Youth trajectories, temporalities, and necropolitics: reflections on justice-involved youth

Abstract

This article analyzes the tension between the promise of comprehensive protection set forth in the 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution and the Brazilian Child and Adolescent Statute, and the persistence of social and institutional practices that subject Black, impoverished, and marginalized children and adolescents to both physical and social death. Methodologically, the study combines a literature review with documentary analysis of normative sources. To bridge the theoretical discussion with lived experiences within the juvenile justice system, the article draws on biographical fragments stemming from the authors’ professional trajectories alongside youth in conflict with the law, respectively, as a teacher in a juvenile detention facility and as a Public Prosecutor for Children and Youth in Maranhão, Brazil. We argue that the dispositif of necrochildhood persists in Brazil by suppressing the right to child and youth protection on two fronts: rapid death, characterized by lethal armed violence, and slow death, marked by the denial of fundamental rights, school exclusion, and premature entry into the labor market. We conclude that, for Black and impoverished youth, the difficulty of planning for the future is an imposition of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018). Confined to a present shaped by structural deprivation, their horizon of expectations is foreclosed by the constant imminence of physical or social death.