Midnight Basketball by Douglas Hartmann

Author:Douglas Hartmann [Hartmann, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Sociology, Urban, Sports & Recreation, Basketball
ISBN: 9780226374987
Google: tWcpDQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 28369056
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Sport-Based Intervention into the New Millennium

While the publicity and controversy brought by the crime bill presented numerous challenges for midnight basketball operations in the political arena, it actually appears to have been a boon for its visibility and influence within the world of sport-based programming oriented toward intervention, prevention, and change more generally. As I alluded to earlier, the 1990s marked an explosion in the number and variety of sport-based, intervention-oriented programs all across the United States. Programs were springing up all over the social service landscape. They ranged from small, single-sport programs located in schools or operated at community centers to citywide, multisport summertime projects run by sport experts at Olympic training centers or sports foundations, from revitalized Police Athletic Leagues to prison boot camps (Pitter and Andrews 1997; see also Cameron and MacDougall 2000; Nichols 2010). And many observers and analysts concluded that the rise of sport-based and athletically oriented intervention and programs was in no small measure due to the prominence of midnight basketball. Standifer’s innovation was a catalyst, an advertisement and disseminator for that whole set of programs in the problem industry. The impact of midnight basketball’s crime bill moment is suggested by the fact that eight of the nineteen programs highlighted in the 1994 National Recreation and Park Association’s report “Beyond ‘Fun and Games’” (Tindall 1995) listed crime prevention and public safety as a “major emphasis,” and it was “risk prevention” that researchers chose as the focal point of the evaluations and assessments the organization was going to launch around the initiatives (Witt and Crompton 1996a). Similarly, when Pitter and Andrews (1997) wrote about the emerging new social problems industry in youth sport provision, the core of their focus was on the twenty-six programs in thirty different metropolitan areas that “provide sport activities as a means of reducing crime and promoting public safety” (89).

This new wave of social problems–oriented, youth sport programming was not predicated precisely on the midnight model, old or new. In the wake of the 1994 crime bill debates, there was some effort to use time effectively and keep kids “off the streets” and “out of trouble”; however, other terms and approaches were beginning to push those out, in favor of more traditional, paternalistic objectives of enrichment, education, and character building—or, in a word, “development.” This new generation of programs was not only less punitive and physically controlling. It also tended to use other sports, to be oriented toward a wider range of backgrounds (girls and young women as well as boys and young men, different minority populations, and those who were economically or otherwise disadvantaged), and (perhaps most of all) to be aimed at youth and young boys and girls at earlier and earlier ages.

These shifts were actually signaled or anticipated during the crime bill debates when New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, among others, went out of his way to lobby on behalf of the community-based prevention components of the crime bill package associated with midnight basketball. In one of

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