The Boogey Man is Gonna Get You

Article by Kathleen Pequeño 

When I was a young girl, my grandmother often relied on an invisible baby-sitter called the “Boogey Man” to keep me in line. Depending on what I might do, the Boogey Man would change into one of several forms to find me anywhere, and would enact one of many terrible acts of punishment on me. The message worked – I should look out, or “the Boogey Man’s gonna get you!” The Boogey Man was not someone you talked to or made your friend. He was pure evil, up to no good, and the point was to stay away from him or else he would hurt you. He wasn’t like us, since ordinary people are not pure evil. Of course, there was never a picture of the actual Boogey Man — he was entirely a construction of my imagination, and therefore perfectly fearful.

In the 1988 election, the first election in which I was old enough to vote, I got a glimpse of an adult version of the Boogey Man. His name was Willie Horton.

Like the Boogey Man of my youth, Willie Horton was clearly bad. He had committed horrible crimes, and he seemed to be purely evil, given how he was presented. His mug shot ran on TV a lot, and I think I could probably have drawn it from memory by the time the elections came around. The details of his case were unimportant – one does not have to explain evil to know that evil must be protected against at all costs

Criminalization Alters Our Perceptions of Groups of People 

One of the main points of “criminalization”, when it’s practiced on communities of people, is to instruct us that they are more prone to criminal behavior, and therefore must be contained. Criminalization attempts to alter our perceptions of people we haven’t even met yet by making them out to be different than “us” and so bad that we can never relate to them as anything other than a problem. We don’t have to worry about whether they are treated as well as us, because like the Boogey Man, they are so outside of society that the usual rules don’t apply to them. For example, children and young adults have become victims of criminalization as well. There is a push to shift our view of all youth as needing to be controlled, in an effort to control the very small number of youth who have actually committed a violent crime. Media stories of youth crime have shaped our perception that collectively “youth” are more dangerous than ever. In reality, while violent crimes that involved youth perpetrators were at one point on the rise, when we examine the drop in violent crime that marked the late nineties, the decrease in youth crime was a disproportionate part of that drop — rather than being more dangerous than ever, they are turning out to be more difficult to predict than ever.

But, even with that reality, the myth of the gangs of “youth super-predators” continues, and the social policies that we’re told will control these super-predators continue. Although many of us don’t really think of a curfew law as a limitation on civil liberty, it essentially is – in Oregon, youth curfew laws mean that a police officer can stop a teenager for being out in public most hours out of the day. Although there are sensible reasons to support curfew laws, mostly having to do with protecting children from adults, the focus on enforcing curfew laws is based on protecting “us” from “them”.

When we identify people as “Boogey Men”, they are not our kids, or members of our families, or our neighbors. We don’t think of them as a reflection of society because they are somehow not “of” society. Instead, we are led to see them as interlopers – different, alien, unconnected to us, and often up to no good. Criminalization creates an us versus them conflict in which we are all players for one or the other side. Since most of us don’t want to be rooting for people who do bad things, we “choose” the good side, and we agree to the controls that are being called for.

Criminalization uses a broad brush to paint a politically or economically expedient picture of a whole group of people in order to restrict, control, or punish that group. It makes criminals out of welfare recipients and young people, and monsters out of criminal offenders. It tries to convince us that the groups in question are somehow fundamentally bad for society unless they are changed, controlled, or made to disappear. And in response, we have developed a criminal justice system that largely focuses on just that – making problems go away by making people disappear.

In the arena of criminal justice, criminalization has had a catastrophic affect on African American males in particular. The Willie Horton story is not the beginning of criminalization, only a fairly recent chapter — just another striking example of how Black men have become so entwined with our vision of “criminal” that often, one only needs to wave a photo to provoke a fearful response. But criminalization is now widely used to control more and more groups of people.

The Newest "Boogey Men" 

The problem of criminalization is a central one for those of us working for reform of our criminal justice system. As long as there are people that the public thinks we “need” prisons for, we will continue to want to build prisons at an extraordinary rate – after all, since criminalization has proven to be an effective way to build political power, why not criminalize more and more people? The list of who is dangerous continues to grow, and in the wake of the September 11 attacks, in which our own personal safety feels more at risk than ever, criminalization of Muslims and immigrants has become a part of our daily lives. It has happened in a faster, more efficient way than criminalization has ever taken hold before.

They have become the new “Boogey Men” – willing to die to kill us, and so dangerous that many of us are willing to give up parts of our own freedom, along with most of theirs, to keep us all “safe”.

We're Going to Have to Take On the Boogey Man

Now that I’m all grown up, or, at least, closer to grown up, I realize that the idea of the Boogey Man was effective for “keeping me in line”, but is not what taught me the qualities that make me a good citizen – caring, empathy, and critical thinking. Our public “Boogey Men” will not help us build community or develop sound social policy. We need to challenge every attempt to craft social policy that is based on identifying an external threat, that is based on “othering” people, or labeling them as potential criminals. Instead, when looking at problems in society, we need to ask, “what does the presence of these troubled people reflect about society?” By doing so, we open up the possibility of getting to the root of the problem and finding unifying solutions, rather than just sweeping the symptoms under the rug (or into our prisons).

And, rather than just tell other people not to do engage in “criminalization”, we have to be prepared to look inside ourselves constantly, and ask ourselves the harder question — are we doing it? We need to avoid playing the game of putting distance between ourselves and the other “thems,” and then believing that we are purchasing safety cheaply by restricting civil liberties for groups of people. For those of us lucky enough to still be among the ever-shrinking numbers of “innocent-until-proven-guilty,” we have to educate others about the history of criminalization and its use as a form of social control, and spell out for others how demonizing of some people ends up restricting the freedom and threatening the security of us all.

This article originally appeared in Justice Matters Spring 2003