Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy

by Bernard E. Harcourt

Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.Home to over 150 repeat offenders ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, the Catalina Mountain School is made up of a particular stratum of boys—those who have committed the most offenses but will still be released upon reaching adulthood. In an effort to understand the symbolic and emotional language of guns and gun carrying, Harcourt interviewed dozens of these incarcerated Catalina boys. What do these youths see in guns? What draws them to handguns? Why do some of them carry and others not? For Harcourt, their often surprising answers unveil many of the presuppositions that influence our laws and policies.

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Bernard Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law & Criminology and Chair and Professor of Political Science at The University of Chicago.

Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, criminal law and procedure, and criminology. He is the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Harcourt is also the coauthor of Criminal Law and the Regulation of Vice (Thompson West 2007), the editor of Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America (New York University Press 2003), and the founder and editor of the journal Carceral Notebooks.

Professor Harcourt earned his bachelor's degree in political theory at Princeton University, his law degree at Harvard Law School, and his PhD in political science at Harvard University. After law school, Professor Harcourt clerked for the Hon. Charles S. Haight Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then worked as an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, representing death row inmates. Professor Harcourt continues to represent death row inmates pro bono, and has also served on human rights missions in South Africa and Guatemala.

Professor Harcourt has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, New York University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université Paris X–Nanterre, and Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III, and was previously on the faculty at the University of Arizona.
Education:

AB ,1984, Princeton University; JD, 1989, and PhD, 2000, Harvard University