“I Didn’t Grow Up to Be a Square, You Feel Me?” Latine Youth Captivity and Unruly Outlawed Envisioning

This article shifts our sociological attention to narratives by and from 19 Latine-identifying formerly incarcerated youth who were part of a community-based nonprofit reentry program in the San Francisco Bay Area. Insights within are focused on formerly incarcerated youth’s perspectives regarding the shaping contours of their life due to experiencing state custody, inclusive of their retrospective articulations related to their educational and reentry experiences post-incarceration. Throughout, I argue that formerly incarcerated youth develop and deploy “unruly outlawed envisioning,” which entails an accumulated set of practices, knowledges, and perspectives that involve informed sets of ideological, institutional, and structural arrangements post-custody that we must understand as strategic refusals to varying iterations of anticipated prolonged captivity via the youth carceral state. Ultimately, I showcase how Latine-identifying youths’ unruly outlawed envisioning refuses longstanding narratives of ethnoracialized passive state capture, gesturing instead toward relentlessly instructive abolitionist dispositions that we must take notice of.