Episode Details

Paul Renfro is a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State. In this conversation he explains how fears of child abduction fueled a hysterical campaign in the 1970s and 1980s that produced a wave of new laws, structures of punishment, and ideas about family, security, and sexuality that continue to haunt American life.