Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People 9780813570488

Citation preview

Trapped in a Vice

C ritical I ssues

in

C rime

and

S ociety

Raymond J. Michalowski Jr., Series Editor Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students. For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Trapped in a Vice The Conseque nce s of Confineme nt for Young   People

Alexandra Cox

Rutg e r s Unive r si ty P re s s New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cox, Alexandra, 1978– author. Title: Trapped in a vice : the consequences of confinement for young people / ­Alexandra Cox. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2017] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017007405 (print) | LCCN 2017023691 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813570488 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780813575650 (epub) | ISBN 9780813594187 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813570471 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813570464 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Juvenile detention—United States. | Juvenile delinquency—United States. | Juvenile justice, Administration of—United States. Classification: LCC HV9104 (ebook) | LCC HV9104 .C625 2017 (print) | DDC 364.360973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007405 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here” from Hum. Copyright © 2013 by Jamaal May. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Alice James Books, www.alicejamesbooks.org. Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra Cox All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. c The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–­1992. www​.rutgersuniversitypress​.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For everyone I’ve seen in the pens and through to the other side of them: your spirit keeps me fighting and your humor reminds me that we’re in it together for the long haul.

Conte nt s



Introduction 1

1

Reproducing Reforms 13

2

Ungovernability and Worth 33

3

Racialized Repression: Barriers to the Emancipation of Young People at the Edges of the System 61

4

The Responsibility Trap 98

5

Change from the Inside 127



Conclusion 160

Methodological Appendix 167 Acknowledgments 179 Notes 183 Index 211

vii

There Are Birds Here by Jamaal May For Detroit There are birds here, so many birds here is what I was trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings and buildings. No. The birds are here to root around for bread the girl’s hands tear and toss like confetti. No, I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, I said confetti, and no not the confetti a tank can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can’t stop smiling about and no his smile isn’t much like a skeleton at all. And no his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced by sun and light parted by shadow-­dance as anything else, but they won’t stop saying how lovely the ruins, how ruined the lovely children must be in that birdless city.

Trapped in a Vice

Introduction “It was strange wanting to be a witness in a place no one cares about.” —­Reginald Dwayne Betts, A Question of Freedom

In 2003, when I was twenty-­five years old, I took a job as a caseworker at a public defender’s office in Harlem. I had never lived in New York City, and I had no experience doing social work nor any knowledge of the New York City court system. Before I got the job, I had worked for a few years in criminal justice policy reform, so I understood a bit about the behemoth system I would be taking on. I knew the work would be emotionally challenging, but I wasn’t prepared for the ethical and political questions it would force me to confront. One of my many duties at this job was to go regularly to Rikers Island to meet with our clients. Anyone from New York City who is sixteen years or older and accused of a crime goes to Rikers Island to be held in detention if they have bail set or if they are remanded to custody by a judge. The island has around 10,000 inmates housed in ten smaller jails, with approximately 9,000 staff members. Just north of LaGuardia Airport, the island’s soundscape mixes planes taking off and landing with buses transporting family members and staff and the massive physical plant machinery that it takes to manage what is effectively a small city. To see my clients, I had to possess what is called a “corrections pass.” This allowed me to bypass the lengthy lines of visitors waiting to see their loved ones, drop off clothing, pay bail, or pick up property. After checking in with a front-­desk sergeant at the main intake building, I would wait for a white school bus reserved for official visitors and corrections officers to take us to one of the jails on the island. One day, I arrived at Rikers during a shift change. I waited outside the intake building with a large crowd of corrections officers. In my first days at Rikers, I assumed that the officers and I would have some camaraderie; we all worked in the same system, after all. A number of my clients even had family members who worked as corrections officers. However, I soon realized that 1

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my brown legal accordion file tipped the officers off that I was connected to defense attorneys, the individuals their jobs had taught them to detest. My external marks of privilege—­my clothing and my mannerisms—­and the fact that they were overwhelmingly Black and Latina/o while I was white—­ perhaps also added to their perception that I was yet another white bourgeois lawyer-­type coming to see the overwhelmingly black and brown clients under their care. The guards demonstrated no camaraderie with anyone associated with the defense; their body language—­the rolling of eyes, their decision to steer clear of us on the buses that led out to the facilities, and their brusque manner when we would try to engage in conversation with them made it clear that any association by guards with defense attorneys was to be avoided. I knew I was viewed with contempt. The officers were not wrong: my office existed to challenge the law enforcement apparatus that employed them. Yet the paradox of Rikers was such that, in the minds of many of the men and women, boys and girls incarcerated on the island, we all represented the neglectful, abusive, and violent state. The guards enforced order, sometimes brutally, while the public defenders pressured clients to plead guilty in the limited time they spent with them. To the people behind bars, we were all the same representatives of a dirty and corrupt criminal “injustice” system: my clients called the corrections officers “police” and often conflated the roles of public defenders and district attorneys. “The system” became, for so many individuals who faced it over and over again, simply a process that screwed them over. “The system” felt particularly heavy and oppressive for my teenaged clients who were locked in solitary confinement for upward of eighty days because they spat at an officer or for the people who were forced to plead guilty to double digits because the alternative—­losing at trial—­could be so much worse. As I stood in that parking lot alone while the guards made small talk with each other, I grappled with the question about whether state actors could ever play a positive role in the lives of people accused of crimes. I thought that the guards’ contempt for me was misplaced, unfair: I was going to Rikers Island to listen to people, to help them. But there is a long history of privileged white folks “saving” people of color from a system that was unmistakably akin to slavery, and thus largely intractable. Perhaps the officers’ attitude was, if you can’t beat it, join it? I attended graduate school in England, where my questions about the state and its role in people’s lives were challenged even further. Despite its strong safety net and expansive social state, I witnessed similar dynamics of social exclusion in English prisons—­particularly for poor people of color—­to what existed in the United States.The same questions about social neglect emerged: how can the state buffer citizens from the crises that force them into the hands of the criminal justice system? And what if the crises that force people into

Introduction 3

the criminal justice system are actually a consequence of an inadequate social safety net and social welfare supports? Again, my questions focused on the role of the state in helping its citizens rather than oppressing them. In time, a more refined set of questions emerged: how is it possible to escape the punitive state? How are helping agencies implicated in punishment? Pursuing answers to those questions led me to write this book. I sought to examine the role that the state plays in young people’s lives, and in turn, how young people perceive the state’s role in ostensibly helping them. I was particularly interested in the political and philosophical puzzle that young people in trouble with the law presented: as citizens-­in-­waiting who were brought into an inherently paternalistic juvenile justice system, what were some of the ways that they could exercise agency and self-­determination? I argue that the approach the state and its agents take with young people accused of crimes is harmful, illiberal, and racist. The system exerts a viselike grip over the lives of young people once they enter its grasp. Shaped by the forces of racism, classism, and sexism, the system demands responsibility of teenagers in the absence of social structures and supports that would allow them to meet those demands. As a result, they often falter. One of these young people was Jacob, whom I met when he was just fourteen years old and incarcerated at the Hooper Secure Center in the Hudson Valley.1 When Jacob was ready to leave Hooper, he gathered up his belongings, which included his GED certificate (high school equivalency), his books, and a check for the money he had earned while he worked at the facility’s kitchen. He got into a state van, and a staff member from the facility drove him just a short way to the local Amtrak station, where he boarded a train to New York City. He looked out at the Hudson River, wearing his own clothes for the first time in several years. Leaning back in the plush upholstered seat of the train car, he turned his gaze toward the commuters going from Albany to New York City and wondered if anyone knew that he had just been released from a juvenile facility. Jacob got a job within a few weeks of his release, enrolled in college a few months later, and even secured a lease on a car. He gave speeches to younger kids who had been in the system, was interviewed by reporters, and went to a conference; he became a “poster child.” Yet just a few years later, Jacob was serving a two-­year sentence in an adult prison. Now he’s starting over again. Many researchers have written about why individuals like Jacob struggle to live a life free of crime. Some have focused on the roadblocks that those from America’s impoverished urban core face as they reckon with the stigma and burdens of a criminal conviction and the structural disadvantages of poverty and racism. This has helped us to understand the mechanisms structuring our high incarceration and recidivism rates, yet the whole story remains untold.

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This book focuses on the neglect of young people like Jacob by the very institutions and individuals responsible for helping him get and stay out of the criminal justice system. It focuses on the moments when youth in the criminal justice system don’t conform to our expectations of how they should behave, only to disappear into homeless shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and adult prisons, as they cross the threshold from the juvenile to the adult system. It focuses on the institutions and actors who discard the young once their actions began to reflect the complex constellation of systemic and personal abandonment that have defined their entire lives. But it is also about the heavy hand of the state—­for instance, the ways that Jacob first entered the system when he was fourteen, living in foster care, and desperate for money, and how he fell into the hands of the police, jail, and a lengthy sentence filled with behavioral change programming. Impoverished young people in trouble with the law, like Jacob, are uniquely situated at the crossroads of multiple interlocking systems of social welfare and punishment. Because of their poverty, their often-­troubled family existences, and their risk-­taking, teenagers encounter the disciplinary power of poverty management in unique and important ways. This book is about a generation of young people who have grown up in extreme poverty. The story begins in 2008, shortly after the global financial collapse. Many of these young people were born in or around 1996, when the federal government enacted welfare reforms that replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which placed caps on the amount of welfare assistance that individuals could receive in their lifetimes and imposed strict requirements on individuals to find work. The individuals who have most suffered under these and a number of other social welfare programs are the most impoverished Americans, especially single parents and their children. State-­based general assistance programs, which provide a safety net for the poorest of the poor, especially single men and individuals without children who do not qualify for other government assistance programs—­like Jacob—­have been cut significantly in the past decade.2 New York’s general assistance levels have fallen in real terms by about $100 a month per recipient.3 In a recent study of the prevalence of extreme poverty (living on the equivalent of $2 a day), researchers found that this form of poverty has risen “sharply” between 1996 and 2011.4 So too has social inequality, or the rising gap between rich and poor, and the increasing barriers for individuals seeking social mobility. Households with children living on no income are the most deeply affected by the welfare policy changes. Almost every teenager I interviewed for this book lived in a household where his or her parents were unemployed or had very low-­income service-­ sector jobs. Some of their parents participated in training programs mandated by welfare centers, such as those for home health aids, but their engagement in those programs provided them with no income.

Introduction 5

Young people seem to struggle the most under the burdens of social inequality. These forms of inequality play a significant role in determining their life outcomes.5 Young people faced higher rates of unemployment than adults after the world financial collapse.6 Yet job training and employment opportunities are scarce. For example, only 7 percent of the 200,000 “disconnected” sixteen-­to twenty-­four-­year-­olds in New York City were served by existing educational and job training programs in 2008, and there were an estimated 12,000 program slots available to serve this group.7 These teenagers and their families frequently interacted with state actors and agencies charged with helping poor people—­welfare centers, social security offices, Medicaid offices, corrections officers and cops, public hospitals, jails, family court, and child welfare offices. Government officials treat them in a manner that has been termed neoliberal paternalism.This form of governance “emphasizes self-­mastery, wage work, and uses of state authority to cultivate market relations.”8 It is both paternalistic in that individuals facing government interventions see them as heavy-­handed and focused on facilitating their change toward waged workers, better parents, more effective students, and so on, and neoliberal in that it emphasizes their role in the market as individuals capable of self-­direction and sufficiency. This book is one of a number of recent studies about young people’s experiences in the juvenile justice system. These studies have provided us with a rich and troubling story about the deeply negative effects of punishment and incarceration in young people’s lives. The studies, which have taken place in all parts of the United States, from Rhode Island to California, have revealed that much of what young people experience in custody and in the system more broadly across the country are very similar to what I have observed in New York; many young people struggle to manage the dual philosophies of care and control that exist in the juvenile justice system; the young people often “fake it to make it” through treatment, and they face harsh material and structural obstacles upon release from custody that prevent them from stopping offending.9 It is clear that our current system of punishment does not work; many, many young people—­at rates as high as 90 percent of boys in New York—enter the adult system after spending time inside of a juvenile prison.10 Involvement in the juvenile justice system actually harms individuals more than it helps them. This book situates the story of Jacob and similar young people in the context of this contemporary political economy and a juvenile justice system that is undergoing rapid change and that is raising new questions about help and hurt in the lives of young people. The setting is New York State, the birthplace of the first juvenile prison in the country and now the site of a serious experiment in closing juvenile prisons and system reform. The experiments that are being conducted in New York today (and elsewhere around the country)

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seek to provide more therapeutic and less punitive interventions in the lives of young people accused of crimes than have ever existed. Juvenile facilities have closed across the United States, unprecedented numbers of young people are being shifted to community-­based alternatives to incarceration, and there are historically low numbers of youth crime. However, much of what we see happening today has happened at several other points in U.S. history, and much of the logic that undergirds it—­that is, that system involvement may actually make young people more likely to commit crime—­has been happening since the late nineteenth century, even if it is undergirded by new evidence today. While facilities close, new therapeutic interventions have been expanded that include a deeper penetration into the lives of children and their families. The juvenile justice system is a palimpsest: the system we have today bears many traces of its predecessors. The first juvenile prison was established in New York in 1825, and the first separate court for young people was created in Chicago in 1899. The founders of the nation’s juvenile justice system believed that children should be treated differently from adults and thus served in a separate system. But not every child was considered worth saving. Black children weren’t worth saving. Nor were Native American or Mexican children. Children who were considered to be “imbeciles” or mentally or physically deficient were banished to facilities for life. Thus, the original form of the juvenile justice system was one that was fundamentally exclusionary in that its practices were focused on keeping out those young people deemed to be unworthy in our society.11 Today, we still exclude youth from our vision of who should be saved, but in less visibile ways. Juvenile facilities are no longer racially segregated. Young people are no longer held for life in mental hospitals and asylums. But police officers in this country disproportionately arrest high numbers of youth of color. The vast majority of young people who enter the criminal justice system are impoverished, and their families have encountered various social welfare institutions—­from public assistance, social security disability, public housing, to health care. Young people accused of violent crimes in New York and across the country face lengthy sentences. The current system, and system actors, exclude and abandon young people but does so through engagement with them as liberal citizens. By “liberal” I am referring to the values of civil and social rights and freedoms in citizenship. American liberals have been committed to notions of “freedom,” even if those opportunities are facilitated by law and policy, as in the case of efforts to achieve racial justice in the country in the 1960s.12 In today’s juvenile justice system, the individuals left behind in this quest to promote liberal citizenship are those kids who are not virtuous enough in their demonstration of

Introduction 7

citizenship. After leaving juvenile facilities and jails, violating probation, or failing their community-­based alternative to incarceration programs, getting sanctioned by public assistance and finding themselves homeless and riding on the subway instead of living in homeless shelters, or running out of psychotropic medication and declining into a delusional panic, these young people end up in adult jails, prisons, and other institutions of social exclusion when they do not meet the expectations set for liberal citizenship by the individuals who have managed them. Yet it is the liberal state itself that creates the very standards for failure. In previous systems, overtly racist and segregationist practices and policies reigned.What is different today is that many of the individuals in charge of the juvenile justice system will disavow racism and actively participate in a federal initiative to reduce racial disproportionality within the system. At Rikers Island, the system is also no longer staffed overwhelmingly by white people; more than half of the staff in New York’s juvenile prisons are black. A Latina woman led the charge to close to thirty of New York’s facilities. The former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, who went on to lead New York City’s criminal justice reform efforts, led efforts to overhaul the District of Columbia juvenile justice system and has publicly declared that large juvenile training schools should be shut down. A recent book calling for the abolition of juvenile prisons has hit the newsstands in force, and its author has made the progressive public speaking circuit.13 Hundreds of private foundations and liberal-­minded groups have direct access to policymakers and legislators and are actively involved in promoting what many would consider to be a movement away from incarceration—­including more alternatives to incarceration, more therapeutic interventions, more job programs and greater access to education. Young people may in fact be forced to work in a social structural system that “exists at least in part because it meets the needs of economic and political interests that favor social order and social control over poor communities, immigrants, and people of color.”14 Yet so many teenagers like Jacob find themselves in the adult justice system because the process of governing young people charged with crimes inevitably results in a class of the “ungovernable”—­those who cannot and will not meet the standards and expectations set out for liberal citizenship by the individuals who run juvenile justice systems and the ancillary social welfare sector. Once they are deemed ungovernable, this class of individuals effectively disappears, only to turn up in other systems of social control and punishment beyond the juvenile justice system. We don’t necessarily have statistics to track this group; once young people exit the juvenile justice system and enter adulthood, they are branded with a different state identification number to track them through a new system. No longer desirable “poster children” in need

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of saving, they’ve aged out of foster care, too old to mentor, with the debts, children, failed relationships, health and mental health problems, and the crises of an adult. They “fail,” but in more important respects, they fail to submit to a system aimed at their submission by revealing the parts of themselves that are sometimes ugly or discomfiting to those in charge.15 When I was working at the public defender’s office in New York, I had a client who was a poster child and then decided not to be one. I met Nina in 2004 when she was sixteen years old. Brilliant, fiercely mature and sophisticated for her age, Nina was incredibly resourceful. She had been taking care of herself for two years after her parents abandoned her for their drug addictions. She had worked her way up a small local crack-­selling network, a girl among men, but one who was a formidable competitor in that game. My job was to get Nina into school; she had been arrested and charged with selling drugs, and although the judge had kept her out of jail, the only way we could help her get out from under the case was to make sure she was back in school. Nina needed a parent’s signature to reenroll, and nearly a year later, with both of her parents on the streets and then incarcerated, we still had no way to get it. Yet we found a solution—­a GED/college program miraculously accepted an opinion written by a lawyer from a community-­based youth program that Nina met all of the criteria for being an emancipated minor. In short order, Nina ascended from drug dealer to college student. Nina became a poster child. She was asked by the organization’s director to speak at our annual fundraiser and charmed everyone she met, with a narrative that confirmed the idea that if only we give teenagers a chance to grow out of crime and a few strong resources, they will thrive. I quickly learned, however, that the poster child narrative forces us to ignore the long-­lasting damage wrought on individuals by poverty, racism, and systemic neglect. Like many teenagers, particularly those whose early childhoods were marred by neglect, Nina struggles with deep emotional pain and depression, and although her successes have been enormous, they wouldn’t be legible or obvious to many. The poster child is a liberal’s fantasy: the young person who has left the streets for college or for a middle-­class job with social mobility. By leaving “the ghetto,” they leave all of their troubles behind, for it was really just their position in the ghetto that made them commit crimes. This story, of course, denies individuals access to the complexity of human existence; it ignores the scars of racism and structural disadvantage in individual’s lives, of one’s racial identity and social history and its importance in shaping one’s orientation to oneself and one’s community, and to some extent it participates in the very narratives about the American Dream that so many liberals would disavow as mythology. This book is about individuals like Nina who lead complex and unique lives; it is an imperfect attempt to situate those lives in a broader historical and political context to talk about the ways that the system affected them. Books

Introduction 9

like this necessarily elide the complexity of people’s lives, their motivations, and their agency. In my time outside of academia, I continue to work with public defenders to present individuals’ life stories to judges and prosecutors. I am reminded daily that it is impossible to draw sweeping conclusions about why people commit crimes and what led them down the paths they traveled. In presenting the claims I do, I attempt to convey the damage that is done when we treat individuals in trouble with the law as objects that can be poked and prodded according to the whims of a system that refuses to recognize their individuality.16 Th eoret ical Ori e ntat i on The philosophical orientations and governing ideologies about youth crime have great consequences for the everyday lives of individuals charged with crimes. They steer individual actors’ decisions about where to intervene in teenagers lives, and most important for this book, where not to intervene. I focus on the present-­day ideologies about the governance of youth crime, using New York as a case study. Governing authorities force youth to express responsibility for their offending actions and for their future compliance with the law, but they do not actually facilitate the attainment of that responsibility, or more important, that ability to get out and stay out of the system. Those youth who are unable to live up to the expectations set out for them by governing agencies are abandoned. I argue that this process of responsibility-­ making is marked by assumptions about appropriate expressions of gender, race, and class. This book examines four elements of the punitive philosophy that are used against impoverished and “risky” youth: ungovernability and worthiness, responsibility, and redeemability. especially young people of Young people in trouble with the law—­ color—­are deemed to be ungovernable and thus in need of court interventions. The book charts the efforts of adults in the criminal justice system to manage young people whom they consider to be unmanageable. Interventions that rely on the idea that the young people who are inherently bad and ungovernable (that this is an assumed part of their culture) fail to recognize the effects of a bad and pathological social structure on individual’s lives. New York, like many other states across the country, has faced significant reductions in government support for welfare since 1996, when federal welfare reform occurred. The federal welfare reforms were partially facilitated by the strong embrace by political actors of the concept of individual responsibility in the marketplace. This idea, stemming from neoliberal political philosophies that prioritize the role of the free market, a reduced social state, and individual responsibility and accountability, was popularized in the United States during the Reagan era and embraced by politicians of all stripes.17

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In response to the retrenchment of welfare supports, state actors in places like New York have effectively been forced to promote notions of individual responsibility for those individuals who are under the control of the state. Put more simply, for young people about to leave a juvenile facility, it is in the state’s best interest to encourage them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find work and education because the state itself does not have the resources to provide such services to them. At first, Jacob succeeded in realizing this goal; he was able to find at least moderately stable forms of employment and education on his own. Many of the interventions aimed at young people charged with crimes in New York and elsewhere are guided by state actors’ desires for the realization of redemptive narratives in the lives of young people who have violated the law. In recent years, many states, including New York, have publicly embraced what they call more rehabilitative and therapeutic strategies with young people, turning away from a lengthy period, during the 1990s and early 2000s, of harsh law-­and-­order approaches to them, which often involved the imposition of lengthy sentences, the introduction of adult-­level penalties, and the use of get-­ tough interventions, such as boot camps and “scared straight” programming. Punitive ideologies have shifted away from these law-­and-­order approaches toward the use of more treatment and the expansion of social control interventions in young people’s lives in their communities (as opposed to in prison). Although these are not necessarily experienced as less punitive by the young people who encounter them (and thus the palimpsest: new strategies always bear the traces of old ones), the ideologies undergirding these approaches frame young people as inherently redeemable. The redemptive pathway is as follows: young people engage in offending behavior, often seen to be caused by their troubled pasts; they are then provided rehabilitative services by the state and into the light of “success,” generally marked by engagement in higher education and employment. At first Jacob displayed all of the signs of effective redemption—­he spoke about “seeing the light” while in residential care, deciding to change himself and his life, and then making determined efforts to do so once he was released. His story was compelling to people in the system and even those on the outside—­he, like Nina, overcame the obstacle of a criminal conviction and, on his own, made a life for himself despite it. Jacob reflected what for many system actors was an ideal: the realization that if the government stepped back and watched him from a distance, then individuals like him who had been governed would engage in a process of self-­government. The theoretical orientation of the research was inspired by and builds on the work of Michel Foucault, a French social theorist who was among the first to express cynicism about this process of self-­government. Foucault was interested in the relationship between individual’s experiences or perceptions

