“For them we are negros de mierda”

Subjects of the juvenile penal system from an ethnographic and intersectional approach

Abstract

In this article, I analyze, from an intersectional approach, the ways in which the subject of juvenile penal policy is reconfigured in a situated way, based on the sanction of an alternative measure to being judged and/or to being imprisoned. From an ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2018 and 2019 in a centro sociocomunitario de responsabilidad penal juvenil, in a town in Greater Buenos Aires, I was able to reframe the overlap between the formal markers that configure the population subject to this socio-criminal policy -age and imputation of a crime- and informal ones, especially regarding gender, class and racialization. The situated experiences of the young people, mostly men, poor and pejoratively labeled as “negros,” are configuring the construction of the contours between “us” and “others” which, also, reconfigures the entire penal territorial youth experience.