Jacked Up and Unjust

“This remarkable book demonstrates the incredible spirit of resilience that young people generate as they encounter poverty, racism, violence, and institutional failure and neglect. Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto insightfully demonstrate the processes and programs that work in changing the punitive treatment that marginalized youths receive. This riveting ethnography provides readers with a rare look at the experiences of young women and men within the juvenile justice system.”—Victor Rios, author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
 
“Jacked Up and Unjust sensitively captures the complex of forces that bear down on a youth population we know very little about, helping us to understand the violence enacted upon them and by them, the turbulence and entanglements of Hawai‘i’s colonial past, racial and gender injustice, the penalty of poverty, and the fallout from youth incarceration. A thoughtful ethnography.”—Amy L. Best, author of Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars
 
“This ethnography is a critical analysis of the experiences of Pacific Islander adolescents whose lives are plagued by interpersonal, structural, and postcolonial violence. A one of a kind in its deployment of intertwining analytic approaches of colonial criminology, this book uncovers new ways to understand the meaning-making work of the youth participants’ experiences.”—Laurie Schaffner, author of Girls in Trouble with the Law