Introduction 11

of self-­regulation and control and the forms of control exercised by governing authorities that were aimed at those individuals. He argued that an individual’s expression of self-­control may actually be a product of the forms of regulation and control exerted by governing authorities.18 The imprint of the government’s role in these forms of self-­control may not be immediately visible to others. Foucault’s followers further developed this notion of what he termed “governmentality,” which is rooted in the idea that governments stimulate the cultivation of subjectivities in the service of particular aims.This has been used to study everything from hospitals and schools to ideas about child-­rearing.19 Criminologists and social theorists have subsequently extended Foucault’s ideas to their analyses of what happens in criminal and juvenile justice systems, arguing that the management of risky youth requires a process of enlisting youth in the process of their own self-­government.20 I argue that people’s redemption has been elevated by contemporary state actors, policymakers, and advocates as a means by which young people can accomplish virtue in their lives as formerly bad kids. In particular, telling one’s redemption story in the prison and later to the public becomes a way that youth can demonstrate their worthiness to those who have ostensibly helped them. These stories become compelling ways for advocates of intervention to feel secure that interventions are still necessary and important, and they also become new moments of governmentality in that young people are actively recruited in the telling of such redemption stories. Yet these stories are often fragile, and I argue that this has consequences for the actual process of change and development. Jacob’s own redemption story began to fall apart after a few years. He reconnected with some old friends on the streets. He accumulated debt. He stopped going to school. Then a family crisis happened, he was robbed, and everything fell apart. He began to despair, but he didn’t know how to cope with his despair; while he was at the juvenile facility, he didn’t receive any mental health treatment to address his serious depression and his history of suicide attempts, and he didn’t get any help in learning how to build relationships with others. Upon his release, he moved into public housing projects, got a low-­wage job, and had no ability to receive state assistance because he was ineligible for welfare support. After his family crisis, Jacob fell off the grid. He told his foster care agency that he didn’t want their help anymore. His philosophy of self-­control that he displayed so well in his juvenile facility migrated from his involvement in education and work to his involvement in the underground and illicit gun economy. He fell outside of the world of governance and into the realm of the ungovernable. In recent years, some criminologists have analyzed the lives of young people caught in the trap that Jacob is caught in, as well as some of the

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contradictions in strategies of governance that he faces—­under the control of the system, but not receiving any help from it, ostensibly engaged in a process of self-­governance but also participating in offending.21 Here I use the term “ungovernable” to represent this position that young people are in. This is where they become resistant to what is expected of them and thus unable to fit into the strategies for their social control. Thus, they are abandoned by the system and left to fend for themselves. I argue that our focus on the effects of the juvenile justice system alone, and the possibility for reform within that system, is myopic. The juvenile justice system is just one piece of a broader social welfare apparatus that is driven by interlocking structures and philosophies of punishment, oppression, and exclusion for youth. These systems both drive and reproduce the pernicious consequences of control of young people deemed to be risky in ways that are deeply illiberal in the sense that they actually inhibit the expression of liberal subjecthood; they are deeply harmful in that they perpetuate social harm and violence, both against and by young people; and they are racist, in that these systems are aimed almost exclusively at black, Latina/o, Asian, and Native American youth and uphold systems of control that are only acceptable in colonial terms—­they are dominating, paternalistic, and oppressive but almost exclusively for those youth, not the primarily privileged white youth who themselves engage in risky and dangerous behavior. The young people taught me these lessons—­none of them saw the juvenile justice system alone as the cause of their frustration and anger at racism and harms inherent in “the system.” I learned from them what was resonant for me on Rikers Island: all state agents and actors are representative of the same forces of marginalization, labeling, and control that they encounter daily and in deeply alienating ways, much like a colonial force. Thus, juvenile justice system reforms that seek to integrate alternatives to incarceration, including social work and therapeutic assistance, in the homes of young people and their families, ankle-­monitoring programs, and antiviolence initiatives that are focused on bolstering policing and safety monitoring and strategies, for example, all simply perpetuate the paradoxes of state involvement in young people’s lives—­they are both deeply penetrating but also punitive and alienating. Young people are trapped in a vice—­a system that pushes out as much as it pulls in.

C hap te r 1

Reproducing Reforms It seems to me that there has been a lot of nonsense written lately about the change in the training school from custody to treatment. If we ever had a philosophy of pure custody, we moved out of it a long time ago, even before we discarded the uniforms, the strict discipline and the “yes sir,” “yes ma’am” relationships that had persisted as anachronisms along with the celluloid collars on the shirts we gave boys with their parole suit . . . what we are trying to do is now moving out in so many different directions that it may well seem confusing and uncoordinated. —­Willard Johnson, Director of the New York State Department of Social Welfare, 19641

New York’s juvenile justice system was born nearly 200 years ago. It has always been paternalistic in its orientation but seemingly protectionist in its presentation. Reformers in New York have always arguably been benevolently motivated by their aim to protect and provide for the state’s most vulnerable citizens who have passed through the system. This is a uniquely northern American phenomenon, in that northern states have always sought to distinguish themselves as models of liberal, rational, and democratic governance. A young person arrested in Rochester, New York, today can walk through the very same gates of the juvenile facility that one of his or her family members could have walked through five generations earlier. In 1902, the State Industrial School was built on a sprawling campus in a rural area outside of Rochester. Today, it is simply referred to as “Industry,” or the Industry Residential Center. In 1902, young people did agricultural or industrial trade work on the campus; today, they receive therapy and go to school. The facility has recently initiated an agricultural initiative aimed at training kids in aquaponics (indoor fish and plant growth). Despite these new innovations, the focus on young people’s character has remained: according to a staff psychologist at Industry who was interviewed about the aquaponics initiative, “It’s not so much about growing food as building character. . . . They learn about working 13

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hard and making sacrifices, and they feel better about themselves. They recognize they can accomplish more in life and school.”2 One hundred and sixty-­ six years separate the lives of the first young person to enter the facility and the ones who enter today, but arguably little in the rhetoric and approach to reforming children has changed. For 160 years, the same questions and debates have circulated through juvenile justice reform: should teenagers who commit crimes be treated like adults? Should juvenile facilities be big or small? Should juvenile institutions focus on education or vocational training, treatment, or punishment? Should young people be treated in their home communities or in institutions? Willard Johnson, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, was right: the history of juvenile justice reform often seems confusing and uncoordinated. As I’ve reviewed the archives of New York’s juvenile justice system, or interviewed staff members, former system commissioners, and reformers, I’ve been struck by the consistency of these questions, the familiarity of the concerns, and even the similarity of the rhetoric.3 Often, the only people who aren’t repeating the same questions are teenagers themselves. There is a term that has been used to describe the young people who have been enmeshed in America’s juvenile justice systems: “other people’s children.”4 State agents are arguably always trying to find new ways to regulate the behavior of other people’s children within a liberal democracy. To strike the right balance—­one that recognizes and respects individual freedoms but asserts the right to control a category of people without rights—­is a difficult task: it would be illiberal to punish those children too harshly, for they are, after all, children; but there is pressure on the state to prevent those children from offending again. A question that preoccupies reformers and administrators in New York and other states across the country is both simple—­how do we get young people out of adult prisons and jails?—­and one that carries great consequences. It happens to have been the first question asked by the individuals who sought to address risk-­taking behavior by young people. A Site of E xpe ri m e ntat i on Until the middle part of the nineteenth century, teenagers and young people who committed crimes were housed in adult institutions. Concerned that teenagers would become corrupted by their time in adult institutions, middle-­class reformers in New York founded the first correctional institution to separate young people from adults in 1825. Called the House of Refuge, it was a juvenile detention center and prison for vagrant and delinquent youth.5 The Western House of Refuge was founded in Rochester, the northern part of the state, in 1849.6 The creation of these separate institutions for the care and control of young people sprang from the sense that young people were more malleable and thus susceptible to reform in a way that adults were not.7



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Once open, the Refuges detained children adjudicated as delinquents and those engaged in “protocriminal” behavior. This included children who “wandered about the streets, neither in school or at work and who obviously lacked a ‘good’ home and family.”8 The reformers embraced the philosophy that there were deviant “types,” and when children arrived in the institution, they would be classed according to the degree of their moral depravity, from good, to bad, to “wicked.”9 Boys and girls were assigned tasks that were aligned with expected behavior for their gender: boys were employed in buildings and grounds work, and girls were taught domestic tasks.10 Critics like the French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the New York City House of Refuge in 1831, argued that these institutions caused more harm than good.11 Others argued that the asylums were not sufficiently rehabilitative for young people and focused too much on a single model of care, rather than individualized and case-­by-­case approaches to delinquency. These created what they called “reformatories,” institutions aimed at educating children in developing forms of self-­discipline, industriousness, and deference, a more individualized model of care than the one practiced by the Houses of Refuge.12 The young people who initially populated the country’s juvenile justice system were Irish, German, Polish, Italian, and Russian children whose families arrived in New York during a surge of immigration in the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their families formed the backbone of the new American working class, and although they were white, they presented a challenge to middle-­class white people already living in the United States. The prospect of new immigrants wielding growing influence on the nation’s laws and norms sparked xenophobic anxieties.13 Within this context, the boundaries of acceptable behavior for new white migrants were enforced by the white middle-­and upper-­class native-­born residents of New York City through the uses of reformatories.14 The group of middle-­class white reformers organized themselves around the goal of “saving” impoverished immigrant children from what they perceived to be the potentially criminogenic threats of poverty. These “child savers,” a largely wealthy group of individuals, pushed for the passage of laws and the establishment of institutions that resulted in the moral regulation and control of poor children. For example, they promoted child labor laws as a means of both eliminating the threat that low wage, largely child-­dominated sweatshop labor posed to mass production.15 They invested their time and their money in the establishment of large orphanages and asylums for neglected and delinquent youth and played a role in marking out what kinds of youthful behavior could be considered to be worth punishing or saving. Over the early part of the twentieth century, a number of reformatories were built by the state across the rural parts of upstate New York.16 Charles

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Loring Brace, a white middle-­class educated man from Connecticut who founded the Children’s Aid Society, sought to take immigrant children out of their homes in the cities and place them with rural, farming families. Brace and others theorized that rural life offered both physiological and developmental benefits to urban children. As a result, the state’s rural landscape is still full of prisons, residential juvenile facilities, and residential children’s facilities. Many of those facilities were built in the nineteenth century; the ones that were built more recently still bear the traces of their predecessors. Large as these reformatories were, they drew from small facilities scattered across a residential campus, each run by a set of “parents.” Through this cottage system, the state agencies sought to decentralize the forms of control that existed in previous institutions.17 The cottage-­based residential treatment systems were intended to resemble an ideal-­typical rural, agrarian family life that could offer moral guidance and sanctuary for urban children who were considered to be ravaged by rapid urbanization and development.18 This was the first time where reformers focused on the size of facilities for young people charged with crimes; yet since then, ideas about facility size, including the ratio of staff to children, the layout of facility units, and the relationship of units to larger institutions, have dominated juvenile justice reform conversations. Reformers have argued that facilities should be as small as possible, allowing children to participate in treatment and facilitating their emancipation from care. The discussion today bears the traces of the past; notions about the intimacy of home and family life, and its benefits in particular in the care of children, have been consistent in discussions about what works for young people in trouble with the law. This doesn’t always mean keeping children in their homes but does operate under the assumption that a homelike structure is best for children. The project of removing children from their homes and placing them in rural areas or upstate cities has also been a critical thread through the history of reform. Continuing in the project of expansion of the state’s facilities to rural areas, the New York State legislature passed laws at the turn of the twentieth century authorizing the use of lands in far upstate New York, near Rochester, and closer to New York City, in the Hudson Valley, for the building of a state training school for boys who were charged as juvenile delinquents, shifting boys away from the Houses of Refuge, where they had previously been placed.19 The New York State Training School for girls was founded in Hudson, New York, in 1904. The school identified the girls as “pupils” and expected them to engage in traditionally feminine disciplines such as sewing and dressmaking, cooking, and cleaning. According to one early report from the Training School, the girls were there to learn the “common decencies of life.”20



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These new institutions considered only some groups of young people reformable. Black children, for example, were often placed in separate institutions or units from white children, often with adults, in part because their “rehabilitative potential was doubted.”21 They often faced longer terms in custody. Child welfare and custodial institutions for poor African American children were deeply underfunded in the early part of the twentieth century in New York.22 Although the population of African American people in New York City rose substantially in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were few social services available for African American children, particularly for those who were considered to be abused and neglected by their families. Child welfare services remained segregated by race, with the vast majority of beds available for white children.23 In 1939, there were only four voluntary agencies in New York City that even accepted African American children.24 To find a placement for these young people, the only place judges felt they could send them was into the juvenile justice system, which had beds available for them.25 Although the segregation of child welfare services was not allowed by law, the state’s interpretation of the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed facilities to be “separate but equal,” allowed these practices to persist.26 The first institutions in New York were built in the context of fears about unruly immigrant children and black children who arguably posed an existential threat to the ruling classes that sought to build a thriving industrial center in New York City. Sociologists of childhood have pointed to the ways that adolescence has always been constructed as a time of storm and stress and that periods of social change have often coincided with heightened concerns about youth crime and risk.27 As some prominent scholars of childhood argue, “risk anxiety is primarily expressed as fear for children—­worries about their safety and well-­being—­but also as fear of children, of what children might do if they are not kept within the boundaries of acceptable childish conduct.”28 Although crime rates among young people have fluctuated since the inception of the juvenile justice system, it is arguable that many of the same concerns about youth crime have persisted from the very beginning. In the years following World War II, there was a significant uptick in arrests of young people and a subsequent growth in the number of juvenile facilities in the state.29 Among the causes were concerns about black radicalization, the emerging influence of the Black Muslims, and the rise of youth gangs.30 By the mid-­1950s, the New York State Department of Social Welfare responded by expanding their institutions, establishing joint local and state financial responsibility for children who were sent to training schools and private facilities.31

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During the 1950s and 1960s, the state repurposed a former sanatorium in Otisville, New York, a former stable for carriage horses from New York City in the Delaware River watershed, and created juvenile facilities near the upstate communities of Hudson and Troy. The number of state institutions expanded from four to eleven, and by 1964, there were more than 6,000 young people in care; by contrast, there were only 539 youth admitted into custody in 2013.32 During the 1950s and 1960s, the state agency also expanded its community-­ based operations, focusing on programs to provide casework and support to young people based in the community.33 During the early to middle part of the twentieth century, New York State used a wide range of interventions with young people charged with crimes. Staff in juvenile institutions began using psychotherapy, milieu therapy, and other behavioral interventions.34 Those involved in institutional care felt that psychiatry and psychology would make the institutions more rehabilitative.35 Yet although some said that these interventions signaled a change in approach from custodial care to treatment-­based care, others, like Willard Johnson, the former state director of social welfare, noted that there was never a “philosophy of pure custody” used in New York’s system; he pointed out that the first psychiatrist and psychologist were introduced into New York’s institutions in the 1930s and that social workers had long been a part of institutions.36 It is thus clear that the debates about whether juvenile facilities should be punitive or therapeutic are age-­old. A System unde r Sc rut i ny The juvenile justice system of New York City has slipped into confusion and despair, caught in a crisis so severe that judges and jailers alike often say they are harming more children than they are helping. —­New York Times, 197037 New York State’s juvenile justice system is an expensive, dismal failure that does great harm to children and families without making our neighborhoods safer. —­New York Daily News, 200838

New York’s journalists have long investigated the conditions of its juvenile justice system and, with striking consistency, have conveyed the idea that the system does more harm than good to young people. Thirty-­eight years separate the opinions expressed above by the New York Times and the New York Daily News, yet they essentially say the same thing. Over the course of the twentieth century, numerous studies pointed to the ineffectiveness of juvenile institutions at ending offending by young people.39



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By the 1960s, a number of critical studies of New York’s and other states’ treatment of young people in prisons and juvenile facilities, produced by advocacy organizations and academics, began to challenge the models of “rehabilitation” that were used in juvenile facilities.40 Organizations like the New York City Legal Aid Society, the city’s primary indigent criminal defense organization, and the Citizen’s Committee for Children published critiques of the state system.They advocated strongly for community-­based interventions over institutions and were supported by the federal government in their efforts.41 In a report published in 1960, the Citizen’s Committee for Children first made the pitch for community over custody, and then repeated that pitch again in 1969: We believe that many children who are now institutionalized could be helped in the community. However, a small number of children are best treated or protected away from home and the community. (1960)42 We believe that New York State must be brave and imaginative enough to help children while they live within or very close to their own communities. We may use foster homes, day centers, small residences, community mental health services, or other means. (1969)43 The notion that “community” is better than “custody” is one that seems, at first, anti-­paternalistic—­reformers want the state to stop removing children from their families. But this critique was also arguably rooted in assumptions about the dysfunctional working-­class family in need of interventions.44 The reformers arguing for a shift from custody to community in the 1960s drew from labeling theory in making their claims. They also drew from the idea of “radical noninterventionism” in the lives of young people charged with crimes.45 The idea that the very interventions aimed at young people could actually cause them to offend resonated with reformers, who asked, through their critiques, whether it was in fact possible that the very sanctioning of criminal behavior by young people might cause them to internalize the identity of a deviant and reenact it. Did institutionalization itself act as a “labeling” force, regardless of whether it was therapeutic? In 1960, system leaders in New York created a program for fifteen-­to seventeen-­ year-­ olds charged with crimes called the “Division for Youth” (DFY) as an alternative to the large training school model. They also began to run experimental treatment programs in residential care.46 In the years after the establishment of DFY, system leaders, in part informed by the labeling research, helped to close some facilities. As a result, the population of young people in the training schools dropped dramatically, smaller facilities with innovative forms of care emerged, and there was a rise in alternative-­to-­incarceration programs.47 Abraham Novick, who was the superintendent of the New York State

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Training School for Girls in Hudson, wrote in a white paper on the subject in 1963: “Commitment to or placement in an institution should be looked up on as a last resort. Last resort is not to be defined as a process of identifying the impossible child for shipment to Siberia, but the considered decision of responsible people that a relatively controlled environment is required for rehabilitation and eventual adjustment.”48 Novick recommended that the youth who remained in facilities should be provided with a range of rehabilitative services rooted in “sociological” approaches, which included group-­oriented treatment and vocational training, while those who remained for what he called “psychological” reasons would receive individualized treatment.49 The facility landscape created in the 1950s had begun to unravel. The subsequent nationwide decline of the so-­called rehabilitative ideal in the 1970s, which involved challenges by academics, policymakers, and advocates to indeterminate sentencing laws and the “correctional” model of imprisonment, transformed approaches toward young people charged with crimes.50 This movement was bolstered by empirical evaluations of treatment programs that demonstrated that few programs “worked” to rehabilitate offenders.51 The “nothing works” movement in part led to a period of deinstitutionalization and diversion in both the adult and juvenile justice systems in the early 1970s.52 In 1970, 10 percent of young people charged with crimes in New York were placed in community-­ based settings; by 1976, that number had risen to 46 percent.53 In the 1960s, emboldened by the legacy of litigation successes in the civil rights movement, a new group of lawyers began to challenge what they saw as the overly paternalistic nature of juvenile courts and their effects. Gerald Gault, a fifteen-­year-­old teenager who was placed into confinement for a seven-­year sentence after his adjudication for making a lewd phone call, raised questions about his treatment by the courts. His case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s majority decided, in its In re Gault decision in 1967, to provide some of the people procedural safeguards that existed in the adult court system to young people like Gault who were processed in the juvenile court system.54 A burgeoning children’s rights movement was emerging, one primarily led by white middle-­class advocates who felt that the child-­saving efforts of their predecessors had gone too far. This also meant that there was greater attention to the uses (and abuses) of placement, leading to efforts to reduce the placement of status offenders, such as runaways and truant youth. In the 1970s, lawyers raised critical challenges to racial segregation in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Some of these agencies were forcibly desegregated after a lawsuit was filed in 1973 on behalf of a young woman, Shirley Wilder, who was placed in the Hudson Training School for Girls after her parents allegedly abused her and no other social services placements could be found for her.55



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However, the procedural protections that were added in the juvenile courts did not necessarily eliminate the broader philosophies and orientations embedded since the founding of separate courts for young people at the turn of the nineteenth century. Institutionalization was still reserved for those deemed the most “risky” in the state—­by the 1970s, those were poor, largely male, youth of color. The system remained a palimpsest. Despite reforms that strengthened children’s rights and recognized the harmful role that system involvement may play in young people’s lives, the foundational and paternalistic approaches to treating “other people’s children” arguably remained at the core. For all that liberal reforms had chipped away at the rights that young people received, they had not in fact altered the population who faced the deep end sanctions in institutions.56 The number of young people in custody may have gone down, and their access to civil rights may have been enhanced, yet those in custody arguably still faced people who saw them as manageable only when they were institutionalized. In 1975, in keeping with the wave of political sentiment against the institutionalization of children and in favor of community-­based alternatives, New York State governor Hugh Carey appointed a new reform-­minded director of the state’s Division for Youth. The new director, Peter Edelman, was working at the University of Massachusetts. Massachusetts came to national attention after the director of that state’s system, Jerome Miller, famously closed the state’s large juvenile training schools.57 Convinced that there were too many training schools in New York, Edelman reduced the state’s reliance on them as a form of secure placement. He also identified a number of other problems in the system, including poor mental health services, weak educational programs, inadequate aftercare supervision, and too few small placement settings.58 During his time in the agency, Edelman shifted care away from large institutions and toward smaller ones. As the juvenile facilities began to close, there was a significant amount of pushback to the reforms from the staff working in the facilities.59 Two incidents galvanized Edelman’s opponents. In early 1977, youth residents at the Austin McCormack facility near Ithaca set the facility on fire; staff members reportedly sat and watched as the facility burned down.60 In June 1977, a thirteen-­year-­old boy from Buffalo named David Smith was murdered at the Industry Residential Center, located just outside of Rochester. In both instances, state lawmakers and the media blamed the putative “softening” of the system.61 In the early 1970s, there was substantial legislative and public attention to serious youth crime in New York, especially robbery and gang violence.62 The Juvenile Offender law, which allows adolescents as young as thirteen to be charged as adults, was enacted in 1978 in New York in response to a highly publicized criminal case involving a fifteen-­year-­old named Willie

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Bosket, who was charged with robbing and killing two subway passengers in New York City.63 Because Bosket was fifteen years old, he was charged in the city’s Family Court, and received a maximum sentence of five years in a juvenile facility. The relatively lenient sentence created significant public furor.64 Correctional interest groups began to question the legitimacy of the state’s juvenile justice administration, which prompted investigations of serious juvenile crime.65 Although violent crimes by young people were actually on the decline during this period, cases like Willie Bosket’s stoked public fears.66 During the summer after the Bosket murders, Governor Hugh Carey faced a tough reelection battle, complete with accusations that he was soft on crime. In response, Carey threw his support behind a proposed Juvenile Offender law, which would require that thirteen-­, fourteen-­, and fifteen-­year-­ olds charged with certain violent felonies be automatically prosecuted in adult court, and behind a provision that would allow a panel of psychiatrists, a district attorney, and a judge to determine a young person’s eligibility for release.67 The Juvenile Offender law forced a significant uptick in the number of youth in care. The passage of the Juvenile Offender law reflects the connections between politics and punishment in the United States. The treatment of young people who offend is dependent not only on individual caretakers but also on political cycles: the commissioners of the state’s juvenile justice are political appointees. Although many individuals working in the system are civil servants who work their way up through the programs, the commissioners often come from outside of the system, thus enacting programs of reform which reflect their ideological orientations, not necessarily their experience in the system The 1980s were a relatively quiet time for reform in New York’s system. The system’s commissioners focused on building up the state’s programming for young people charged under the Juvenile Offender law. The facility’s commissioners continued existing treatment programs, such as Guided Group Interaction, but also initiated programs like Aggression Replacement Training.68 During the 1990s, there was a well-­documented surge in youth arrests, similar to the period of panic about youth crime in the 1950s. There were several high-­profile cases of white teenagers who engaged in school shootings, teenage gang violence, and teenagers involved in murdering their peers. Many states passed laws heightening penalties toward teenagers.69 In her account of juvenile justice in the 1990s, Elaine Brown points to the ways that the white teenagers engaged in school shootings were described as alienated victims, while the teenagers of color who committed homicides were characterized as evil murderers.70 During the 1990s, the system was brimming with young people of color, especially during the years when Republican Governor George Pataki led the state and when law-­and-­order politics were ascendant.



