activism of the Mothers Defense Committee and today’s Mothers of the Movement, whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become leading figures in the Black Lives Matter movement. This continuity, however, does not detract from the importance of the subtle shifts in constructions and understandings of criminality Suddler finds throughout the twentieth century. Rather, his examination casts an important lens into the construction of an enduring racist juvenile justice system which persists today.

Emily Brooks (PhD, The Graduate Center, CUNY) is a former editor at Gotham. Her first book, Gotham’s War within a War: Anti-Vice Policing, Militarism, and the Birth of Law and Order Liberalism in New York City, 1934-1945, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.