Juvenile smokescreens: Softening the harm of zoos, aquaria, and prisons through (human) children
| dc.contributor.author | Deckha, Maneesha | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-12-05T19:49:50Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-12-05T19:49:50Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This chapter explores how human children soften the abusive edge of carceral spaces. Prisons, immigration detention centres, and zoos and aquaria are institutions that attract sustained public scrutiny from prisoner rights, migrant rights, anti-racist, and animal rights movements. Critics and scholars note the entwined nature of race, gender, and species logics that shape and unite these spaces and object to the shortand long-term incarceration these institutions make possible as well as the conditions residents confined within experience. Prisoner rights, migrant rights, and animal rights critics also contest the messaging that these institutions and their proponents use to assure the public of the need for confinement and the ethical acceptability of the conditions captive animals and humans experience. These discourses, depending on the specific institution, highlight the larger public “law and order” interests of safety and border control, but also “progressive” interests of rehabilitation, conservation, and education. In highlighting these latter “progressive” interests, carceral institutions seek to humanize themselves and their work to bolster their social credibility. This “humane-washing” occurs through long-standing rationales about rehabilitation for offenders in the prison context, and more recent rationales about the conservation of nature and conservation education in the zoo and aquarium context. It also, I will argue, occurs through a specific type of marshaling of the human child. I seek to add to the literature on “humane-washing”4 as well as contestations and uses of “childhood” and “family” narratives in general in this analysis. I apply a multispecies lens to consider how the real and imagined human child in the zoo and aquaria context, and narratives about what is in the best interests of human children in the immigration and prison context, figure into characterizing such carceral institutions as legally and socially legitimate spaces. The argument acknowledges that these carceral spaces can yield positive benefits for some, such as rehabilitation or rescue of a specific individual or even conservation of a specific species. However, it accepts the existing critical scholarly literature against such spaces overall to focus on the question of how carceral spaces mask their problematic and oppressive nature by integrating the presence of human children. | |
| dc.description.reviewstatus | Reviewed | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Faculty | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Deckha, M. (2022). Juvenile smokescreens: Softening the harm of zoos, aquaria, and prisons through (human) children. In L. Gruen & J. Marceau (Eds.), Carceral Logics: Human Incarceration and Animal Captivity (pp. 238–260). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108919210.017 | |
| dc.identifier.isbn | 9781108919210 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108919210.017 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/22959 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | Cambridge University Press | |
| dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject.department | Faculty of Law | |
| dc.title | Juvenile smokescreens: Softening the harm of zoos, aquaria, and prisons through (human) children | |
| dc.type | Book chapter |