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Unlike other states, which amped up their penalties against young people, New York did not adjust its already quite harsh laws allowing teenagers to be automatically arrested and convicted as adults, even though there were some calls to do so. The juvenile facilities continued to function as they had, significantly expanding a cognitive change treatment model, Aggression Replacement Training, into their programming.71 The state also started a military boot camp program in the early 1990s. Despite some claims about a hardening of the system toward a more “correctional” model, however, it appears that the 1990s were a time when treatment programming continued to be tinkered with in the facilities as it had throughout the twentieth century. The major difference was that the system appeared to be under relatively little scrutiny by outside reformers, and each juvenile facility had some autonomy and little supervision from above from the state commissioners. There was also a relatively inactive litigation and juvenile justice reform movement at the time.There is little documentation of any critical reports or investigations of the system issued during the 1990s. Th e Conte m p orary L andscape of Juve nile Just i c e In the spring of 2015, New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, proposed to raise the age of responsibility from sixteen to eighteen years. Although many advocates had called for the age to be raised at other points in New York’s history, this was seemingly the first time a state governor was behind such a policy change, and he received support from law enforcement for his efforts.72 This is representative of a larger shift occurring across the United States—­ bipartisan support for criminal justice system reforms is gaining traction, and “nonviolent” teenagers, who the bill would affect, seemed to be low-­hanging fruit in reforms aimed at saving money for the states, in that their diversion to less costly systems of care than prisons would be a political move that posed seemingly little threat. Those who supported raising the age argued that the adult prison system where teenagers are placed is overly harsh and punitive. Community-­based organizations in New York City sent busloads of teenagers to Albany to lobby in support of Cuomo’s proposal to raise the age. Many of the teenagers who came out in support of the bill were clients of alternative to incarceration organizations or had been incarcerated at Rikers Island (a jail for adults but where teenagers as young as sixteen can be sent). Some of these teenagers were featured in news stories, campaign literature, and even in a video put out by Governor Cuomo’s office. At the time, I was teaching a college course inside of Hooper, a maximum secure juvenile facility for young men. The young men in my class were all charged with violent crimes. More than 90 percent of young men in the

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facility were convicted as adults under the state’s Juvenile Offender law—­the so-­called Willie Bosket law. The young men had heard about the governor’s proposal and were excited about how it might affect them. Unfortunately, the only way it would affect them was that more young people would be joining their facility because the governor had proposed that all young people currently held in adult prisons be transferred to the state’s juvenile facilities. None would have their sentences changed, nor would they cease being charged as adults. The bill would only affect those sixteen-­to eighteen-­year-­olds charged with nonviolent crimes. The kids affected by the Willie Bosket law—­those charged with serious, violent felonies, 90 percent of whom are children of color—­would remain a class of individuals carved out under the law as undeserving of the mercy granted to their peers charged with nonviolent crimes. Several years earlier, in 2008, I began doing my research inside of the facility during another period of reform—­one that was aimed at enhancing the provision of treatment inside of juvenile facilities and lessening the forms of “strict discipline” that existed there. The reforms were also aimed at improving conditions of confinement. When he was fourteen years old, Jacob was sent to Hooper. Like many juvenile facilities in New York, it is located in a rural area a few hours from New York City, where most of the young people inside, including Jacob, came from. At the time, Hooper and a number of other facilities across the state were in turmoil—­fighting between residents was commonplace, as were their arrests for fighting and assaults on staff; staff members were regularly calling out sick, and stories about the turmoil in the system were a regular feature in the public media. Jacob arrived in the system shortly after Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer appointed a longtime child advocate, Gladys Carrión, to the position of commissioner of the state’s system, with the charge that she shift it from a punitive to a rehabilitative system. In November 2006, just two months before Spitzer took office, a boy named Darryl Thompson died after he was physically restrained by staff at the Tryon boys’ facility.73 Even under the previous governor, Republican George Pataki, the state’s juvenile justice reform movement had picked up steam. There were a number of advocates who were involved in campaigns to stop the building of a juvenile placement facility in the Delaware River valley, as well as campaigns against the building of new juvenile detention facilities in New York City.74 The New York Civil Liberties Union conducted an investigation into conditions of confinement in two girls’ facilities, making serious allegations against the state for the overuse of force and neglectful mental health care.75 Other state organizations investigated conditions of confinement and called for greater oversight of the state system.76 Carrión, who was a former child advocate and director of the nonprofit social services organization United Way, immediately embarked on a project of closing the state’s juvenile facilities and cleaning house. Reformers had



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criticized the system as a product of the 1990s-­style “lock ’em up” mentality and said that the facilities resembled prisons. The state’s boot camp facility, built in the early 1990s, was still open. The directors of the facilities were appointed through an archaic political patronage-­based system, and there were rumors of a cloistered culture of staff violence against youth. Carrión closed down facilities and made those that remained more humane. Meanwhile, at Hooper, a lot of staff members were unhappy at this change in direction, and kids like Jacob knew it. Many staff members at Hooper considered Jacob to be a model resident. It helped that he was white, which allowed him to gain some favor with white staff members, and that he had mastered the art of deference to staff. Jacob and a group of other young men were hand-­selected by the facility administrators at Hooper to participate in my research study; I quickly learned that this same group was frequently chosen to meet with outsiders coming in the facility. The young residents knew that a lot of changes were happening in New York’s system, in part because the staff that watched over them would often grumble about the reforms and the new commissioner, Carrión, during their shifts. The teenaged residents were also, to some extent, aware that the system was under scrutiny and that changes aimed at making their lives in the facilities better were taking place—­they no longer had to hold their hands behind their backs when they walked from one place to the other, they were given greater access to ombudsmen who could hear their concerns, and the rules had been changed about the kinds of incidents that might precipitate a physical restraint against them. But for the most part, few residents or staff members were actually informed by facility or system administrators about the broader agenda of the reforms, and in fact, the changes were quite minor. Residents in the facilities that closed were simply moved to another facility. Some residents experienced shorter stays in confinement than in the past, but they had no point of comparison to the previous sentencing practices because it was often their first time in the system.Yet to the outside world, the changes were deemed profound and transformative, attracting the attention of national media and the federal government. In Washington, DC, members of the Department of Justice learned about allegations of abuse and neglect in New York’s facilities and sent some of their lawyers to the state’s juvenile facilities to investigate these allegations. After their investigation, in 2009, the Department of Justice published a scathing report about New York’s system and forced substantial changes to their restraint policies and mental health policies, hiring monitors to inspect the progress of change.77 In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg hired a new cadre of liberal advocates to work in his administration to steer changes in the city’s juvenile justice system, many of whom came from the same advocacy community that had

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pressed for reforms.Within a matter of years, the city’s most notorious juvenile detention facility, Spofford, which had long been critiqued for its deplorable conditions of confinement, was closed by his administration. The mayor appointed a probation commissioner, Vincent Schiraldi, who had progressive bona fides and had overseen a dramatic transformation of DC’s juvenile justice system, closing its notoriously bad juvenile facility, Oak Hill, and opening a smaller facility focused on education and youth development. Schiraldi pushed for juvenile probation reform in the city and supported the mayor’s new focus on jobs for young men who were involved in the criminal justice system. By 2012, liberal advocates and city and state bureaucrats, who in the past had been on opposite sides of the political fence, were celebrating some of the most dramatic system transformations they felt could be possible: a major initiative, called “Close to Home,” which involved the closure of most of the state’s juvenile facilities and the development of a network of community-­ based care in New York City. Community triumphed over institutions in the debate over what was best for kids in trouble with the law.78 It is no surprise that the reforms reached their fullest force after the 2008 global financial catastrophe. In New York, as in many other states, criminal justice expenditures have been identified as a key driver of state expenses, and many states have looked to criminal justice reforms as the answer to this crisis. At the height of the New York reforms, it was estimated that it cost approximately $268,000 a year to house a young person in Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) custody.79 Those costs were disproportionately borne by the government of New York City, which sent the vast majority of young people into state custody. In a study of the recidivism rates of young people who were in OCFS custody in New York, which tracked a large group of young people leaving custody until age 28, not only were the vast majority of boys and girls rearrested, but 71 percent of the boys ended up spending time in an adult jail or prison.80 In an earlier study often cited by those making a case for reform, 80 percent of young people discharged from OCFS custody from 1991 to 1995 were rearrested within six years.81 Citing recidivism rates in making the case for reform is not new: sociologist Alexander Liazos has pointed to times as early as the mid-­nineteenth century when reformers pointed to the high rates of return to custody of young people who were institutionalized.82 The attention to the conditions of confinement in New York paralleled a broader critique of institutional care in states across the country. A number of states, from Ohio to California, to Connecticut, Texas, and New York, significantly reduced the size of their juvenile facility populations since 2004.83 New York closed down thirty-­one facilities and reduced its juvenile facility population by more than 3,000 young people since Carrión was appointed.84



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Carrión forced staff members to reduce their reliance on physical restraints and promoted the use of new therapeutic interventions, including a “trauma-­ informed” program of organizational change called the Sanctuary Model. The Sanctuary Model is “designed to facilitate the development of structures, processes, and behaviors on the part of staff, clients and the community-­as-­a-­ whole that can counteract the biological, affective, cognitive, social, and existential wounds suffered by the victims of traumatic experience and extended exposure to adversity.”85 Over the course of the research period, this model was implemented in facilities across the state. State administrators also introduced Dialectical Behavior Therapy into the facilities and a new behavioral change and treatment model (called the New York Model) that was developed in conjunction with administrators from a Missouri-­based juvenile facility. In Missouri, system administrators downsized their training schools in favor of small “homelike” facilities, where neither the young people nor staff members wear uniforms; the young people decorate their rooms and are involved in community governance of their facilities. The Missouri Model received national media attention and is frequently cited by liberal advocates as a model system. New York City in fact paid for some advocates and bureaucrats to travel to Missouri to tour its facilities. This reform shift in favor of small facilities over big ones is reminiscent of the Progressive Era efforts at emphasizing cottage-­based facilities and family-­style care over the large reformatory model. The George Junior Republic, a Progressive Era facility built in upstate New York, emphasized its family-­like atmosphere, lack of uniforms, and youth governance after it was established in 1895.86 The Missouri Model appealed to New York administrators because it arguably offered a safe and humane alternative to the large-­scale congregate care facilities that played such an abysmal role in young people’s lives. For the New York reformers, the smaller facilities and more human and gentle approach to children embodied their commitment to the dignity and fairness that young people should expect in custody. OCFS’s plans to close facilities triggered an outpouring of responses from both progressive reformers in support of the changes and juvenile facility staff opposed to the downsizing process.87 This coincided with growing dissent among some staff members about Carrión and her ideas about systemic reform. The death of a staff member in a community-­based facility at the hands of two young men who had recently been released from custody became another lightning rod for criticism of the system, sparking a conservative Republican legislator from upstate New York to begin an investigation of the reforms.88 Staff members’ resistance to reforms was rooted in their perception that facilities were more violent as a result of these changes, that the commissioner was out of sync with the “true” nature of the young offenders inside the

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facilities, and that staff members were unable to have their concerns heard. 89 In response, Carrión described the “culture of violence” that existed among staff members in the residential facilities. Media sources around the state opined about the relationship between staff “cultures” of resistance and the levels of brutality that existed in the facilities.90 At a statewide juvenile justice advisory group meeting, Carrión said, “quite frankly, in some of my facilities, I am convinced that I cannot change the culture. It is too embedded, it is a toxic environment.”91 In New York, an emphasis on strengths-­based and positive youth justice, as well as identifying youth needs, has become de rigueur among reformers. Young people are considered by this group to be a special class of offenders who have unique developmental needs that can only be supported through age-­appropriate therapeutic interventions.92 There has been a recent effort by policymakers and advocates in the state to embrace “evidence-­based practices.”93 A statewide juvenile justice task force argued that the state should “broaden the evidence-­based field by supporting and conducting evaluations of new, innovative programs that apply the principles of best practice,” arguing for the expanded funding of programs like Functional Family Therapy, a short-­ term treatment program that focuses on addressing risk and protective factors in young people charged with crimes, working with them and their families.94 Perhaps one of the most significant new reform efforts in juvenile justice systems across the country has been the introduction by state and local governments of risk assessment instruments. These tools are used by workers in the juvenile justice system to assess young people’s risk of failing to appear for their next court date, their risk of reoffending, and also their so-­called criminogenic risks and needs—­essentially the individual, social, and familial factors, from their school attendance to their family circumstances, that put them in a category of individuals who have a higher likelihood of failing to appear for court or reoffending. Risk assessment instruments have been embraced by liberal reformers as part of a broader effort to make juvenile justice systems more value-­neutral and objective and to eliminate what was perceived by many to be a gaping problem in these systems—­racial bias by police, probation officers, judges, and prosecutors—­who were using their own discretion to make decisions about whether a young person should be detained. Efforts to analyze young people’s riskiness have emerged out of developmental psychology. Psychologists in particular have argued that young people charged with crimes possess characteristics that have compromised their positive development.95 Risk factors may include mental health problems, a lack of stable relationships and community ties, and dysfunctional family backgrounds.96 The criminologist David Farrington defines risk factors as “prior factors that increase the risk of occurrence of the onset, frequency, persistence,



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or duration of offending.”97 These factors have been roughly broken down into several areas: individual (both physiological and psychological), family, school, peer, community and neighborhood, and situational factors.98 The individually based factors may include low resting heart rate, hyperactivity, parental criminality, truancy, and the presence of delinquent peers.99 Macro-­ level factors include poverty and community disorganization.100 Related to these notions that offending behaviors emerge out of the conditions of poverty are the ideas of Ross and Fabiano, the early advocates of social cognition efforts aimed at offenders, who argue that poverty and an attendant lack of stimulation can cause cognitive delays.101 The Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm area of research and policy has influenced policy and practices in youth justice around the world.102 It focuses on interrupting the development of criminal careers. The criminologist John Muncie argues that “the ‘criminal career’ approach suggests that offending is part of an extended continuum of anti-­social behavior that first arises in childhood, persists into adulthood and is then reproduced in successive generations.”103 Although there is some consideration of neighborhood contexts in the research, it has been argued that it is most focused on “proximate, individual factors” as opposed to “social and structural influences.”104 Early childhood intervention programs such as Headstart are guided by the notion that investments in these interventions can prevent later engagement in offending.105 Multisystemic Family Therapy and Functional Family therapy, the “evidence-­based” practices that were recently introduced in New York, are connected to ideas about the risks that families are said to present to a young person’s offending.106 These programs were an attempt to be more meaningfully impactful in the lives of young people and their families struggling under conditions of poverty; they were aimed at doing preventative, holistic work that could make an immediate impact on the lives of these young people, assisting them in navigating a world where they would face triggering circumstances and difficulties daily. The Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm approach has been criticized on methodological, theoretical, and ethical grounds.107 Government interventions that prioritize risk factors arguably focus on only the negative qualities of young people to more fully control and classify them.108 It has been said that these strategies fail to take into account the broader social constructions of risk. The risky young people enmeshed in the youth justice system thus contrast with children who take risks in “a quest for excitement or ‘kicks.’”109 Risk factor approaches are aimed at moving juvenile justice systems to a more objective, neutral examination of children.Yet risk assessments are arguably also part of a movement toward “racial liberalism,” which roots racism in racial prejudice as opposed to identifying the ways that racism becomes embedded in social structures and institutions.110 Racial liberalism sees

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solutions to racially discriminatory practices in the apparent elimination of discretion by criminal justice system actors. Thus, by asking that system workers fill out forms about individuals accused of crimes, the results of which get tallied and used to determine someone’s eligibility for detention and interventions, individual bias is allegedly eliminated from the process of justice.Yet risk factor approaches, as criminologist Peter Kelly argues, “recod[ed] institutionally structured relations of class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability and geography as complex, but quantifiable, factors which place youth at-­r isk.”111 Risk has, in effect, become a proxy for race.112 The failure of racial liberals to realize that bias can exist in the very questions that are asked about individuals, and in how they are framed, may be a result of the arguably misguided belief that individual racial bias, rather than socially structured and historically grounded racism, has shaped the disproportionate numbers of youth of color in the juvenile justice system. Risk instruments are used as part in the juvenile justice system to decrease the numbers of young people in detention; the Annie E. Casey foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative relies on risk instruments to reduce the numbers of youth in detention. The Vera Institute of Justice was hired to develop such an instrument for use in courts across the state and has touted its effects in reducing detention numbers.113 Despite these efforts, the numbers of youth of color in detention has actually risen according to their numbers in the population.114 The use of these risk technologies fits into the criminologist Kelly Hannah-­Moffat inquiries about how “risk technologies [are] reshaped to fit with an ongoing normative ‘post-­welfare’ commitment to therapeutic interventions.”115 Custody is reserved for the so-­called bad kids; welfarist interventions are saved for the good ones. The focus is on separating the deserving from the undeserving: those young people who are said to “need” to be institutionalized are separated from those that pose the lowest risk. Anthony Bottoms describes this as the split in the punitive imagination between the dangerous and “the rest.”116 Almost none of the groups involved in advocating for change in the juvenile justice system have invoked broader claims about economic redistribution as a solution to the overpolicing and incarceration of poor youth.117 Almost all reformers have focused on developing solutions to the central need to discipline youth—­to address their offending behaviors in ways that are seemingly less punitive.Yet they start with the principle or premise that offending behavior is the problem, not the adult actors who might be engaged in creating and re-­creating reforms that have only led to the same result: the overincarceration and policing of young people of color. Since its inception, New York’s juvenile justice system has been deeply shaped by the state’s liberal elite. Although it has taken distinct and different



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turns since the country’s inception, American liberalism has been fundamentally oriented around the notion that all power should not be vested in the state and that liberty “must have resources of its own inaccessible to the state.”118 American liberals have been committed to notions of “freedom,” even if those opportunities are strongly facilitated by law and policy, as in the case of efforts to achieve racial justice in the country in the 1960s.119 Yet New York is also unique in its approach to policymaking. Its democratic process is more restricted than other states. Political scientist Vanessa Barker notes that New York’s government actors have long relied on expertise in their criminal justice policymaking in the face of “depressed democratization,” which exists because the state has a high centralization of power and low civic engagement. She argues that “because the state does not pursue democracy for its own sake, the state must show itself to be useful to maintain legitimacy . . . the state prides itself on its expertise and scientific engagement with social problems and is therefore less likely to pursue strictly punitive responses, considered crass and unscientific.”120 We see evidence of this in juvenile justice policymaking: the opinions of experts about what is right for children have long predominated in juvenile justice policymaking. Evidence-­based practices play a role in boosting the legitimacy of state policymakers who are actually seeking to change practices in favor of lightening the state’s financial burden as opposed to fundamentally redistributing wealth and resources. Although there was a period during the 1970s when the Juvenile Offender law was passed when the government moved toward a more punitive approach to a small class of young people, the interventions aimed at young offenders over the course of the state’s history have been dominated by an ethos of liberal paternalism, which the sociologist Loic Wacquant describes as “liberal and permissive at the top, with regard to corporations and the upper class, and paternalist and authoritarian at the bottom, towards those who find themselves caught between the restructuring of employment and the ebbing of social protection or its conversion into an instrument of surveillance and discipline.”121 New York’s long-­standing system of liberal-­paternalist interventionism in children’s lives has foundations in its early child-­saving institutions. The uses of paternalism have been justified on the grounds of a person’s ability to make rational choices. The philosopher Geoffrey Scarre argues that paternalism is guided by the notion that children do not have systems of purpose that adults have that justify their rights, and thus, “it does not infringe their rights to intervene in their behalf when their irrationality threatens their well-­being.”122 Today, juvenile justice reform is guided by the notion that the state’s poorest children need a tight hand to be guided into adulthood. Some scholars claim that the current punishment of young people has a neoliberal

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orientation, and thus a focus on responsibilization, the “adulteration” of penalties, and a preoccupation with risk.123 However, New York’s approach to youth justice has always been invested in child protection, moral support, guidance, and “care,” which are strongly connected to liberal New Yorkers’ interest in “saving” poor children. There are some unintended consequences of this strain of liberal-­ paternalism. Some of the historic patterns of segregation and discriminatory approaches to the offending of young people of color continue to play a role in their disproportionate involvement in the system as well as their perceptions of the fairness of “the system.”The ways that child saving was historically oriented toward deserving children in the state, and the emphasis of current reforms—­with their elevation of “low-­r isk” young people as deserving of community-­based interventions—illustrates the trends in policymaking. What if those seemingly pressing questions—­the tilt toward punishment or reform, large or small, community or institution—­are irrelevant? What if the very questions themselves, or the binaries they represent, obscure a greater project of governing young people that needs to be fundamentally challenged? What if these persistent and pressing questions have actually promoted the perennial state of reform we are in?

