‘Enslaved by the Criminal Justice System’: Law, Racial Injustice, and Modern Slavery Failures

Abstract Chapter 4 shifts the focus from young drug dealers’ and their families’ experiences of welfare state failure to their encounters with the criminal justice system. The government’s modern slavery agenda was implemented against the backdrop of an entrenched racial neo-liberalism that continues to criminalize Black and minoritized working class youth as its constitutive ‘other’. I discuss cases of boys and young men who ostensibly meet the government’s own criteria of modern slaves but who police and prosecution continue to frame as ‘gang’ members often on illusive grounds, with their involvement in county lines activities then acting as an aggravating factor in sentencing. But this is not all: as my ethnography with their mothers and other female family members shows, anyone who dares to speak on behalf of these boys and young men can potentially find themselves attacked and drawn into the scope of the criminal law. Young men’s experiences of the criminal justice system and their family members’ desperate efforts to advocate speak, once more, of the social suffering caused by state institutions to those at the margins. It also reveals the workings of a disjunctive democracy whose claims to provide colour-neutral justice are betrayed by the lived realities of racial injustice.