C hap te r 2

Ungovernability and Worth

Michael was sixteen when I met him. He had never been arrested, but most of his friends had. Growing up in the Bronx as a black teenager in the late 2000s, Michael had faced the near-­constant indignity of being stopped by the police for the color of his skin, his gender, and the color of the clothes he was wearing.1 The adults in his life had identified him as “bad”—­he had bounced around different schools, pushed in and out of different classrooms by teachers who didn’t like him. His parents became frustrated and angry with him about school. Yet it seemed that many of Michael’s problems at school were like those of other teenagers: he was a bit of a class clown, he swore in front of his teachers, and he was sometimes late to class. His teachers told him that he had an “attitude problem.”They told him he was lazy and that he didn’t listen.Yet Michael was bored, his schoolwork was unstimulating, and he spent a lot of time sleeping. Michael’s teachers continuously evaluated him. One of Michael’s teachers was asked to rate a range of his behavior in a school-­based risk assessment. Some of the indicators on the assessment included “Picks nose, skin or other parts of body,” to “Apathetic or unmotivated,” to “Talks too much,” to “Whining.” Michael scored poorly, for example, in the “Behaves irresponsibly,” “Secretive, keeps things to self,” and “Sleeps in class” categories. Michael wasn’t the only teenager deemed to be ungovernable and worthless. It was close to my first day on the job at the public defender’s office when one of my teenaged clients described himself to me as “bad.” Over the past ten years, I have heard teenagers in trouble with the law use this word over and over and over again: “I was a bad kid,” “I was bad in school,” “I was bad, real bad.” It took some time before I fully understood the symbolism of these expressions of badness: these words weren’t necessarily reflective of young people’s actual behavior; they were the ways that they had been described by their parents, their teachers, juvenile facility staff and corrections officers, psychologists, social workers, and judges. These were other people’s words, other people’s condemnations. These designations are calcified through the records and forms that are linked to young people, from the Individualized Education Programs required 33

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for Special Education students, to psychiatric assessments, to child welfare reports. The records inform decision-­making during a criminal court case. Through the various records and assessments, many of these young people (and their parents) are characterized as being out of control. Other scholars have identified some of the ways in which these attributions of irresponsibility and dangerousness are associated more often with African American teenagers, through the public media, and by their disproportionate presence in custody, pointing to some of the racialized dimensions of these experiences.2 These characterizations may impact on the development of young people’s institutional identities, and their sense of self-­efficacy and control. Michael, like so many other teenagers I met, was suspended from school multiple times. In New York City, the school suspension process nets a substantial number of young people each year, pushing them into what some have called the “school to prison pipeline.” The school system there has more police officers than the police forces of many U.S. cities’ police departments, reflecting a national trend toward the incorporation of crime control practices into the educational environment.3 Suspensions and “pushouts” have escalated since the passage of the federal education reform No Child Left Behind in 2001, a reform that linked school funding to school achievement and has forced many young people who do not meet educational standards to be suspended and pushed out to alternative schools.4 It is possible that unmanageable teenagers are those who are actually ungovernable—­as in not able to meet the criteria for being acceptable students within the government-­ defined ideas of acceptability—­in the era of high-­stakes testing. Michael was a talented dancer when he was a teenager, well known on the streets for his skills. He is a tall, handsome young man and a stylish dresser. When I first met him, he said that he wanted to model and aspired to go to college. Like many teenagers, he balanced the demands of girls, friends, and family in a way that often dissatisfied the adults in his life—­they thought he wasn’t focused enough on his schoolwork and his future. Michael is a people-­ pleaser: he is friends with teenagers from different and sometimes opposing gangs and cliques in his neighborhood and with different generations of people. He knew many other people in his neighborhood, in part because his great aunt was a powerful presence there. Her apartment became a convening spot for Michael’s many cousins and family members. Michael said that his great aunt was probably the only person who thought he “was going to be something and still does.” Yet Michael and many of his friends had no access to fulfilling jobs. They grew up in an era when transformations in the global economy that occurred in the 1960s had a significant impact on their lives. These changes resulted in a significant loss in the manufacturing jobs that in many cases had drawn their grandparents and relatives to live in New York from the American South,



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Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, among other places.5 They lived in a world where they and their parents found it nearly impossible to find a job with a living wage, let alone a fulfilling one.6 The primary jobs available to Michael were either low-­paying positions at places like McDonald’s, where some of his friends worked, or the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, a lottery-­based system that provided minimum wage work over the summer. Kids like Michael turned to play as an alternative to employment. The scholar Robin D. G. Kelley argues that dance, art, sports, and music have offered many young people of color from cities like New York “more immediate opportunities for entrepreneurship and greater freedom from unfulfilling wage labor” in the context of this recently transforming global economy.7 It was no surprise that Michael couldn’t find many places to hang out with his friends besides his great aunt’s house. Youth programs in New York City faced severe funding cuts in the late 1990s under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani—­ between 1994 and 1997, the New York City Youth Bureau lost nearly half of its annual budget.8 By the time Michael was a teenager, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in office, afterschool programs also faced significant cuts. After the federal education program No Child Left Behind was implemented, New York City schools, under pressure to bring children up to grade level in reading and math, cut arts, music, and other enrichment programs.9 Thus, Michael and other young people had few opportunities to engage in programming in their schools or their neighborhoods that would enable them to cultivate their aspirations and skills. Adult judgments about the worth and virtue of teenagers also influenced the choices that they made about the kinds of interventions they used with them. Teachers, school administrators, child welfare and foster care workers and other government agents had assessed the worth and virtue of many young people I met as “good” or “bad” teenagers before they even entered the juvenile justice system. One teenager, Marcus, said he had been described as having a “bad attitude” when he was in school and that he was placed on a unit for the “bad” kids when he was in detention. Other young people used the identical expression, “bad attitude,” to describe their behavior in school. Some would more overtly speak about the way they had been misunderstood, like Khalil, who spoke about his early experiences in school in this way: “They said I was a real angry child—­an aggressive child—­cause I always wanted to fight.” Khalil was psychiatrically hospitalized and placed into a school for children with mental health problems. He spoke about what he called the “anger management” classes he took there, where he was taught “how to count to ten, and stuff that I didn’t need to know.” He was later arrested and placed in a secure residential center. I did not see these assessments as straightforward examples of labeling theory in action—­or the idea that a negative attribution or label can alter an individual’s self-­concept and potentially lead to deviant

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behavior.10 Although the young people would use the words “bad” to describe themselves, when pressed, they knew these were other people’s labels, not their own. Furthermore, these adult assessments of young people did not necessarily turn young people to crime. Instead, they created clearer pathways or conduits for young people’s entry into the criminal justice system: they became the evidence on which claims about their worthiness for staying in or out of the system lay, particularly when a teenager ultimately had to face a judge.11 These assessments of worth also seemed to be particular to the generation of teenagers that I met—­all born during the early and mid-­1990s in New York into impoverished, mainly African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican families, and primarily young men. They were born in New York City at the height of the War on Drugs and at the beginning of a policing and welfare revolution that would have deep and largely negative impacts on their lives and well-­being—­most importantly for their opportunity to access institutions that could foster their growth and development, not prevent them. In the early 1990s, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani supported the New York City Police Department (NYPD) in implementing the “broken windows” policing strategy, which was aimed at arresting individuals for low-­level misdemeanor offenses and addressing crimes that were seen to impact on the quality of life of New York City residents, such as graffiti on the subways and turnstile jumping.12 This was a generation that would ultimately become criminalized in ways that were distinct from other periods in U.S. history; in this new era, their criminalization was linked to their ability to demonstrate deference and self-­control as opposed to being explicitly linked to their identity as young people of color. It was arguably an expression of a new era of “colorblind racism” in that these demands for deference were not overtly racialized or identified as racialized projects to control children of color.13 Instead, young people of color like Michael found that in their schools and everyday lives, they were asked to submit to regimes of control that demanded their “self-­control” in language that was race-­neutral. Governability for these young people arguably meant participation in the white behavioral status quo. The 1990s also marked the beginning of an unprecedented crime drop in New York City, falling 72 percent from 1988 to 2008.14 Yet the early lives of Michael and his peers were still marked by living in high crime and highly policed communities. Even though homicide rates dropped during the 1990s, some communities, including Harlem and the Bronx, continued to have consistently high gun-­related homicide rates. Individuals in these communities also saw countless numbers of their fathers, brothers, sisters and mothers sent to prison: at a think tank convened by individuals incarcerated at Green Haven prison in upstate New York in the 1990s, the inmate researchers found that 75 percent of the people incarcerated in prison in New York came from just seven neighborhoods in New York City.15 Michael and his friends all knew



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someone who had been sent “upstate,” the term for prisons located outside of New York City. Michael’s own father had spent time in jail.16 While their older cousins, siblings, parents, aunts, and uncles were being arrested at high rates during their very early childhoods, Michael and his friends lived at home with parents who faced a new and harsh reality: life-­ altering welfare reforms which resulted in significant cuts to cash benefits, and mandated that their parents actively seek work to obtain food stamps and other benefits. Although the federal welfare reforms of 1996 reduced the total number of people dependent on welfare, they had numerous untold consequences: for children whose parents weren’t working or couldn’t work, the welfare reforms forced them into deeper poverty. By the early 2000s, Michael’s mother became homeless, and he went to live with his father. The families of young people like Michael also faced scrutiny by child welfare workers convinced that Michael and his friends were “crack babies,” a now-­discounted phenomenon, but a term used countless times by the teachers, foster care, and child welfare workers I met. The science discounting the existence of crack babies had clearly not found its way to the corridors of the welfare offices and the schools; teachers and workers were convinced that what they saw as skyrocketing instances of hyperactivity among children were the results of drug use during pregnancy, not necessarily the effects of living in poverty, attending impoverished schools, being exposed to community-­level violence, or even the inclination of school social workers and psychologists to overdiagnose children of color with such disorders.17 When Michael was sixteen, just as he had begun to hone his skills as a dancer and an athlete, a SWAT team shoved down his family’s apartment door in the early hours of the morning, arresting Michael and his father and charging them with selling drugs. Michael spent the night in jail with his father but was released after the police realized they had arrested him by mistake. As a result of his father’s arrest, the child welfare authorities got involved with the family, seeking to remove Michael’s younger siblings. Just a few weeks later, Michael was stopped by police as he walking from his house to his great aunt’s house. The police claimed that they saw him with a gun, but when they arrested him, they couldn’t find one. Regardless, Michael was charged with gun possession. Michael’s sweet demeanor and personality, his athletic and creative talents, were never taken into account by the judge whom he had to face. From Michael’s point of view, the judge saw him as a young black man from a predominantly black neighborhood, ultimately ungovernable, despite the fact that he was just sixteen years old and had never been arrested before. He said of his judge, “I think that he sees me as like a bad person or something.” Michael was remanded to Rikers Island, an adult jail where teenagers can go as soon as they turn sixteen in New York.

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When young people like Michael first enter the criminal justice system, they believe that their worth is a barometer that judges use in determining their eligibility for freedom. Others speculated that judges and prosecutors were jaded from seeing so many young people from the same neighborhoods, committing the same crimes. In many respects, these teenagers’ experiences of being labeled as “bad” kids at an early age initiated their experiences of feeling stigmatized throughout the time of their involvement in the multiple and overlapping institutions of social control. Some young people spoke about how judges, probation officers, police, and other system agents assumed that they were incorrigible and bad. The teenagers felt that judges were particularly harsh toward those who fit into their expectations of criminality. Michael saw the judge’s perceptions of him as an indictment of his identity. Other young people were similarly influenced by their perception of what court actors thought of them, or at least their interpretation of their actions. They didn’t need to have read the latest policy reports or newspaper articles illuminating the ways that racism exists in the criminal justice system, or detailing the high rates of incarceration among young black males, or exposing the school to prison pipeline—­they lived these things. They also lived in a world where it cost as little as $50 to buy a gun on the street and where friends would ask friends—­especially those without a criminal record, like Michael or a girlfriend—­to hold onto the guns for them. Michael had a lot of friends who had guns, and he wasn’t about to turn them in, despite pressure to do so from his prosecutor, because, as he told me, “snitches get stitches.” Michael was also arrested shortly after the black American football player Plaxico Burress was sentenced to two years in prison after accidentally discharging a gun in a Manhattan nightclub; prosecutors and judges across New York saw Burress’s sentence as an effective “message” to all individuals possessing a gun in New York: there would be no mercy at sentencing in gun cases.18 Time and time again, I spoke with young people whose experiences in schools, in mental health and child welfare institutions, and with the police and punitive authorities left them despairing for their chances of getting out of the system. The people they spoke about had the power to identify them as unworthy, and they had little power to control that characterization. For Michael and other young men of color living in poverty in New York City and upstate urban communities like Poughkeepsie, Syracuse, and Troy, their gender and their race marked them as suspicious to the police and other state authorities—­they inhabited the role of “criminalblackman.”19 Although not always accorded the same suspicion as their male counterparts, girls of color—­especially those who engaged in violent offending—­found themselves similarly pushed to the deep end of the system after they were arrested. The intersections of race, class, and gender in this group of young people’s lives, and in the assessments of their worth by state actors, were profound. Legal



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scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that we must always consider the ways that race, class, and gender identities intersect to create unique forms of oppression and privilege, and that we cannot untangle one category of identify from the other. Attributions of ungovernability and worthiness were in themselves linked to young people’s race, gender, and class identities and shaped the ways that young people were responded to by state actors. The white teenagers I met in the juvenile justice system were overwhelmingly from deeply impoverished and rural or suburban backgrounds. I met just five white teenagers inside of juvenile facilities during the course of my research. With one exception, all were from poor rural communities in upstate New York or the impoverished suburbs of Long Island, and all spent time in the child welfare and mental health systems before entering the juvenile justice system.20 Few white teenagers enter custody, and when they do, they are often there because their custodial sentence is seen as a last resort by judges and other officials who have sent them to all other forms of placement—­ therapeutic foster homes, hospitals, and private residential treatment. Although the facility staff members were no less likely to describe the white youth as “bad,” they more often saw white youth as troubled, rather than troublesome. Being troubled did not necessarily exempt the young person from being considered ungovernable or worthless, however. The mental health unit at Hooper juvenile facility had disproportionately high numbers of white youth compared with the rest of the facility during the time I was there. One of those young people, who was from a rural town and whose parents were both incarcerated, had spent time in countless other mental health and juvenile facilities across the state. The staff at Hooper felt that he should not be there and that he should be at a facility designated for mentally ill or even developmentally disabled youth. But the state agencies responsible for those young people systematically rejected him: they said he had exhibited too much violence, too much impulsivity, and he had no family supports. It is arguable that his whiteness allowed him access to the privileges of such assessments, but his poverty and his “badness” made him unworthy of such help. Girls have a complex relationship with such designations of worth. We know that in many respects poor women—­and especially women of color—­ were the touchstone of the welfare reforms of the 1990s. They were both the enemy and the aim of such interventions.21 Their children, the teenagers I interviewed, were born and raised into a world where their mothers were scrutinized and stigmatized by state agencies. During the 1990s, unprecedented numbers of children were removed from their drug-­using mothers and placed into foster care, often with grandparents but sometimes with their father or even strangers. If the kids were older when a neglect charge was filed against their parents, they were placed into group homes. This was true for a number of the young people I met while doing the research and for countless

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numbers of my teenage clients. As the children of mothers who were seen as unworthy of assistance from the state, the young women grew up with complex ideas about what life should be like as young women in the world that was tied to their mothers’ ability to parent them. Genevieve was sixteen, Michael’s age, when I met her. She was a serious, strong-­minded, and commanding young woman. In a way, my interactions with her were highly marked by how she saw me—­another white lady entering her life and asking her a lot of questions, like so many social workers and state officials before me. Yet in her responses, I learned a great deal about the frustrations of young people faced with an onslaught of individuals fascinated by their dysfunction.22 Genevieve’s father went to prison when she was young; she vividly remembered the night that he was arrested, asking him, “Daddy, where are you going?” Her mother raised her and her two older siblings. She knew her father was incarcerated but didn’t know where he was locked up. This was in part because of her dislocated childhood; she had gone in and out of foster homes, finally landing in a group home when she was fourteen. Like many young people, Genevieve was removed from her home after child welfare authorities were notified when she and her siblings stopped attending school regularly. This educational neglect accusation prompted further investigation into her family’s life, and she and her siblings were taken away from their mom, separated, and placed into different homes.23 Like many parents who have had their children taken away from them, Genevieve’s mother was caught in a punishing trap—­living in a homeless shelter for single women with no income, yet obligated to prove that she could find a home large enough for Genevieve and her two siblings. The only way her mother could get her children back was if she could find a job that paid enough for her to put a deposit down on an apartment large enough for her family and have adequate cash in the bank to pay the monthly rent. No shelter for families would accept her without her family. Genevieve spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals. While she was at the group home, she was arrested for punching another girl in the face.24 The judge in her case initially sent her to a psychiatric hospital to be assessed. She remembers being the only black person in the courthouse—­her group home was located in a predominantly white community. After leaving the psychiatric hospital, she was sentenced to placement by her judge to Marshall, a girls’ secure juvenile facility in upstate New York. When I met her at Marshall, Genevieve was a self-­described bad kid. She said “I’m a bitch” and “I’m stubborn.” When I asked her how she came to think these things about herself, she, like so many others, said, “They tell me I’m stubborn and I’m a brat.” The “they” encompassed all of the state officials and mental health treatment professionals she had encountered throughout



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her life. While at Marshall, Genevieve was put on an Egregious Behavior Protocol, a cognitive behavioral therapy intervention originally used in children’s psychiatric hospitals, twelve times in a period of a few short months. Like many teenagers, Genevieve said that she “didn’t care” about this in a way that signaled that she cared quite a bit. These young people knew what it was like to be designated as unworthy of mercy before they even entered the criminal justice system. As the children of parents who had themselves been punished, either through incarceration or the child and social welfare system, they were intimately familiar with the dark pall the system cast over their lives.When they arrived at school, many of these young people were deemed too difficult to handle, too obstreperous or oppositional to their mainly white middle-­class teachers, and engaged in too risky behavior in the street—­or at least in enough incivilities to deem them intervenable by the state. Yet could it have been that it was the individuals making the accusations against them who shaped the boundaries of their worthiness of mercy and assistance? Or that the punishing conditions of life in the world where more money was spent to incarcerate their father than on a single year of public benefits and public education might actually shape their decisions to, in Michael’s case, skip school, or in Genevieve’s case, punch another girl in her foster care placement? What happened when they entered the criminal justice system itself? Approaches to juvenile justice have evolved over time toward a greater acceptance that adolescents have diminished responsibility for criminal offending. Advocates have instead embraced developmental approaches, which seek to accept that offenders are still developing into adulthood. Many judges, advocates, and others will talk about treating children as children. However, the actions of these individuals, including teachers, police, judges, prosecutors, and system representatives sometimes convey assessments and condemnations of children’s moral worth. They also still emphasize the accountability and responsibility of young people for their behaviors.25 This is revealed in young people’s use of the word “bad” to describe themselves and their feeling of condemnation by those actors; young people’s words strongly convey the meanings that have been transmitted to them throughout their lives about their worth. The actions of the adults in the juvenile justice system charged with designing and implementing interventions against young people often contradict their spoken philosophy of caring for children. It was these ironies that I pointed to when I described the ways that ostensibly liberal reforms often conceal the potential experiences of oppression that young people feel in a system aimed at their growth and development yet ultimately more concerned with care expressed as a form of control. The actions of the adult system actors often demarcate the differences between themselves (virtuous individuals who possess the moral worth to

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treat, punish, and condemn youth who have violated the law) and the youth themselves—­the bad kids (predominantly black and Latina/o teenagers) who are in need of interventions to facilitate their change. As such, many of the adults I observed projected a kind of moral indignation about the young people’s actions, albeit in ways that were tempered by references to young people’s youth and arguably inoculated those actors against critique.26 The actions by adult actors toward children in the juvenile justice and criminal justice system nationally and in New York involve assessments of children’s risk of rearrest and reoffending through the use of actuarial tools that assess the riskiness of young people, their participation and progress in school, and their parents’ employment and relative ability to care for them.Their assessments of young people’s demeanor and behavior treat teenagers and their parents as deeply responsible for the routes that led them into the system. Young people themselves can see and feel this. In fact, they’ve become quite accustomed to it from an early age, as children of parents on welfare who have been scrutinized by the child welfare, social security, and other poverty program authorities. Parents would sometimes say to me that the information they had to share in an intake assessment for their child in probation, an alternative to incarceration program, or residential treatment, was the same information they had shared at a welfare center or a foster care office. They would express a kind of resignation about needing to give up such personal, intimate information about themselves, yet through this they also taught me that the institutions of social welfare and punishment were often indistinguishable in their minds. Under present-­day welfare and poverty management regimes, individuals are assessed through their ability to exercise rational choices that are generally directed toward participation in the capitalist marketplace.Young people who are idle and who rob people instead of bag groceries, who play around in the hallways of school rather than sit silently in the classroom and raise their hands, or whose parents choose to sit at home and watch television rather than apply for a job at McDonald’s can be deemed unworthy by those authorities. They are, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman puts it, “flawed consumers” who must ultimately face social exclusion for their failure to participate effectively in the capitalist marketplace.27 Worth in the Court s In the initial stages of young people’s involvement in the system, assessments about their worth are made by judges, who determine whether they will let them out into the community into a program or on probation. Michael wasn’t so lucky at first; the judge in his case sent him directly to jail, without giving him a chance to stay out in the community and prove himself. When young people are adjudicated as juvenile delinquents, like Genevieve was, they



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are given risk assessments by probation officers; these risk assessments are used to guide a judge’s decision making about whether to detain a young person. Teenagers are considered “high risk” if the offense they are charged of is relatively severe, if they have a prior offense history, if they have a history of going AWOL, and if they have poor school attendance.28 The apparatus of alternatives to detention and incarceration, which based agencies, probation and parole includes a network of community-­ offices, drug treatment programs, social workers, caseworkers, and advocates, is one legacy of the prison decarceration movement of the 1970s and 1980s which took place in New York and in other states across the country. As prisbased ons, juvenile facilities, and mental hospitals closed and community-­ alternatives to those institutions opened, some have argued that there may have in fact been a greater numbers of individuals who came under control of community-­based agencies of social control, simply by virtue of living in communities where there was such a proliferation of control.29 Most recently, local authorities, including probation agencies in New York, have begun to use new technologies, such as electronic monitoring of young people charged with crimes; these new technologies signal a new era of social control that raise considerable questions about the ubiquity of such forms of control in people’s everyday lives.30 These sites of control may also force more individuals into places where their worthiness for citizenship is assessed. In New York City in particular, it is common for judges and other court actors to create highly structured service plans for young people charged with crimes, both pre-­and postconviction or adjudication. In each case, there are a range of individuals who are involved in a case, including defense attorneys, prosecutors, alternative-­to-­incarceration program representatives, probation officers, and judges. These individuals are all involved in determining the supervisory arrangements for young people if they have been released from detention as well as their fate if they fail to do well in an alternative-­to-­ incarceration program. The consequences they face in failing to meet a highly structured set of rules are serious, as illustrated in this New York judge’s admonition to a young person charged as a Juvenile Offender in his courtroom: you are getting this break, but I promise you that if you slip up on this case, I guarantee you I will sentence you to the maximum that I can. And you’re very young to be doing three and a third to ten years, but that’s exactly what I’ll do. So if you really learned your lesson, learning that lesson is going to include one hundred percent compliance with the terms of this agreement. You are not going to cut school. You are not going to be using any drugs. I am going to have you tested to see that you’re drug free. There will be a curfew in place every day of the week. Your life is going to change quite a bit from this day forward so that you can walk

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freely out this door. If you slip up, I am going to send you away for the maximum. Okay? If you don’t slip up, you may get out of this without being a felon.31 The court governs a young person’s process of putative self-­determination by mandating programs of self-­improvement. If a teenager exercises her potential for self-­improvement, then she avoids the lengthy sentences that are at the judges’ disposal. One judge who presided over the cases of a number of young people spoke about his desire to create a courtroom “where the atmosphere is such that the presiding judge would be able to recognize and respond to the salvageable youth.”32 Young people are arguably uniquely salvageable or capable of worth because they are still malleable. The court interventions are particularly tailored for individuals who aren’t yet adults, but in the process of becoming them in ways that are central to their role as social citizens.33 For example, in New York, young people charged as adults who have mitigation in their offense are eligible to receive “Youthful Offender” treatment, which allows them to have a clean record after they have completed their sentences. For those young people in New York who are given a chance to stay out of detention or to do an alternative-­to-­incarceration program, they participate in a number of different programs based in the community. In New York City, there are a relatively high number of nonprofit alternative-­to-­incarceration programs specifically oriented toward young people. In upstate communities, there are far fewer, particularly for young people charged as adults; there, probation is often the key agency providing services or contracting them out. A significant number of teenagers in New York are given an opportunity to participate in a community-­based alternative-­to-­incarceration program, either while their case is pending (instead of waiting in detention) or as an alternative-­to-­incarceration: in 2006, for example, only 13 percent of juvenile delinquents statewide were sentenced to placement, and 32 percent received a sentence of probation.34 For the teenagers charged as “Juvenile Offenders” in New York City in 2008, approximately half were remanded to custody after they were arraigned, and more than 60 percent were ultimately kept out of custody upon conviction.35 Slam, like Michael, grew up in a heavily policed and predominantly black neighborhood. Both of his parents spent time in and out of prison, and he was raised by his grandparents. Unlike Michael, who was relatively new to the criminal justice system, Slam had been arrested several times and had been in and out of detention. When I asked him about his experience with the police, he said that police assume “most black people [like him] do bad things.” Slam’s words reveal his recognition of the salience of the “criminalblackman” status that he inhabited in the minds of the police. After being arrested as an



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adult at age fifteen for possessing a gun, Slam spent some time in detention, and then a judge gave him a chance to participate in a program. Slam was obligated to attend the program in person at least a few times a week, receive regular drug tests, get counseling and treatment, and have curfew monitoring. Workers from the alternative programs report on a young person’s progress at their court dates. If young people fail to meet these requirements in the pre-­ pleading period or during probation, they will face a period of detention, they will have their probation revoked and could be sentenced to custody or placed in a residential drug treatment program. The workers at Slam’s program frequently found him to be “noncompliant”: he failed to go to school and meet his curfew. After repeated mistakes in the program, he was ultimately sentenced to time in residential custody. A psychiatrist evaluated him for court after he had failed in the program and noted that he should develop “measures to address his noncompliant behavior, some impulsivity, poor judgment, and his poor ability to cope with stressors.” The only evidence of his “noncompliance” provided was his problem with school attendance and meeting his curfew. This report, along with Slam’s failures in his program, were used as the basis for the judge’s decision to send him to placement. His personal limitations and failings in the program, and in the mind of the psychiatrist, are perhaps seen as indicative of his capacity for self-­ control, compliance, and deference to authority. After violating his probation, Slam was sentenced to placement in a small juvenile facility in rural upstate New York, in the middle of predominately white hunting, fishing, and farming country. The facility, where there were a number of layoffs during the time I spent there, offered some of the best jobs in the area. A number of local residents had staked their claims on the hope that hydrofracking might expand to the region, part of the Marcellus Shale, but so far none of their hopes had come true as Governor Cuomo held off on allowing fracking to occur. Life at the facility was tense as staff members worried about job loss and security. The residents complained to me that the staff members took out their anger on them, often in a racialized way.They felt that staff targeted black and Latino kids for harsher punishment than the white kids and were stricter with them about small behavioral rules, like keeping their shirts tucked into their pants. Before going there, Slam was evaluated by a probation officer, who noted that “the probationer felt there was nothing more to say on behalf of himself because he felt the Judge has already made up her mind to put him in placement.” Not only was Slam deemed to be unworthy of a second chance, he had accepted his designation and punishment in a defeatist way. The other young people I met in custody spoke about their experiences of being deemed unworthy for any kind of mercy—­even if just an expression of humanity or recognition by their judges and lawyers—­after making

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their own worst mistake. I regularly met with a small group of young men at Hooper secure residential center, a facility reserved for teenagers charged with serious and violent felonies under New York’s Juvenile Offender law, which allowed them to receive adult convictions and adult time. That group was made up entirely of black and Latino teenagers. They were all born during the 1990s and were just a little older than Michael, Genevieve, and Slam. Tony, a bookish, self-­contained young man who often kept to himself and who had aspirations to go to college and become a lawyer, had been sentenced to fifteen years to life for a homicide. He said that he knew that a judge might simply look at which neighborhood he came from and his race (black), and make a simple assessment about his worthiness for mercy; he knew that by receiving the maximum possible sentence he could have received that mercy was not extended to him. It wasn’t until years later when I learned the charges against him—­he had killed a member of his family—­that his comments came into relief. This was a young man who, although he committed a heinous act, knew that he was only seen as a cold and calculating sociopath, not as an individual whose act may in fact be suggestive of a complex life history that may deserve further and deeper consideration and investigation. The tabloid newspaper accounts of his case corroborated this characterization. Smitty, another young black man in the group at Hooper, came from an impoverished upstate rust-­belt town. He said he thought that all a judge did was look at his rap sheet, the reputation of his neighborhood, and his race, then made a simple and negative determination about his fate.The young men reasoned that the judges in their cases might have become jaded because they saw so many young black men appear before them, in case after case, from the same neighborhoods.36 Community-­base d A sse ssm e nt s of Worth Almost all of the young people I interviewed were charged as adults. In New York City, the vast majority of younger teenagers charged as Juvenile Offenders—­80 percent in 2008—­were charged with robbery. Close to 80 percent of sixteen-­and seventeen-­year-­olds in New York are arrested and charged with robbery.37 Assessments of a young person’s worthiness for treatment and help, as opposed to punishment, were vexed—­these were young people charged with serious crimes, but there was also a recognition that many of the robberies they engaged in were done in groups, with other teenagers, and thus may be indicative of the kinds of risky, peer-­driven behavior in which many teenagers engage. Billy had this experience of being analyzed and assessed for his worthiness and salvageability after he was charged with committing a robbery. After he was arrested, the judge sent him to detention for some time, but eventually released him so he could participate in an alternative-­to-­incarceration



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program. He described this as a time while the judge “like wait and observe and see like my behavior,” and that “basically he [the judge] put the ball in my hand trying to see if I could hold it and not give it back.” The judges, alternative-­to-­incarceration program workers, and probation officers envisioned a young person who would be buffered from the allure of a deviant lifestyle by the intense array of supervisory tactics that were created for them. The court actors sought to help young people become more responsible by requiring them to call in for curfew, attend school, and pass drug tests. The implicit understanding of these adults seemed to be that the more services a young person was engaged in, and thus the more points of contact and surveillance by the system, the more likely they were to stay out of trouble. Yet the expectations set by the adult actors and the various contact points that these actors laid out for these teenagers were actually out of step with how they could achieve the expectations. Malcolm, also sixteen years old, was released from court and allowed to participate in a community-­based program after he was arrested for a robbery. After Malcolm failed to go to school, call in for curfew, or engage in services at his alternative-­to-­incarceration program, his caseworker reported that Malcolm was making the “wrong choices” and that he needed to be reminded by the judge of the “consequences he is facing if he continues to make wrong choices.” In response to repeated frustrations voiced by the court advocate and by Malcolm’s guardian about Malcolm’s behavior, the judge sent him to jail to try to “wake him up.” The reform process that is envisioned here is one in which Malcolm’s full participation in services is the only possible way to measure his change and in which the deprivation that jail time inflicts is seen as a kind of antidote to his resistance to change. The expression used in the courts for this term of temporary detention is “therapeutic tune-­up,” although the law requires judges to have a legal reason for incarcerating someone. One way that the differences in worth between young people and adults was arguably symbolized was through the adults’ assiduous record-­keeping about young people’s behaviors. Staff in alternative-­to-­incarceration programs monitored young people’s school attendance, the times they arrived and left school, when they were at home, their alcohol and drug consumption (through frequent drug testing), their friendships and associations, and their participation in mental health and doctor’s appointments.38 Prosecutors and police were known to monitor the Facebook and Twitter pages of young people they deemed to be suspicious, and a New York City Police Department unit called the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program started checking in on young people who had open robbery cases, including going to their schools to find out if they were attending them. The interventions used with young people charged with crimes assume that change occurs in these young people’s lives as a result of the interventions.

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Yet it remains an empirical question as to whether “change” occurs at all. In her book about juvenile drug courts, sociologist Leslie Paik has argued that notions of “accountability” used in these courts do not necessarily translate into a reduction in drug use but more often fit in with drug court staff members’ notions of “responsible” citizenship.39 Ironically, Slam’s repeated failures to participate in school and follow the rules of the judge, not his reoffending, pushed the judge to sentence him to time in a juvenile facility in upstate New York. The psychiatrist who evaluated Slam noted that “. . . it appears that to some degree, the respondent’s most problematic recent behavior is related to school attendance and open disregard of the Court’s directives.” The judge felt that Slam was unworthy of a continuing chance to stay at home because he couldn’t exercise the requisite self-­control and responsibility set by the court. When young people couldn’t successfully demonstrate their ability to participate in community-­based programs and parole—­when they engaged in both the “bad” or unworthy behavior that would mark them as unsuccessful program participants—­judges would sentence them to time inside of juvenile facilities or prisons. It was there that their badness transformed in a way that would have serious consequences for their sense of self-­worth and ultimately their chance to be recognized as citizens on the outside of custody. Inside Jail and R e si de nt i al Fac i l i t i e s Michael spent several months on Rikers Island, including in solitary confinement, before his family bailed him out. Teenage boys are sent to a facility on Rikers called the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC); girls are sent to a facility known informally as Rosie’s, or formally as the Rose M. Singer Center.You didn’t have to travel far in New York City to hear about the reputation of RNDC. It was notorious for its violence, both inmate-­on-­inmate and guard-­on-­inmate. In late 2009, the rate of serious injuries against young people was four times higher than any of the adult facilities on Rikers.40 On nearly every visit I made to see my young male clients at Rikers Island, they cried as they talked about their desire to be released; sometimes I asked them if they wanted to be placed in protective custody (PC), but PC offered no respite from the horrific conditions of confinement in an outdated jail that was never warm or cool enough and whose staff relied on a famous “program” that involved deputizing teenage inmates to manage their peers.41 The practice of deputization of young people by staff was practiced openly in the institutions, and seen as partially essential for the maintenance of order, as young people far outnumber staff.42 In October 2008, an eighteen-­ year-­old, Christopher Robinson, was beaten to death by guards on the island. Almost everyone who had a family member or friend at Rikers knew about Christopher Robinson. Less than a year after Robinson’s death, Michael was



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remanded to the island by his judge. Michael described his emotions after he entered the facility: A: When you were in jail, did you feel unsafe? M: Yeah. A: Did you feel like those parts of yourself that you just talked about, do you

feel like you had to hide some of them? M: I had to change my whole mentality. A: What did you become? M: I had to be the way the judge looks at me. Inside there.43

Expressions of “badness” in custody may be one means of securing respect among their peers and protecting their self-­esteem, as suggested in the work of other scholars who have studied these forms of badness among impoverished young men.44 However, Michael’s self-­awareness about his performance of badness also suggests his attempts to manage his fear and anxiety about his personal safety and his loss of control upon entering custody may not be a straightforward expression of his culture but rather an example of his adjustment to the structural conditions that are created by warehousing thousands of young people deemed unworthy of social uplift and support. He had to become bad because that was the expectation by both the guards and the other inmates. Michael found that being bad in custody enabled him to survive inside custody but also, in some ways, to fulfill the role of badness that had been established for him and his peers on Rikers Island. Many of the teenagers at RNDC were fulfilling the expectations of those who oppressed them, even if they did not do it consciously. At a meeting I attended for advocates to speak to corrections officials about conditions of confinement, Martin Horn, the now-­former commissioner of the New York City jails, spoke about what he described as the adolescent culture of brutality and gang violence. His consistent message throughout his tenure, in response to data that suggested that there were higher rates of assault in the teenage jails, was that teenagers were inherently worse than adults and that “disputes among adolescents develop and escalate more rapidly than among adults.”45 Among the solutions he proposed included the addition of more surveillance cameras and higher levels of staff as well as the ability to do lockdowns. He also recognized publicly that idleness contributed to conflict and proposed adding more cultural and educational programming to the jails. In the process, the commissioner repeated an oft-­cited idea about teenagers: that they are greater risk-­takers, more hotheaded, and quicker to anger than adults. Yet in the meeting I attended and in a number of other contexts, Commissioner Horn tended to absolve adults of any responsibility for the forms of

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violence that occur behind bars as a result of the conditions of confinement, including the staff practices of violence and containment. He also failed to acknowledge the fact that 90 percent of inmates at Rikers Island were black and Latina/o, and that they were controlled by corrections officers who were overwhelmingly black and Latina/o themselves.46 Implicit in his discussion about “bad kids,” then, was an acknowledgment by him and his audience members alike that these were “other people’s children.” Although the white commissioner never made it explicit, everyone he spoke to in the largely white policy audiences knew that he was talking about the need to control black and Latina/o teenagers, and he was asking his largely black and Latina/o staff to do it. Michael had some protection while he was in Rikers because he had a family member who worked there who was watching out for him.47 But it didn’t make the experience any less scary for him. He described what he saw as the “big bad wolf act” that young people engaged in: A: What did people do to put on the big bad wolf act, like what ways do M: A: M: A: M: A: M:

they act? They try to take what you have, like take your phone calls, take your stuff, fight you for it, lots of things. Like predators kind of? Yeah. Did you feel like that was mandatory for survival there? Mmhmm [indicating yes]. What happens to the guys who don’t participate in that? They just get picked on, all they stuff tooken, and get bullied.

Like many young people in detention at Rikers Island, Michael never received a visit from his lawyer, nor did he learn when his case would be resolved. He did not even know when he was going to be bailed out by his family, who promised him they would: M: I was just like, I was thinking like, my life is over, so, I might as well just

get my GED [General Equivalency Diploma], and I was just honestly like when I was in there I was thinking like I’ll probably get out of here in the next three and a half years, life is over for me, me, I’ll probably be like twenty-­two, twenty-­one so I’m just might as well just be a BA.48 A: What’s a BA? M: Bad ass. A:   . . . yeah. M: I couldn’t think of nothing I could do, like to get myself out of the situation, to keep going, so. I didn’t finish high school or nothing.



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A: Yeah, I can understand that. It’s like, what else can you do? M: I’d gave up.

Michael links his decision to become a “bad ass” to his loss of hope. His decision is thus a choice to both “give up,” take the plea offered to him in his case (of three and a half years in state prison) and also an assumption of a new self-­representation, one that is marked for survival. He acknowledges that this identification with badness is a performance; however; becoming a “bad ass” is a choice to become a jail archetype. Michael expressed resignation about the status that he saw as so linked up with incarceration—­one that was the antithesis of what he saw he might become on the outside, a college-­educated, artistic, and athletic young man. A mutually reinforcing process of fear and predation occurred in the institutions where eliminating one’s fears was seen to be accomplished by inspiring fear in others. Unworthiness thus correlates with a transformation in one’s self-­identification that can have powerful and violent consequences. Like Michael, other young people performed badness in confinement. They connected these performances to the maintenance of their safety, to the preservation of respect, and to the acquisition of privileges and relief from some of the pains of confinement.The words used by young people to describe these performances—­“masquerading” and “fronting”—­suggest the self-­awareness that is involved in these performances. Described by young people as “being bad,” these performances were most frequently enacted by young men and were forms of self-­representation that were respected (or at least feared) by peers. In many respects, these young men were displaying what has been called a form of hegemonic masculinity—­dominance, power, and control over others through strength, the defense of respect, and one’s hardness.49 What I found was that these young men engaged in forms of “being bad” that were both resistant to and arguably in line with the expectations of institutional staff and the individuals like Commissioner Martin Horn who ruled over those staff. “Being bad” was thus a response to being designated as bad and ungovernable; it was a symptom rather than a cause of the violence the young people experienced.50 It was an embodied response to being identified as bad. A number of the teenagers I met whom police and other court actors considered to be aficionados of the jail life were in fact a great deal more cynical about the hardening potential of jail than they were assumed to be. At each court appearance, the prosecutor in Billy’s case would routinely allude to Billy’s involvement in gang culture and his “hoodlum”-­like behavior to continue to plead for his incarceration over his release to a community-­based program. The prosecutor invoked stereotypes about gangs and gang life, their hardness and capacity for violence, as well as their “out-­of-­control” natures, in part to justify the continued need for Billy’s containment and incarceration.

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Yet Billy was of course a far more complex human being than the prosecutor made him out to be; although Billy was indeed engaged in the street life, his feelings about that life were deeply ambivalent. He wanted to leave the street life, and occasionally, he did. He wanted to be in a school that challenged him and valued his intelligence, but his special education classification of “Emotionally Disturbed” forced him to be rejected from three separate schools over the course of six months.While he was in detention, Billy describes it as a place that “you don’t want to be.” He said, “It’s a horrible place. It somewhere where you don’t want to be. You don’t have no say so. Somebody control, like you control yourself, like, you got other people telling you what to do so basically you’re being controlled by somebody higher when people, the COs [corrections officers] in the facility. You sleeping there, somebody go into your cell, you gotta wait to get fed, like fed when it’s time to get fed, you gotta ask to use the bathroom.” Billy was concerned about his ability to exercise self-­control and to express a form of self-­actualization. He spoke about how “it basically make you feel like you’re a caged animal. There’s no lesson to be learned from being there. It’s just, the only lesson, it is a lesson—­just don’t come back.” Michael also felt that “jail is for animals, like wild animals, like tigers or something.” Yet when Billy eventually left jail, he continued to struggle; he was under no illusion that the horrific experiences inside would actually deter him from being sucked into the life of the streets again. Contrary to some assumptions that time in jail is a “rite of passage” or source of pride for some young men from impoverished urban communities, and thus a place they may “want” to go, it was for many of these young people a time when their sense of humanity, dignity, and self-­control was challenged—­a place where they absolutely did not want to go.51 The teenagers were fearful as they faced a loss of control over their autonomy and safety. Like Billy explained, jail is rife with degradations.52 It was a deeply alienating place for young people. Some teenagers charged as adults got to escape the fate of Rikers Island and its brutality. They were instead sent to one of the many juvenile detention and residential juvenile facilities that exist across New York State. At the time I did my research, there were about twenty state facilities and quite a few privately operated, publicly contracted residential facilities located across the state. The latter included some pastoral, open campuses that looked much like private boarding schools; they didn’t have barbed wire fences or any of the typical trappings of criminal justice institutions. They often had young people who were sent there from both the juvenile justice system and the child welfare system. The juvenile facilities, on the other hand, were generally surrounded by barbed wire fences, the staff wore uniforms and had keys and walkie-­talkies, and the young people were confined to locked units. These facilities ranged from the secure centers—­where teenagers charged as adults



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went until their twenty-­first birthday—­to limited and nonsecure facilities, locked facilities that were for teenagers adjudicated as delinquents. Tory got lucky. Even though he had an adult court case, his judge allowed him to be sentenced to custody through his delinquency case, sending him to a privately operated facility in Westchester County. The sprawling campus had well-­g roomed athletic fields, small residential cottages, and large brick buildings that held the school and staff offices. In theory, this was a better placement than a secure facility because Tory would have the opportunity to do home visits, which he couldn’t do while in “secure,” and the facility at least felt and looked a little less sinister than a secure juvenile facility. For the most part, young people’s discussions about being bad in jail and prison contrasted with those about their experiences in residential centers. Billy’s mother in fact spoke about how she would prefer her other son Marcus, who had spent time in a residential facility, to go back there rather than spend his time at Rikers when he was arrested shortly after his release from the facility. Although the residential facilities were not devoid of violence—­in fact, there had been several high-­profile incidents involving fights between residents and staff assaults—­they tended to be environments marked more deeply by boredom and fatigue than the chaotic environments young people described at Rikers and in detention. Nonetheless, these were environments where “being bad” and assessments of worth continued to be salient. Assessment and record keeping also defined the day in the residential facilities, and became yet another way for adults to judge the worthiness of the young people under their care. Staff members kept copious log books of young people’s movements in and out of their units, their participation in groups and school, and in particular any behavior that was considered to be manipulative, deviant, or otherwise “bad.” Bad behavior was marked through further record keeping—­the deployment of “levels” that were essentially bad behavior slips. Staff would also engage in a weekly meeting with young people to give them a “Resident Behavior Assessment.” Some young people spoke about the ways that being “bad,” defiant, or resistant in residential facilities helped them achieve recognition from staff and other young people within institutions. Being “bad” helped them to maintain a reputation among their peers and staff, allowing them more attention and resources. Tory described this as “juice,” or a kind of power: T:   . . . in [name of detention center] and all these other secure facilities, you

gotta be bad to get what you want. A: Really? T: Be bad, staff will go to look at you and they’ll like, if you bad staff will always be nice to you . . . you always gotta most likely be talking with every staff. If everybody know you for being bad—­like here they got a

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crisis center. If you always bad you just go to crisis every day. Once you start being good, crisis won’t know you because you used to come there so they just going to be nice to you, buy you soda, give you privileges with them. If you was never bad, you just quiet, not a lot of people will recognize, not a lot of staff will recognize you, acknowledge you and you can’t really get what you want. The crisis center, which was a kind of seclusion area, was also, paradoxically, a place for young people to get attention. A: So it’s kind of about getting your name out there—­being heard, being seen? T: Like with the staff they call you, up here, they say it’s “juice.” If you have

juice with staff. So if I like, if I can ask the staff, tonight on the phone, get on the cell phone, and the staff say yeah, but you haven’t lot of juice with that staff. A: Oh, I got that. T:   . . . the staff isn’t going to, if you just always sitting there and quiet watching TV you don’t pay nobody no fine, staff don’t look at that, they look at you why else, they try to calm you down. A: I got that. So juice is kind of like a certain kind of power? T: Yeah, but you can only have it with staff, like. A: You can have it with other residents? T: No, residents, you just gotta have respect for them. For some young people, being acknowledged satisfied a critical need to be “seen” or heard. This quest for acknowledgment and recognition relates to that described by criminologist Monica Barry, who argues that young people may often “act out” to accumulate some symbolic power.53 However, this negative form of attention speaks to the difficulty young people might face in being acknowledged by institutional staff, and thus the need to “be bad” to achieve that recognition, which may ultimately perpetuate their enmeshment in the system.54 Bad behavior by residents would provoke staff to write furiously in their logbooks, whip out “level” or disciplinary slips, and prepare themselves for a physical restraint. Bell was also identified as ungovernable by staff in the residential facility where she was incarcerated. Accused of a violent felony that landed her in adult criminal court, Bell was sentenced to time as a Juvenile Offender at Marshall girls’ facility. When I met her, Bell was seventeen years old. Her presence in a room was undeniable—­even though she was only five and a half feet tall, she felt like the tallest girl in the room and she had a palpable physicality, moving around a lot, sometimes sitting close to the other girls, sometimes moving closer to me. She would sing and dance and sometimes



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pout—­everyone always knew when she was in the room. When she was just four years old, she was “taken away” from her mother after she tried to jump off the fire escape of her building. She did this after she was sexually abused by someone in her mother’s home. After that, she was placed in foster care. She was subsequently molested in one of her foster homes and said she continued to be molested, including by staff at a juvenile detention facility, throughout her childhood and early adolescence. When she was fourteen years old, Bell ran away from her foster home and became a sex worker. She continued prostituting for several years until she was incarcerated after getting into a fight with her boyfriend. Bell was placed on the “secure” unit, reserved for girls convicted as adults. This was a small unit—­typically there are only a handful of girls in the state convicted and sentenced to time in custody as adults each year. In 2008, there were just twelve girls admitted to secure custody.55 The rest of the facility had units filled with girls adjudicated as juvenile delinquents (called the “limited secure” side) and the revocators’ unit. Bell and her cohort on the secure side wore maroon sweat suits to distinguish themselves from the girls on the “limited secure” side, who wore blue sweat suits. Otherwise, their experiences in custody were relatively similar—­the facility was surrounded by a high, barbed-­ wire fence, the girls’ movements were tightly controlled, and they each had individual rooms on their units that staff members could lock at any time. When Bell first arrived at Marshall, she was given her uniform and a pair of shoes with white shoelaces. These shoelaces symbolized the behavioral stage that she would be on—­called “Orientation.”56 To advance to the next stage, Bell would need to follow a set of rules and requirements laid out for her within a facility rulebook given to her on the first day. After arriving at the facility, Bell was assigned to a facility line staff member who was considered her “mentor.” In her case, she was assigned to a middle-­aged white man. Bell pointed to the irony of the racial and cultural differences between herself and her “mentor”; she said that they inhabited “different worlds.” After arriving in the facility, Bell was required to become familiar with the basic rules there.The basic rules required deference to staff authority, compliance with rules and procedures, “work[ing] out problems” through treatment programs, exercising “self-­respect” and respect for others, honesty, cleanliness, and being quiet.57 If a young person violated a major rule in the facility, such as possessing contraband or assaulting another resident or staff member, they would have to appear before a disciplinary committee where they could participate in an administrative hearing where they were provided with a legal representative. The hearings themselves looked and felt a lot like a school suspension hearing. During my time in the facility, some people, including Bell, were even arrested.58 If they committed a facility-­based infraction, young people like Bell who had received an adult-­level sentence can lose the

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opportunity to leave after two-­thirds of their sentence has been completed, the minimum amount of time they serve out of their sentence in New York. Bell struggled to conform to the behavioral rules. She was constantly in trouble in the residential facility, often fighting with residents and staff, both verbally and physically. While she was in the facility, she was placed on “Egregious Behavior Protocol.” Under this protocol, a young person is required to write and reflect on the “chains” and “links” that lead to their “egregious behavior,” and then apologize to the other members of their residential unit. The process is meant to be aimed at “repairing harm.”59 One can almost think of two Bells: one of them is the fantasy of a Bell changed by system interventions that is harbored by adults in the system and codified in the system’s manuals and behavioral treatment guides. This Bell (I’ll call her “Compliant Bell”) is someone who receives an intervention, say an Egregious Behavior Protocol, and responds to that intervention by immediately taking responsibility for her deviant actions, apologizing to her peers and staff members, and internalizing that sense of responsibility such that at the next opportunity she has for violating the facility rules. She thinks twice about engaging in her actions because she has recognized that there are negative consequences for them—­not only could she lose the ability to get out when her sentence ends and lose privileges, she could also receive the condemnation of her peers. The other Bell (I’ll call her “Noncompliant Bell”) is the human being behind the fantasy. She was the Bell who, despite multiple inducements from staff to comply with facility rules, continued to violate them. After numerous episodes of defiance of staff rules, Bell was ultimately arrested for assaulting a staff member in the facility, and she was sent to a local jail. Because Bell was older than sixteen when she was arrested in the facility, she would no longer be eligible to stay in a juvenile detention facility; she was sent to the local county jail. Bell linked some of her physicality and defiant behavior in the facility to her despair, frustration, and voicelessness there. She said that “kids are fragile” and that a lot of staff in the facility could not recognize this. She said even at the age of four, “I was so angry.” Referring to the abuse she suffered as a child, she said, “I spent all my life grieving it.” Her defiance of the facility rules was neither rational (a “choice”) nor fully conditioned by her past and her environment; instead, her resistance to the rules was a more complex, integrated, and embodied psychosocial response. This was a response to both the negative evaluations of her worth (as a young and black female former sex worker with no known family who had violated the law by engaging in violence) and her marginalized status both in the facility and the outside world. Bell knew that as a black teenager who violated the rules in a facility with a number of white staff and teachers, she also posed an existential threat to those individuals: she



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was their racist nightmare of an angry black girl who needed to be kept under control, yet she continued to defy the rules despite those perceptions.60 Bell’s despair contributed to her frustration, and she “acted out” in defiance of facility rules. She ultimately related her behavior in the facility to the expression of this anger and grief. For many staff members at Marshall, Bell was one of the more intransigent and difficult young people in the facility. She was what mainstream psychologists might describe as prototypically “oppositional”; she had also been charged with a violent felony, which was an external brand of deviance and difficulty, particularly as a young black woman.61 According to the residential facility staff I talked to, Bell made no “progress” in treatment. She was one of a number of young people who talked about “faking” her way through the program requirements. The distinctions between Bell’s identity as a defiant young woman in the public stage of the program and a reflective and analytical person in the back stages shows some of the ways in which the demands of the facility for her to conform to a particular kind of “institutional self ” created frustrations and tensions for her.62 Girls in the justice system are often considered to be more “difficult” to work with than young men.63 The director of the girls facility, who described the young women in her facility as “my girls,” also said that “they are a very very tough bunch,” and that they are “really damaged kids” who engage in a huge amount of physical aggression. Bell was emblematic of this kind of “difficult” girl, as were many others in the facility. This notion of girls as difficult and damaged constructs them as uniquely out of control: unlike their male counterparts, their behavior is perhaps seen as less reflective of their “criminal” behavior (their “badness”) and more reflective of their vulnerabilities, their personal weaknesses, and their ostensibly inherent inability to exercise self-­ discipline and appropriate femininity. Other efforts by young people to get “juice” with staff and other residents involved using surveillance cameras. When some teenagers arrived at the residential facilities, they “wiled” or acted out in front of the video cameras. They did this not only because they knew that staff members would review the footage of the cameras and make assumptions about their character, but also because they knew that staff would discuss their misbehavior in front of other young people. Thus, “acting out” in front of a video camera became a means of establishing a reputation for toughness in front of one’s peers and attention from staff members. The sociologist Jack Katz suggests that being by being bad, individuals are capable of “manifest[ing] the transcendent superiority of their being” and demonstrating the “dominance of their will.”64 Arguably, for the young people in the residential facilities the performance of “being bad” is paradoxical: it

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demonstrates dominance but also vulnerability and anxiety. Thus, it is indeed a kind of demonstration of will, but a kind of will that is highly circumscribed; in a future chapter, I discuss the ways that adults in the system spelled out the proper exercise of the will for young people. Part of the vulnerability and anxiety that young people experienced arguably grew out of their acceptance that the facilities themselves would do nothing to improve their chances at getting a job or building a better life for themselves once they got out. The teenagers were also under no illusion that the people in charge of them would see them as any more worthy of assistance once they got out.They knew that many of the staff in the facilities simply saw them as “criminals.” One staff member described to me how he saw a clear difference between “criminals” and “adolescents,” suggesting that many of the young people under his care were just “criminals” who engaged in acts so heinous as to be irredeemable, as opposed to an “adolescent,” who just engages in dumb behavior that may ultimately diminish over time. His words echo those of system administrators, who characterized the differences between youth as “sociological” and “psychological,” often in ways that reflected racialized assumptions about who was deserving of individualized care and intervention and who was in need of an approach focused on socialization to middle-­class white norms of behavior. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption among some of the young people was that every intervention in their lives, however benevolently framed, ultimately leads to confinement. They knew, in other words, that they lacked worth in the eyes of the authorities they so often encountered. In 2009, African American and Latina/o people in New York City were stopped and frisked nine times more often than white people.65 “Getting hassled” by the police on an everyday basis, particularly in the context of the rise of more aggressive policing strategies, inevitably impacts on the “collective consciousness” of those individuals, and in particular, people of color, who face the most scrutiny by the police and the system.66 By the time they ended up in residential care, teenagers felt a sense of resignation about how the system saw them—­as deserving of confinement. Gove rning th e U ng ove rnable Before Michael even entered the criminal justice system, he was scrutinized and assessed at every level, and a determination had been made by adults that he was a bad kid. The same was true for many young people—­they’d bounced around from school to school, from foster home to group home, to hospitals and mental health facilities—­they were intimately familiar with “being bad” by the time they made it into the system marked most explicitly by its association with “badness”—­the courts. These assessments of a young



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person’s worth that were made by individuals working for state and local government agencies were arguably guided by racialized assumptions about how riskiness and badness can be expressed. It could be argued further that these assumptions were also colonial in nature, in the sense that they were expressive of a desire to make governable the ungovernable; the poor, largely youth of color who had been deemed to pose a threat to perceptions of order and stability. Identifying these young men and women as ungovernable but also unworthy of mercy, of treatment, and in need of punitive forms of detention and placement upheld the continuing reliance on incarceration as a form of social control of the poor. Badness is a lack of deference. It is about resisting the boundaries of appropriate comportment. When a young person violated the law, their badness was fully realized. Many of the young people I met did indeed engage in acts of harm and violence—­as the largest percentage of the young people I interviewed were teenagers accused as adults, they had been engaged in robberies involving guns, attempted murder, murder, and crimes involving sexual violence. Thus, in many respects they were “bad.” Yet I would like to suggest that their experience in the criminal justice system itself played a role in actually perpetuating and enhancing their construction as individuals unworthy of state support, mercy, or social uplift. By engaging in serious offending, or even more minor acts, such as the assault that Genevieve committed, young people resisted the boundaries set by the constraints of surveillance and policing. They became the individuals for whom “being wild” or a badass is seen to be one’s fate, part of one’s inherent character or a “risk factor,” as opposed to actually having been partially caused by the experience of colonialism and domination. Michael’s family ultimately bailed him out from Rikers Island. His judge accepted a plea offer that would allow him to earn Youthful Offender treatment—­no conviction on his record—­if he successfully completed a term of probation. A police officer that Michael’s family knew came to court to advocate for him, and his lawyer enlisted me to write a presentencing report about him to ask for his release. After he was bailed out, he made improvements at school and made it onto a basketball team. He got the sense that there might be a greater chance of receiving probation. He also felt more confident and happier about his life more generally, and thus he felt optimistic as he reconnected with friends, found some adult mentors, and gained some confidence. Michael’s ability to enter college was shaped in part by his opportunity to stay out of prison and by his access to some—­albeit limited—­networks and opportunities provided by the adults in his life. Had he gone to prison, Michael would not have been able to finish high school at home or been given access to the resources and knowledge about college provided by a high

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school guidance counselor. He also would not have been able to continue to dance and perform in the way that he enjoyed. After Michael was released from jail, he continued to stay connected to me, his lawyer, and other adults in his family. He’s now working on producing his own music album. So was Michael ultimately found to be worthy? Perhaps yes, but in many respects, his self-­representation and his life outcomes will have been indelibly shaped by his experience in jail.

C hap te r 3

Racialized Repression Barrie r s to the E mancipation of Young Pe op le at the E dge s of th e System It’s easy to get in trouble, but it’s so hard to get out. —­Angela, mother of Billy and Marcus

Angela never got to see what happened to her two sons, who were enmeshed in the criminal justice system starting when they were both fourteen years old. She died after a short battle with cancer while Marcus was incarcerated. He was brought to the funeral in shackles, guarded by officers from the New York State Department of Corrections. Marcus was sixteen in 2009 when he was released from a residential facility in upstate New York, where he spent two years after being sentenced as an adult. Since he was considered an adult in the terms of the criminal justice system (although he had not reached the age of “adulthood” in the sense that he was able to live independently and make decisions about his financial and personal opportunities), he was expected to report to a meeting with a parole officer alone, without his parents.The City of New York also required that Marcus reenroll in a high school because he had not yet reached the age at which he could legally leave school. However, his parole officer was unable to provide him with information about how to reenroll in school. His mother Angela thus attempted to decipher the notoriously labyrinthine public high school bureaucracy, without access to the Internet or to anyone to tell her where to go. After a lengthy period of time, Marcus and his mother found a school for him to attend.1 The police aggressively monitored the block where Marcus lived, concerned about emerging gang rivalries. A number of the young people that Marcus had grown up with were police-­identified gang members. Spending time with these friends, he was arrested several times soon after he was released from custody.The first time he was arrested he was with a group of his friends on the sidewalk when the police asked them to move off the sidewalk.2 When they refused, they were arrested for disorderly conduct. Marcus was subsequently arrested for a misdemeanor offense—­possessing a razor blade. Marcus soon stopped attending school. 61

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When Marcus’s parole officer learned about his arrests, he asked Marcus to report to his office. Marcus’s father, who had spent a number of years in prison and who had been on parole, knew that these arrests would likely trigger a parole violation and that his son would be placed in custody. Knowing this, he wanted to be present with his son in the parole meeting so that he could advocate for him and ask the officer to allow his son an opportunity to participate in a program rather than go to jail; his father asked me to attend the parole meeting as well. Marcus’s parents located a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) course for Marcus to attend and got him to take an admissions test, anticipating that the officer might ask what Marcus was doing to stay out of trouble. Marcus and his father went to the parole office to have a conversation about some of the difficulties he had faced in getting back into school and resettling into the community. We entered through a large metal-­mesh enclosure that resembles a cage. Immediately, we were faced with signs detailing various prohibitions: no hats, no cell phones, no do-­rags, no gum, and no food. We sat down on a row of benches facing a bulletproof glass window, where Marcus was expected to check in.The vast majority of the room was filled with black and Latino men. In New York City, just 5 percent of parolees are white.3 When Marcus was summoned by his parole officer, and his father and I accompanied him into the office. The officer began speaking with Marcus and his father while he administered an oral drug test to another client who was still sitting in the office. Marcus began to explain to his officer that he had been unfairly arrested. The officer interrupted him, saying that he could easily establish not only that Marcus had violated parole, but that Marcus was someone who had engaged in continued criminal activity and that he could say to a parole judge, “He’s just a plain criminal.” The parole officer said that he was willing to wait some time to see whether the cases resolved themselves in court—­all parole officers are able to exercise such discretion. He then said to Marcus’s father and to me, “If you hadn’t have come in, I would have taken him into custody.” Marcus’s father said that he did not want his son to go to jail, because “he’ll become a monster” there. The officer indicated that he did not want to send Marcus to jail either, but that his “hands were tied” if Marcus was ultimately found guilty and that his decision to exercise discretion in that moment was a small act of mercy. Like the client who was there before him, Marcus was required to take a drug test. Several weeks later, Marcus’s drug test came back positive for marijuana, and his father preemptively found a residential drug treatment program for him to enter, which the officer expressed some willingness to consider. In response to the choice between entering a residential drug treatment program for at least a year or going to jail, Marcus decided to run away from home. I



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received a voicemail message from the officer shortly afterward, informing me that he had decided to file a violation and bring Marcus into custody: I gave Marcus a break, as per your suggestion, and Marcus did not enter Carter House as instructed. He had a bed available yesterday, and his father had until 11 o’clock today in order to bring him to Carter House, and he refuses to enter Carter House.4 So, uh, I told the father to encourage him, cause if he does not enter today, a warrant will be issued for his arrest . . . so he’s in violation now, and in all possibilities, or all probabilities, I will be taking him into custody, tomorrow, Wednesday, when he reports. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, you need to talk to him, his cell phone is disconnected, but maybe you can talk to his father again. I have no idea what you could do. I know he’s a young guy, I thought maybe you could help, obviously . . . uh . . . this gentleman doesn’t want any help. The officer, like a number of other criminal justice agents I interviewed, framed Marcus’s continued violation of the terms of his parole as his inability to effectively engage with the help he was offered. Marcus and other teen­agers were characterized as individuals who lacked the requisite self-­efficacy and agency to lift themselves out of their personal predicaments. Marcus was found at home early one morning by a warrant squad several months later. Marcus spent the next year in Rikers Island, during which time his charges were “bumped up” to a felony, and the prosecutor’s initial offer of time served was upgraded to an offer of several years in custody. During his time in jail, Marcus was repeatedly placed into solitary confinement after engaging in fights. During his time at Rikers, Marcus felt defeated and hopeless, which contrasted sharply with the characterizations of him by the prosecutor in his criminal case as an active gang member who had a proclivity for violence. He called his mother in tears, speaking about his frustrations about the case, his life prospects, and the inevitability of prison time. Marcus eventually pleaded guilty to the offense he was arrested for and received an indeterminate sentence of two to four years in a state prison. Although it placed him at a more serious risk of being incarcerated, Marcus’s choice to go on the run from the courts and parole was arguably driven by fear, and a sense that he had little control over his case. While on the run, he called his mother one night, crying and saying that he did not know if he could trust his parole officer’s promise that he might be able to do a program, nor could he even cope with the choice of entering a drug treatment program, facing the possibility of being away from home for another year. His mother Angela told me that she was worried that Marcus was experiencing a “mental breakdown.” Marcus’s choice, in effect, was to withdraw from his world and to become more deeply alienated from opportunities to build social supports, enhance his personal skills, and ultimately build a sustainable life for himself.

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He finally got out of prison when he was twenty-­two years old, having spent a few months on the streets since age fourteen. This chapter examines the systems and people outside of the custodial institutions that act as barriers to young people’s growth and development. Developed in communities across the United States to respond to risk-­ taking by young people while they have an open case or after they have been released from custody, these systems and institutions are repressive structures that inhibit young people’s potential rather than facilitating it, even though they are actually set up to support young people. In that sense, they resemble colonial practices because they involve oppressive and dominating practices by one group over another that they perceive to be inferior.5 In the present day, colonial models are complex, especially given that many of the workers in criminal justice and social welfare bureaucracies are now largely people of color; thus, parole and probation officers, foster care workers, and other agents of the state, who are themselves predominantly black and Latina/o, are exercising these forms of social control over members of their own race and ethnicity, as opposed to a clear white–­black oppressive structure.6 Th e Criminal Conv i c t i on, Pove rty, and Marg i nali ty When she was seventeen years old, Shayla was arrested for selling drugs in front of public housing projects in her neighborhood. After she was arrested, she received a notice banning her from trespassing on the grounds of those projects, where her mother lived. Although she lived nearby in a private apartment with her grandmother, Shayla couldn’t even walk through the grounds of the buildings to get to the nearby subway stop. New York City’s public housing projects receive federal subsidies. As such, they are subject to a set of federal rules enacted just three years before Shayla was born, in 1988. Emerging at the height of the War on Drugs, these rules were gradually expanded over the course of the 1990s until eventually President Bill Clinton gave them a name when he signed the strongest version of the law into action: the “One Strike” policy. Individuals who engaged in criminal activity on public housing grounds, or public housing tenants who engaged in criminal activity, would be banned or evicted from public housing, no questions asked. Even someone believed to be using drugs or alcohol or who had a history of drug or alcohol abuse could be barred from applying for public housing.7 Shayla was banned from the projects even though she had received the equivalent of a second chance—­Youthful Offender treatment, an opportunity given to young people in New York up to age nineteen that allows one misdemeanor and one felony to be removed from their record. It is the equivalent of a second chance, in recognition that young people are less culpable for their



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crimes than adults. But in the minds of the New York City Housing Authority policymakers, Shayla was allowed no such chance. In theory, Youthful Offender treatment also allows young people the opportunity to apply for jobs without having to check a box denoting their criminal conviction. Yet many of the young people that I met overwhelmingly perceived that they would not get a job as a result of their criminal case, regardless of whether they had a conviction or not—­even those with a juvenile delinquency adjudication, which does not appear on a criminal record, or Youthful Offender treatment, felt that a potential employer might somehow find out about their time in the system. In some cases, this dissuaded them from even applying for a job. Their perceptions were linked to the realities of the waged labor market: employers do actually discriminate against individuals with criminal convictions.8 Just under half of the participants I interviewed expressed fears about applying for jobs with a criminal conviction and being denied a job because of that conviction.9 These fears were particularly pronounced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.10 This news was often discussed by residential facility staff, who themselves faced layoffs, and served to affect young people’s perceptions about their job opportunities. Once he was released from Rikers Island, Michael desperately wanted to get a job. Michael felt pressure to work to support his own needs and those of his family, particularly because his own father had lost his job as a result of his arrest. As a lover of fashion and style, Michael hoped to work at a clothing retailer.Yet he found that a substantial number of job applications at local retailers where he wanted to work—­including at Foot Locker, his primary choice—­had a section that asked whether he had ever been arrested.11 Discouraged by the question, Michael was pessimistic about his chances at obtaining the job whether he left the answer to the question blank or answered it truthfully. Almost all of the young people I met wanted to go to college and dreamed of embarking on a range of careers. Jacob, for example, actively researched colleges while he was incarcerated and recited off a list of names that included Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Jacob and Jamal also both spoke about their desire to attend a criminal justice college because they were both interested in pursuing a career in law enforcement. Yet a number of the young people expressed concerns about realizing these career aspirations because of their criminal convictions. Tony wanted to become a lawyer, and Jacob wanted to become police officer, but both of them knew that their time in the system would create barriers to realizing these goals. If Shayla had applied to college, she may have again faced a felony conviction box. Even though Shayla had the ability to check “no” on that box because of her Youthful Offender status, many other young people I met did not have that luxury. Even those with Youthful Offender treatment often

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checked the box, assuming that they were obligated to—­they had been processed through the criminal court, after all. The full weight of their Youthful Offender adjudication may have been explained to them, but they never fully understood it. These teenagers were born into a world where the collateral consequences of a conviction were everywhere. Many young people, including my own students and colleagues, believe that a criminal conviction alone will block someone from going to college or receiving financial aid. In 1996, Congress passed an amendment to the Higher Education Act that denied individuals with a drug conviction from receiving financial aid, but that provision has long since been revised; it now more narrowly denies people from receiving aid if they get a felony conviction while they are in college. Yet this distinction is poorly understood on the ground.While he was incarcerated on Rikers Island, Michael spoke with resignation about his future prospects to go to college, saying, “I wanted to go to college,” but “I’m in here, because of the felony.” It was also during the 1990s that the State University of NewYork (SUNY) decided to add a felony conviction box on their application. After applicants check the box, they receive a letter from SUNY demanding an array of paperwork related to their conviction, including their rap sheet, which costs $65 to obtain from the state, detailed inmate administrative records, and psychological treatment histories. They then usually face a felony review committee that assesses their fitness to join the campus. Unsurprisingly, a substantial number of people who check the felony conviction box and receive the letter demanding the supplemental information do not proceed with their application; this is a process that has been termed “denial of admission through attrition.”12 In August 2016, the SUNY Board of Trustees decided to eliminate the felony conviction box from the application.13 The process of applying for college itself, including the federal student financial aid forms, can often be intimidating for young people who have been enmeshed in the system for much of their adolescence. Three years out of custody and living at home with his mother in Brooklyn and unemployed, Andrew never started college in his community despite possessing his GED and some college credits that he obtained while in custody. Upon his release, his parole officer made him participate in drug treatment and anger management classes before he could even begin to apply to college. These mandated programs and the burdens of supporting his mother, along with Andrew’s confusion about the processes of applying to college, have prevented him from even applying for college again, even though he wants to go. A criminal conviction in New York is also accompanied by an array of fines and fees that can create burdensome debt for individuals.14 Shayla faced mandatory surcharges in the courts as a result of her conviction, as well as fees associated with the programs she was eventually sentenced to. Jesse was



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convicted of a misdemeanor sex offense—­“forcible touching”—­when he was eighteen years old. After he was released from Rikers Island, he was homeless and unemployed. Yet his conviction, which resulted in ten years of probation supervision, also required that he pay for a sex offender treatment class. If he would not pay for his classes, he would violate the terms of his probation. At the time, he wasn’t working and thus was unable to pay. The barriers to accessing housing, employment and education that Shayla and the other young people faced are just a few of what have been called the “collateral consequences” of a conviction.15 Many of these consequences were enacted into state and federal laws and regulations around the time they were born, as part of a national project of politicians in the 1990s who were tough on individuals accused of crimes—­who created laws that subjected them to numerous civil penalties outside of a criminal conviction that treated their convictions as representative of the ways that they had violated the expectations of citizenship. Their parents were considered to be individuals whose relationship to the state, as dependents on welfare, public housing, and public education, was considered provisional by governing authorities. People who committed drug offenses faced particularly harsh consequences as a result of their arrests, but other people who were convicted of crime faced restrictions on their civic life. The people who faced the harshest restrictions were those who received any kind of state assistance, from housing to welfare. Federal lawmakers who created these penalties were of the belief that if people violated the law, they must face penalties that would communicate to them that their assistance on the state would be put in jeopardy if they violated the laws of that state. For a number of the young people I met, their initial criminal conviction had compounding effects. New York has particularly punitive laws with respect to multiple felony convictions; under the “Mandatory Persistent” statute, individuals can face serious prison time if they have a second or third conviction. In the six years I have known him, Billy has been arrested several times and has been and out of detention, including Rikers Island. Tory was sixteen when he faced his first adult-­level conviction; after getting out of a residential facility, he was arrested not long afterward and charged with attempted murder. Now twenty-­two, he is doing a twelve-­year sentence in an adult prison in upstate New York. In other words, a conviction is not just a conviction, nor is an arrest just an arrest. After an arrest, these teenagers face barriers in social systems beyond the criminal justice system. These barriers prevent them from realizing their desire to work and to go to school, and they expose them to more time in detention and prison. A young person’s arrest can set into motion an array of punitive responses that play a deep role in shaping their lives. Yet so many of the teenagers I met had desires to go to school and to work. Not only were there explicit prohibitions on their ability to reach these goals,

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but there were also ways that the adults they worked with at various points in the system would press them to lower their expectations about their desires. A number of scholars have studied the career aspirations of poor and working-­class youth. Paul Willis, in his 1977 study of working-­class boys, found that the young men felt the attainment of “qualifications” was “a deflection or displacement of direct activity,” and they rejected the middle-­class concept of job “choice,” instead accepting the inevitability of their entrenchment in working-­class vocations.16 Allistar MacLeod also found that young people from a low-­income housing development in an American city had “depressed aspirations” that affected their social mobility.17 The work of these scholars has been highly influential in understanding the choices made by working-­class and impoverished young people about the labor markets. Yet, as indicated earlier, the aspirations of the young people in this research were wide-­ranging, and not necessarily uniformly “low.” More recently, the sociologist Jennifer Silva examined the difficulties working-­class young people face in realizing their career aspirations in a depressed contemporary job market and identified the ways that they identified their route to success through willful self-­change.18 Although a number of the young people I met were aware of the realities and challenges of the waged labor market, many of them still aspired to jobs or to educational pathways that departed from those understandings (see Table 3.1). For the young people who would not have a criminal conviction on their record, their family court adjudication still loomed large in their perception of what they might be able to do with their lives. This was compounded by the fact that they were often confused about their rights with respect to their convictions, and system actors often added to this this confusion. For example, a number of young people given Youthful Offender status were often given the wrong advice about what this adjudication meant. Possession of a Youthful Offender adjudication means they could complete a job application and say they had not been convicted of a criminal offense. I observed at least one staff member at a residential facility encourage young people to reveal their criminal conviction in job interviews or on a college application, telling those young people with Youthful Offender status to be “honest” about their convictions. Although this represented a misunderstanding of the law by the staff, it also reflected staff members’ understandings that these were young people who should and would be forever marked by their convictions. Peter, a Youth Counselor at Hooper, suggested to the young men that it was important for an employer to know about a young person’s conviction in making their judgment about hiring them. Peter, like other staff members in residential facilities, alternative-­to-­incarceration programs, parole, and probation, may have played a role in “framing” young people’s expectations about their potential in the labor market, but in a broader sense, in their life’s work.19



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Table 3 - 1 Desired Career Paths

Criminal justice careers

Christina:Youth development aide (in an Office of Children and Family Services facility) Jacob: police officer Jamal: police officer White-­collar professions

Tony: lawyer Nina: accountant Maya: veterinarian Creative work

Newz: celebrity photographer Izzy: architect Genevieve: magazine editor Michael: model, professional basketball player Blue-­collar work

Marcus: Sanitation worker Billy: Bicycle repairman Bell: House cleaner Other working-­class professions:

Olivia: Amtrak (train) conductor Eddie: Barber Jenelle: Home health aide

Confront i ng L ow E xpe c tat i ons of C hang e A number of the young people confronted system actors who had little faith in their ability to change, which played a role in dampening their expectations of themselves. The irony of such expectations was that they existed in a system that exerted strong expectations over them for positive change. Young people’s interpretations of these perceptions sometimes related directly to their decisions to “give up” in the context of a criminal case. Malcolm said of the judge and his alternative-­to-­incarceration program staff that “they just want me locked up.” He described the unfairness of his court process, his feelings of defeat, and his desire to do time in custody rather than complete a program. Slam similarly communicated his feelings of defeat and frustration, which were recognized during an official probation interview. Billy said his teachers expected the worst of him, which had an impact on his motivation to go to school and to work hard, even though his court case demanded that he participate in school fully. A young woman in confinement

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spoke angrily about how the staff “think we’re animals” and that she could do little to defeat that presumption. A number of young participants expressed ambivalence about changing in the face of what they felt was a lack of recognition about their potential for growth and change. Some young people in custody frequently spoke about their feelings that staff expected them to return to custody, and this was often both overtly communicated to them, but also felt by the young people through staff members’ body language and other cues. Young people were sometimes frustrated that they could not meet institutional expectations of change. At a focus group at the girls’ residential facility, some of the girls said that the “staff bash us so much,” saying things like “you need to work on this.” One of the girls said that she felt like saying to the staff that “you’re not seeing that I’m trying.” The girls felt that their progress in treatment—­if there was any—­was rarely acknowledged (or “seen”), despite their feelings that they had actually changed. This emotion had particular salience when it came to feelings about the structural impediments posed by their racialized identity, and the young men would talk about their feeling that “all we have in our mind is that we’re the minority and we’re not gonna make it.” Newz similarly described his resistance to his implicit fate that “you black, you a man, you are one of two things: you might end up dead before you turn 21 or you going to be in jail.” Yet while Newz and these other young people speak with a measure of defeat, they also speak about defeating the presumption of their failure. The young people who were in the community spoke frequently about the expectation of failure they confronted in school and from the police. Police, for the most part, were seen as inherently lacking the ability to exercise understanding or empathy, particularly with respect to young people of color. Slam noted, for example, that police assume “most black people do bad things.” When I asked Slam whether he believed, in fact, that “most black people do bad things,” he said “yes.” His emotion is complicated, particularly in the context of a conversation with me, a white woman from a different class position of whom he may have felt some distrust. Yet it reveals a degree of resignation about and perhaps an internalization of the functional and symbolic equivalence of “blackness” and “risk” that permeate popular culture and policing strategies. Slam may indeed feel forever “marked,” but his resignation also reflects similar emotions expressed by those living under conditions that resemble colonialism: that there is little room for resistance to these constructions of blackness and criminality, and they are thus assimilated into one’s way of constructing identity.20 Some participants recognized that if the police were to assume the worst about them, it would be better to avoid the indignities, humiliations, and potential pains of contact with individuals who not only use physical force



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against them, but who also simply see them as archetypes against whom they are incapable of exercising mercy and discretion. The young people also often spoke about how their words could be “twisted” by the police, and used against them, and that they could be manipulated by the police into “snitching” on their peers.21 They felt the police would “railroad” them, which they define as the practice by which the police rapidly and summarily pursue convictions without understanding or attempting to verify the broader truths and contexts of their situation.22 Being railroaded means that there is no opportunity to refute the assumption that one has done wrong and always will. Some teenagers felt that it was impossible to comply with the requirements of their case. Billy, while in detention after being arrested for robbery, spoke about his pessimism about getting probation instead of time in custody, after hearing in court that the prosecutor was only offering him three to nine years in custody. Speaking in a sullen and dejected manner soon after he had been placed into detention, Billy indicated to the judge that he had been told by someone in detention that only 21 out of 1,652 people received probation for robbery offenses.23 The judge in his case had said to him “don’t let that scare you,” which made Billy more sanguine about the outcome. Ironically, after finally receiving probation, Billy met with the judge and his lawyer in his case in private and revealed his fears that no one would check on him or look out for his best interests anymore.This spoke to some of the contradictions inherent in his experience: while he hated the indeterminate nature of the punishment, he appreciated the support and care he received from the individuals who were most involved in helping him fight his case and find a better outcome for his life. Shayla similarly wanted a probation sentence for her felony offense, and eventually received it. However, while on probation, she was frustrated about her officer’s ability to help her and low expectations of her. Shayla asked her probation officer how many of her clients had succeeded, and the officer told her that about 1 out of 100 people did. Shayla felt that her officer conveyed a general sense that she would fail on probation and be sent to prison. Izzy said that judges and criminal justice agents (including staff in facilities) hear so many more “failure stories than success stories” and he felt that they would base their judgment on those stories. Michael, the young man who was charged with gun possession and who waited for months on Rikers Island for an outcome in his case, relied on his father to plead with his attorney to try to get him into an alternative-­to-­ incarceration program. Michael’s attorney said to them “in the ten years I’ve been doing this, I’ve only seen one or two people successfully complete a program.” Failure in these contexts literally means incarceration, but it also seems to convey a broader assessment about young people’s essential deficiencies as human beings that they cannot and will not meet the expectations of responsibility and compliance meted out by the courts.

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Adults like Peter, the counselor in Hooper boy’s facility, would frequently attempt to moderate what they perceived to be young people’s too-­lofty expectations. Some staff at the girls’ facility, for example, spoke about how the girls had “unrealistic” expectations of their futures and that these expectations needed to be brought under control so that the girls would not be set up for failure. A teacher in the girls’ facility spoke about how it is too hard to “try to get them to learn” and that it would in fact make more sense to teach the girls skills that were more “real,” as opposed to English, math, and science. This accords with researchers’ findings that poor kids of color are often given “dumbed down” curricula and face lower expectations for their success in schools.24 Similarly, in the boys facilities, some staff emphasized the need for the state to train young men in skills, such as automobile maintenance or carpentry, which they said would enable them to receive a job, arguing that the disproportionate emphasis of the reforms on treatment, as opposed to education and training, were hampering the young men’s potential. The jobs and skills that a number of staff felt were aligned with what was “realistic” for the young men were largely service industry positions. Peter, a youth counselor, encouraged Jamal to apply for a job working at a delivery and package service at the airport rather than trying to go back to school. Slam spoke about his aspiration to work in a pet store after he had been told by a residential facility staff member that this would be a good position for him. The staff members who told me about their desires to get these young men in trade-­based employment echoed some of the same claims made by those who established training schools for juvenile delinquents in the early part of the twentieth century. The assumptions of these individuals were that working-­class kids need to be prepared to do working-­class jobs; then, the kids were largely Italian American and Irish immigrants; today they are black and Latina/o teenagers.25 Peter and other staff members spoke about how it would be better for the young men to be in adult prisons, which offered more vocational training programs. Some of the residential facilities provided young people with the opportunity to receive vocational training, but the programs differed by facility and were often dependent on the availability of appropriate teaching staff. At Hooper, there was a horticulture class, training in maintenance work, a career class, and a print shop. The McClary facility did not have any vocational training programs, although some staff members would enlist the young people to help take care of the plants surrounding the facility. The Marshall girls’ facility had a career and financial management class, training in office skills, and in the culinary arts. At the facility where Slam served his time, there was an automobile maintenance shop and the wood shop. A staff member who gave me a tour of the facility vocally lamented the lack of support the central administration of the state agency had provided the facility to properly



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sustain its vocational program, instead focusing its resources on therapeutic interventions. The teenagers recognized the limits and realities of the labor market and their position as working-­class kids within that market, but they also saw the ways that the adults in charge of their lives sought to limit their opportunities. The young men’s group that I met with at Hooper spoke to me about their realizations about the barriers that were being erected around them. Eddie, one of the older boys in the facility, was serving a fifteen-­year to life sentence for which he would be transferred to an adult prison on his twenty-­first birthday, which was imminent. He had received his GED while he was inside the facility and was on an “Honors”-­level behavioral change stage. So too was Aaron, who was serving a fifteen-­year to life sentence. Jacob, the young white man serving time for a robbery case, was the youngest member of the group and was going to be released soon. Panama, who was also on the Honors stage, was getting ready to be released as well. Before arriving at the facility, Panama had been arrested multiple times and had violated his probation. It was unclear to him whether he had received Youthful Offender status, but no one at the facility had helped him to clarify that status. All four of the young men had spent quite a lot of the time in the education program in the facility. The facility, like many across the country, did not offer the young people the opportunity to receive a high school diploma, only a GED. Also, every residential unit attended school as a group; the classrooms were not divided by grade level, reading ability, or other abilities. Thus, it was often quite possible that each classroom had young people with a wide range of abilities in it, from a fifth-­g rade reading level to a high school graduate. The curriculum was recycled each year, so young men with multiple-­year sentences would be taught the same materials year after year. In 1994, in another moment of 1990s-­era “zero tolerance” for people with criminal convictions, the federal government prohibited the use of Pell Grants for people who were incarcerated and in college programs, which existed in prisons across the country. Thus, even if they had received their GED, teenagers in New York’s juvenile facilities were not able to access college courses for free unless they were lucky enough to land in the one facility that had started a full-­time pilot college program that was being financed by a private donor. Teachers in the state facilities are recruited through a state civil service system, and although they are certified, they are not always placed in classrooms to teach in their subject matter expertise. There are no full-­time special education teachers in each classroom; there is generally just one special education teacher per facility. Substitute teachers were often hired on the basis of personal connections, not because they possessed any qualifications or expertise. The classes themselves are plagued by frequent interruptions. During my time in the facility, I spent a number of hours observing classroom sessions;

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very few of those hours were devoted to instruction time. Instead, classes often took a long time to start and were interrupted by alarms or facility-­wide emergencies, and treatment team meetings.26 In the classes themselves, the teachers often struggled to maintain the interest level of students. A number of the young men fell asleep in class, talked to each other while the teacher spoke, and sometimes even got into fights.Youth Division Aides (YDAs), or guards, were required to sit in every classroom, but the YDAs were frequently disengaged themselves; I observed some of them falling asleep during class. Additionally, a number of young people decided that they did not want to go to school, but some facilities, unable to force them to go, developed incentives-­based systems to try to get them to go; for example, they would get more time on the television or access to Play Stations. Contrary to the assumption of some staff members that these were just inherently “bad kids,” it became clear to me that their disengagement in school and lack of motivation to do well there was in part caused by the facility staff and the structure of the facility education programs. During my interviews with the young people, they told me that they did not pay attention in their classes because the classes did not stimulate them or hold their interest. Besides the curriculum being recycled every year, almost all of the teachers in the facilities were white, the textbooks and course books were completely outdated, the classroom technologies were limited, and the materials were often clearly irrelevant to the lives of the young people. Whereas in a traditional high school the teachers might have access to ongoing professional continuing education and keep apprised of the latest ideas and technologies, the juvenile facilities are isolated from present-­day discussions about pedagogy and curricular development. In fact, a number of teachers would tell me that working at the facilities was often a last resort for them; some were retired and looking for extra work; others had looked for other jobs in education but could not find them due to the very tight educational job market. A number of the teachers I met were motivated by their desire to help young people but were provided few financial incentives and support to do the work that they wanted to do; they thus relied on the resources that were in the facility or sometimes paid out of their own pockets for extra ones. As a teenager who had spent quite a lot of time at the facility, Eddie had extensive firsthand knowledge about how the teachers and staff approached the young men there. He said that the “maximum expectation” by teachers and staff of students in the residential facilities is to get their GED and how “that’s poor,” because it is essentially just a ninth-­g rade education. He noted that it was difficult for an individual with a higher-­level degree, such as a master’s degree, to find a job in the context of the current economy, so it would be even more difficult for someone who only had a GED. He said “to me, there’s no hope for your future.” In a context in which residential facility



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staff members have a great deal of influence over these expectations, both in their ability to facilitate connections for young people and to provide counsel to them, their moderation of young people’s expectations may play a role in shaping their sense of what is achievable. All of the young men in the group that I spoke with acknowledged what was happening in the world outside of the facility: layoffs in many industries and limited job prospects for many. But they resisted the notion that there was any hope that lay in the educational programs in the facilities to help them make their way past that barrier. They thus held onto the idea that they were capable of doing work that was meaningful but critiqued the system for preventing them from achieving their goals. “Th e Syste m ”: Pe op le - ­C hang i ng In st itut ions i n Young Pe op le ’s L ive s For a number of the participants, the word “system” meant much more than the system of punishment in which I encountered them. Their relationship to the criminal justice system was often peripheral to their many other concerns about governance.Their use of the word “system” represented the interpenetration of government agencies into their lives and which they felt structured and determined where they could go when they left confinement.“The system” was the force that repressed them—­it served as the source of their frustrations as well as their inability to grow up and proceed with their lives. Sam was at the facility for the second time after he had violated parole. Like many of the other young men in the facility, he came from a heavily policed neighborhood in New York City with poor, failing schools. He was an eager participant in our focus groups despite attempts by staff members to bar him from attending; they told me that he had been engaging in “negative” behavior on the units. Peter, the youth counselor, related Sam’s influence with the other boys on his unit to that of a dog attracting fleas. Sam defined the word “system” as anything that had to do with “not staying home,” which included “cops, detectives, captains, generals, juvenile system, everything that has to do with being incarcerated” as well as foster care.27 Participants would also call corrections officers or guards “police.” For so many of the young people, it didn’t matter what adult system actor they were dealing with—­all of these people, whether they were a child welfare worker or a police officer—­represented a negative form of social control in their lives.28 These individuals were largely focused on policing and repression, and ultimately on removing the young person’s freedom. The fluidity between systems was arguably the strongest between the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Skippy was a white kid from a poor family in suburban Westchester County. Skippy’s parents drank and used drugs for most of his childhood. He was placed into foster care with a relative

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who physically abused him. He was then returned to his mother’s house and was arrested for multiple delinquency cases until he was finally arrested for a more serious attempted murder case—­he stabbed his mother’s boyfriend. In his delinquency case, he was seen by the same judge who saw him after he was removed from his mother; Skippy said that the judge had known him “my whole life.” The judge initially placed him in a private residential facility. He left that facility and then was placed into McClary, the lowest security-­level facility in the state. It was rare for me to see a young person charged with such a serious offense, and to have such a serious history of child welfare involvement, in such a low-­security-­level setting. Both Skippy and I felt that this may have been a reflection of his whiteness. In court, a young person’s involvement in the mental health and child welfare systems, as well as their educational status, is frequently discussed by court actors, and in fact plays a significant part in decision-­making about their placement and the outcome of their cases. Delinquency cases may also flow out of neglect cases if young people fail to participate in mandatory services or because they are facing more scrutiny by the state as a result of their involvement in the neglect case. A number of the participants who were incarcerated, and a disproportionate number of the girls from upstate New York, were there because they had failed in previous mental health and child welfare placements. In a recent study of a sample of young people in New York State Office of Children and Family Services custody, researchers found that 65 percent of girls and 46 percent of boys had received child welfare services before they came into custody. Forty-­ eight percent of girls and 24 percent of boys had received foster care services before they were placed into custody. A higher percentage of girls were also noted as having a “significant” mental health problem upon entry into custody, and girls in the juvenile justice system have disproportionately experienced sexual abuse and violence.29 A large-­scale national survey of young people also found that girls had more significant histories of abuse than boys.30 Girls’ pathways into the child welfare and juvenile justice systems have been found to be different from that of boys, with interventions in their lives more often being framed as a form of care, protection and treatment.31 Girls are more likely to be perceived and treated as “troublesome” if they resist the boundaries of their care or treatment; this is perhaps borne out in the various ways that girls in trouble with the law are often described in the courts, in community-­based programs, and in residential care as somehow more “difficult” than boys to work with.32 Also, girls are said to more often report a history of abuse and mental or emotional problems than boys, but this does not necessarily indicate their disproportionate experience of such problems and could more likely reflect the ways that discourses of abuse and mental health problems are gendered.33 The girls described their experiences as ones of an



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almost systemic purgatory, and these experiences are evidenced by a recent piece of research done on children in New York City’s foster care system on their sometimes-­dramatic lengths of stay in care.34 Researchers have also found strong links between a history of maltreatment and a young person’s involvement in delinquency, as well as a history of experience in the child welfare system with their later incarceration.35 I met a young woman named Maya both inside the facility and after she got out, and as I saw her confront the demands of the foster care and juvenile justice system, Sam’s words about “the system” were realized for me. At a certain point in time for Maya, almost all of the adults in her life were in some way connected to controlling her body, her movements, and even what she felt was her mind. One of the most striking aspects of the repressive therapeutic and behavioral change practices inside of the facilities were their failure to acknowledge the ways that the teenagers like Maya and Sam were complex beings who were not simply “bad,” but who also had desires, despair, hope, anxiety, and fear. They gossiped and fought and cried but also encountered rules and practices that treated such engagement as toxic and problematic, rather than as a normal part of human interaction. The girls in the group whom I met with at the Marshall facility felt that the staff expected the worst of them; one of them said that the staff members would often tell them that they thought they would reoffend soon after they were released. The girls said that staff members would almost expect them to violate rules and would shake their heads with an “I told you so” attitude after the girls messed up. The girls spoke about how the staff members in their facility were frustrated because they were not getting proper “respect” from the girls but that they did not acknowledge that asking fifteen-­and sixteen-­ year-­old girls for “respect” might be an impossible task—­or a fantasy. Unlike the staff, the girls understood that pushing boundaries was in fact an inherent part of adolescence. One of the girls wondered why the staff members complained about the residents so much because, after all, they had families to go home to. The girls I spoke with expressed frustration that “everybody is trying to control us.” Maya and Genevieve were in the same focus group, and after they spent some time catching up and gossiping during one of my group sessions, Genevieve told her that the girls on her unit thought that Maya was the prettiest girl in the facility. Maya demurred, as she was quiet and reserved, and didn’t like the attention. Maya told me she liked to play basketball, and she also wanted to be a veterinarian. When she was little, she loved to make things, and told me about doing crafts and making a teddy bear for her grandmother. She had eight siblings and split her time in her childhood between her grandmother and her mother.Yet like so many other teenagers, Maya got into a lot

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of trouble as a child. When I asked her why, she said “I was being bad” and “I didn’t listen.” She said that she had “started being bad” after child welfare authorities removed her siblings and her from their mother. She said that she was first suspended from school when she was ten years old; as a young black girl, she was surprisingly not alone in this experience—­black girls actually face higher rates of suspension and expulsion than boys.36 She first went into the foster care system when she was eleven years old; by the time I met her, she had been in ten foster homes. When Maya was fourteen years old, she received a twelve-­month sentence in family court. When I asked her about her experience in court, and she said, “I didn’t understand one word they said.” She remembered hearing something about AWOL and that her probation was violated. She said that her lawyers didn’t come to see her in detention, and she didn’t really remember anything about them. Maya’s alienation from the court process and from her attorneys was not unusual; it represented her distance from a system that she was both a part of but also controlled within. So many of the teenagers felt that they couldn’t understand the process, their attorneys, or the judges.They felt a great social distance from the people who ran the court, and they were perplexed by the proceedings and afraid to ask questions about them. The young people occupy a social space—­“the system”—­that is controlled by agents who have more social power than they do. Maya did well enough during her time in the juvenile facility to qualify for a few privileges, including a trip to a local community college, although she begrudged the facility staff for requiring the girls to wear their uniforms on the trip, identifying them as coming from an institution. Maya’s release from the facility was delayed because the state Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), which was responsible for her care as both a juvenile delinquent and as a neglected child, could not identify a foster home for her. Shortly before she was adjudicated and sent to the facility, she was removed from her mother’s home and placed into foster care. Foster care placements are notoriously difficult to find for teenagers. Maya grew increasingly frustrated and agitated as she waited for a placement because no one in her facility would give her a definite date when she would be leaving. Maya was getting into trouble as a result of her frustrations and told me, “I’m tired of this place.” During this waiting period, she complained that every resident who was “doing the program” is “faking it.” She called the program at the facility “day care,” a claim that I heard a lot of young people make. It was often intended to mean that they felt the program was a joke—­that they were simply being treated as infants, rather than engaged and stimulated. When I asked Maya what she was most looking forward to when she got out, she talked about “seeing my family.” I asked what she was least looking forward to, and she said “going back to school.” When I asked her why she felt



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that way about school, she talked about how she had “been away for so long” and that she hadn’t been in a “regular” school in a while. Maya was finally released from Marshall, and by the middle of the summer, she was in a foster home in Queens. She wanted to find a summer job. No one, from her foster mother to the agency that represented her, helped her with this. The apartment where she was staying was run by a West Indian woman who had a few teenagers under her care. Ms. Roberts, the foster mother, must have assumed that I worked for the state, as she immediately reported to me how poorly Maya was adjusting to her home and to her rules. Instead of asking me who I was, she immediately began telling me that Maya was “doing bad” and that she had not come home one night and had missed her curfew. Ms. Roberts said that she was required to report Maya’s behavior to the foster care agency because she would ultimately be blamed if Maya got rearrested or into more trouble. Ms. Roberts was preoccupied with getting “blamed” for Maya’s absence; she said she wanted to call the police because at least they might document her efforts to help Maya. She was even worried that she could be arrested if she was accused of neglecting Maya. Foster parents in New York City get paid on average about $750 a month for their teenaged foster children and also receive clothing subsidies for the children. Ms. Roberts had several other teenaged foster children in her home. She didn’t have a full time job, and thus the foster children were her primary source of income. She told me “I get paid by the day,” and so she thought that if Maya didn’t get home by midnight, “I won’t get paid.” Ms. Roberts spoke at length about Maya’s need to obey the rules. She repeated the word “rules” throughout our conversations, saying that when she was a child, she “followed the rules,” never sleeping in, and working hard enough to travel to the United States to work. She implied that Maya was a child who had never learned to follow rules, and “that is how she ended up upstate—­she wasn’t following the rules.”37 She showed me signs that she had posted outside of the door that Maya shared with her other foster child indicating their curfew time. After Maya missed a number of her appointments and other obligations, such as her curfew, her social worker said to me, “She’s really lazy, too. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” The worker refused to refer Maya to any summer programs until she attended therapy and made her curfew, saying, “I don’t reward bad behavior.” No one set up any programs or activities for Maya that summer. At times, the teenagers’ boredom that I often witnessed was representative of the ways that the individuals from the state who are responsible for their lives and well-­being neglect to see them as adolescents and see them instead as wards of the state. Maya hadn’t been given any information about when she would return to her biological mother, and she yearned to be with people who knew her well.

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As she spoke in front of Maya, who remained silent during the conversation, she said, “She’s been in care since she was eleven years old” and then implied that she was a child who knew no boundaries and who was getting herself into trouble during the day. When I asked Ms. Roberts if she knew when Maya would be off of aftercare—­the equivalent of parole for young people in the juvenile delinquency system—­she said she did not know. I was surprised that the person who had such important responsibility for Maya would not know when this supervisory arrangement would be over. After she got out of the Marshall girls’ facility, Maya was unable to cash a stipend that she received through foster care because she lacked photographic identification. Her foster care agency had lost all of her vital documents, which she needed to obtain her identification card. The agency was responsible for obtaining new documents but failed to do so for the entire summer. Maya’s social worker arranged for her to go to a number of appointments with a therapist but did not organize any other activities. She said that Maya should be responsible for getting her own photo identification. Maya would often skip her appointments with her therapist. Of therapy, she said, “I don’t know when I’m going to outgrow therapy, but they’re going to give—­I don’t know, just, I never asked for therapy a day in my life, they gave it to me, they felt I needed it . . . I swear they know how we feel and stuff. So I don’t.” Maya felt that the government actors in her life—­the lawyers, foster care workers, aftercare workers, and her foster mother—­thought, but did not know, how she felt. It was clear that Maya recognized and reiterated that she was being governed, not cared for. She was being repressed, not recognized. When it came time for Maya to re-­enroll in school, the Board of Education told her that her classification of “Emotional Disturbance” in the Special Education criteria barred her from attendance at the school to which she was assigned. Billy too was rejected from numerous schools because of his “Emotional Disturbance” classification. Jenelle had taken the requisite number of classes to obtain a high school diploma while she was in the juvenile facility, but her high school at home didn’t recognize the credits she had received at her juvenile facility, even though there was a recently enacted statewide law mandating such recognition. After Maya was rejected by the school she was assigned to, she was expected to go to the Board of Education in person to find a new school. After a number of months, Maya ran away from her foster home. I have searched for Maya for the intervening years since then—­on Facebook, through public databases, and Ms. Roberts, but she has vanished. Perhaps some would take this as a good sign—­she hasn’t turned up on Rikers Island or in any official arrest databases, thus she is a “success” in official understandings of teenage well-­being in the criminal justice system; she hasn’t recidivated. But, to me,



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there remain broader questions about whether Maya was given the opportunity to be a teenager and to grow up. Maya was not alone in experiencing adults who were “ungiving” in terms of information about public benefits or assistance in regard to opportunities to enhance their well-­being and grow up. The various forms of community supervision that young people encountered were more directly focused on monitoring, as opposed to offering guidance, referrals, and support, or “care.”38 These forms of governance were thus ones that were putatively aimed at ensuring the welfare and development of young people but neglected to ensure either. Frust rat ion B orne Out of I ndete rm i nac y One of the most striking experiences of following young people as they go through adolescence is to witness the significant process of change that takes place between early and late adolescence. For so many of the young people I met in 2008, and then see again today, I am struck that what often gets neglected in our understandings of the impact of criminal cases on their lives is that these cases are happening to young people as they are undergoing the tremendous changes that accompany adolescence. Thus, young people like Maya, Skippy, and Shayla are not only negotiating their legal cases, but their identity, friendships, sexuality, independence, and autonomy. These issues were particularly complex for those teenagers whose relationships to their families had been disrupted not only by incarceration, but also by the child welfare system—­the meanings of independence were fraught for them, as well as their ideas about who and where they could find protection and care from. In the context of juvenile justice systems, many scholars have written about young people’s abilities to “age out” of crime. They extensively studied the processes of maturation that contribute to the relationship between age and crime.39 Some have argued that there is a relationship between the development of maturity of judgment and the exercise of responsibility, temperance, and perspective, all of which may play a role in decision-­making that leads to offending.40 But what is perhaps less studied is the texture and complexity of that maturation process as it takes place within the institutional settings that comprise the juvenile justice system. The indeterminacy of the court cases was another piece of the repressive structure that young people faced: not only was the court process a difficult one for them, it often lasted many years and included a sprawling array of obligations and pressures. The court interventions sometimes lasted for months or even years. Only one of the young people I met with had their case fully resolved during the year that I followed them, even though I met a number of them long after they had been sentenced.41 If teenagers were sentenced to custody, they sometimes

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faced lengthy periods of parole or probation after those sentences. Teenagers who are charged with less serious crimes find themselves moving in and out of juvenile justice, child welfare, and mental health institutions for long periods of time.42 The structure of the court system also creates and sustains the indeterminacy of the sentences. Depending on their age, young people can face either short, determinate jail sentences or a sprawling ever-­expanding form of surveillance by the state. For young people charged in family court with less serious offenses such as drug sales, minor theft, and assault, they may actually receive a longer period of supervision in family court than if they were charged as adults. One participant, Luis, spent three years in custody in OCFS for a cocaine-­related charge that he received as a juvenile delinquent in family court. After he returned home at age seventeen and was arrested and sentenced on a similar charge, he did a 30-­day jail sentence as an adult charged with a misdemeanor in criminal court. Billy and Malcolm continued to attend their alternative-­to-­incarceration programs well over a year after their initial arrest. Tory faced five years of probation after spending eighteen months at a residential facility. Others confronted up to a lifetime of parole after they completed their adult-­level sentence, as in the case of two participants who had received sentences of fifteen years to life. For others who experienced the uncertainty of the child welfare system, in which they did not know when or if they would be reunited with their birth families, returning to group homes or foster homes after custody was experienced as a continuation of custody. The group homes often prevented young people from going off property, and some foster homes had strict rules about curfews. The legal cases also tend to last for long periods of time because of the intricacies of legal process, but also because of the frequency with which young people violated the terms of their probation sentences, returning to the original courtroom where they were sentenced. Billy, for example, spent more than two years in court for a robbery case that he was arrested for when he was fourteen years old. He has been arrested several times since his first arrest and has spent time in a juvenile and an adult detention center. He has graduated from two alternative-­to-­incarceration programs, which he reported to at least twice a week. He had a curfew for over two years, and was expected by his judge to be with an adult family member at all times when he left his home. At one point, his probation officer discovered marijuana in his home and required him to go to a long-­term residential drug treatment program (see Table 3.2 for descriptions of the participants’ pathways through the system). This sense of indeterminacy provoked a range of emotions among the teenagers, from desperation and deep pessimism to rage.43 Maya spoke about the various court interventions she had to engage in before she violated her probation and was sent to the residential facility by saying, “I had so much, it

83 Table 3 - 2 Examples, Lengths of Time Spent in Custody and the Community

Name

Comments

Name

Comments

Ellen

Spent time in a residential mental health treatment facility before she was sent into custody.

Khalil

Maya

Spent time on probation, then violated probation and was sentenced to time in the facility. She stayed longer in the facility than she was supposed to while her foster care placement was made.

Spent time in detention, then went into custody, violated his aftercare and went back into detention pending the outcome of his violation hearing. Was sent back to residential facility.

Skippy

Was placed in a residential facility and got into trouble in the facility then “bumped up” to a more secure facility.

Oliver

Spent time in a residential treatment facility, got into trouble there, and was sent to a secure facility.

Jose

Spent time in detention, residential facility, and is now in adult correctional facility. Was given an indefinite sentence of five to ten years for assault and robbery.

Jamal

Spent time in detention and then in a residential facility.

Izzy

Spent time in detention and in a residential facility. Was given a sentence of one and onethird to four years for robbery.

Jacob

Spent time in a group home, then in detention, then in a residential facility. Had a sentence of one and one-third to four years for robbery.

Tony

Spent time in detention, then in a residential facility, now in an adult prison. Serving an indefinite sentence of fifteen years to life for murder.

Jamy

Spent time in detention then a residential facility.

Sam

Spent time in detention, then the residential facility, then violated parole and was arrested again and was sent back to the residential facility. Now in adult prison finishing a three- to ten-year indefinite sentence.

Christina

Genevieve

Gina

Spent time in multiple residential mental health placements prior to being sent to custody. Was placed into a residential treatment program after she was released from custody. Was in a residential treatment center and a psychiatric hospital before she was placed into custody. She went back to the residential treatment center after released from custody. Was in foster care before being placed in custody. Received an extension of placement in custody due to the seriousnessw of her offense. Was eventually released from custody in November 2010.

Bell

Spent time in secure detention before she was sentenced to custody.

Jenelle

Had an indefinite sentence of one to three years in custody.

Victoria

In detention then sentenced to the secure facility for an indefinite sentence of one to three years.

Don’te

Spent time in one secure facility, then got an extension of placement and was moved to another secure facility.

(continued)

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Table 3 - 2 Examples, Lengths of Time Spent in Custody and the Community (Continued)

Name

Comments

Name

Comments

Panama

Spent approximately five years in a residential facility.

Shayla

Eddie

Spent time in detention and a residential facility, and is now in adult prison finishing an indefinite sentence of fifteen years to life.

Spent time on Rikers Island, then in programs; five years probation plus programs.

Billy

Under court supervision for close to two years; completed two alternative to incarceration programs; spent time in Rikers Island and juvenile detention center; now on five years of probation.

Michael

Rikers Island, then received five years of probation.

Marcus

Spent time in detention, then residential facility on a one and one-third to three-year sentence, then Rikers Island (for a year awaiting outcome of new case), served two years of a two- to four-year sentence in adult prison.

Newz

Spent time in detention, then in residential facility, and now in adult prison, serving a three- to nine-year sentence.

Antonio

Spent time in residential facility (three years), then three months in Rikers Island.

Nina

Spent time on Rikers Island, received five years probation.

Tory

Spent time in an alternative to detention program, then was placed in detention after he was rearrested, then he was placed in a private residential treatment program for 12 months, and was released to a community based program after release. Now on Rikers Island after being rearrested three times since his release from the residential program.

Malcolm

Spent time in detention, then at a program, then received conditional discharge.

Slam

Spent time in a Functional Family Therapy and a Multisystemic Therapy program with his family. Was arrested again and spent time in detention, then was sentenced to 12 months of probation, which was revoked, and then he was sentenced to 12 months in custody. He was released from custody and given a six-month extension of placement, to be served at a community based alternative to incarceration program. Since being released from custody, he has been rearrested twice and has spent time on Rikers Island.

tortures me.” Many court actors might argue that these pains and frustrations are an integral part of young people’s need to integrate these new responsibilities into their lives where they were once absent, but it is arguable that this experience of “torture,” or perhaps, to a lesser extent, deep frustration, affects young people’s ability to fulfill their potential in the sense that they struggle



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to locate a focus for the expression of their sense of self-­efficacy and their process of growth. The teenagers felt powerless in the face of the indeterminacy of the custodial terms and were often ambivalent and frustrated about what it actually meant to change. In the courts, judges had the ultimate power over when and how they sufficiently met the court’s terms of participation in an alternative-­ to-­incarceration program, which often meant that they would stay in the programs for months, or even years. There were many years where Shayla struggled to find such freedom from her court case. She had already faced a great challenge, as a young person, to establish her identity as a gay black woman. When she was younger, she worried about a large birthmark on her face, her skin color (she felt it was too dark), and her hair. She wanted to wear boys clothes and always felt more like one of the boys, but her family didn’t approve of this—­they wanted her to wear “girlie girlie” clothes—­and she was teased at school. She did well in school when she was younger, and she was considered one of the smartest students in her class, but her grades began to slip, and she was ultimately kicked out of school for bringing marijuana to school. By the time I met her, she had left her high school and was trying to enroll in a GED program. After she was arrested and charged with selling drugs on the grounds of the public housing project from which she was ultimately banned, Shayla was sentenced to five years’ probation and mandatory participation in an alternative-­to-­incarceration program, which referred to intensive outpatient drug treatment for her marijuana use. She said, “I’m tired of traveling back and forth and all that” to the program and that “it makes it harder when you stressed out like that, it makes you want to relapse.” Shayla wanted to go to college, but then she felt like she would “have to worry about” not meeting the expectations of the program she was in and “have to worry about my probation officer.” She said to me, “Honestly, I don’t want to do any more programs. Like, I’m grouped out. Like, I don’t want to sit in a chair, I don’t want to talk no more, I don’t want to do that. I just want to move forward, and keep going. I want to be done with . . . and that’s it.” Shayla used terms from the drug treatment program (“relapse,” and later in the interview, “sobriety”), perhaps subconsciously recognizing that she might have to use this language to justify her desire to get out of the program.44 Although she was an occasional marijuana user, she had been constructed as an addict for the purposes of the court intervention and thus had to prove her distance from that identity to get out of the program. She threatened to “relapse”—­even though she knew she probably would have never used that terminology before, particularly about marijuana use—­ because she hated the program and wanted to give up on it. For Shayla, there were limited opportunities in her life, postconviction, to express and exercise

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responsibility, in part because of her adolescence, and in part because of her position in the courts. So her talk about “relapse” may have been one way of gaining a sense of power or control over her circumstances. Young people may develop unique strategies “aimed at gaining some control over their environment so that they could access individual freedom, autonomy and esponsibility.”45 Shayla had to identify as a drug addict to stay out of prison. For many teenagers, marijuana use was a way of coping with the extreme anxiety associated with their lives, particularly in the absence of their access to mainstream mental health routes to overcome anxiety. Shayla said that “for a person like me to see a person that grew up in a urban neighborhood, and they smoke weed, and they get arrested, and they have to stop smoking, and like, that could be really hard on them . . . It could change their attitude, their aspect, their outlook on life and could really shut them down as a person.” She said that the court forced her, through the imposition of the programs and controls, to “stop being the person you was before” without recognizing that by imposing behavioral standards and controls without being attuned to where they were coming from, it would create problems in their lives. She said that “for them to throw you back in the same environment where you came from, before you got arrested, and before you had to make these life altering decisions, it’s, it’s difficult.” She found that one of the biggest challenges came when trying to navigate her life as a teenager, “because you want to hang out with the same people, and you want to go to the same parties, and you want to see the same girls, and you want to do the same things you did before. But you gotta, you gotta wonder, well if they’re smoking weed over there, I can’t go, because it might tempt me if they are doing this over there. I can’t go, I can’t do this.” Shayla’s response to this dilemma was to simply stay at home and close herself off from the world: “So you shut yourself down, and you become antisocial, and you live in a box for the rest of your life and you don’t want to do nothing.” Shayla’s words could be interpreted as a kind of denial of her marijuana addiction and her lack of responsibility in avoiding her deviant peers. However, she is frustrated that the court interventions fail to recognize her life context: she said, “You have to stop being the person you was before,” despite living in the same place. She described wanting to “move forward, and keep going,” fulfilling her potential in the ways that she desires. After she was first arrested, Shayla also expressed a similar frustration that her capacity for change wasn’t recognized, saying “only my teachers from my school know what a good kid I am.” She said that they know about “my initiative, my passion . . . how much I value my education.” The program made her feel stuck. In response, she argues, it is possible to “shut yourself down” and withdraw. Shayla perceptibly recognized that the courts may never see her for who she is. At a meeting I



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had with Shayla on Rikers Island, she conveyed the complexity of her emotions about being accepted into the program to me.The following is an extract from my field notes about that meeting: to-­ I told her [her lawyer] that had spoken with [the alternative-­ incarceration program], and that they were willing to accept her—­ S responded emotionally (I think she even cried), and her demeanor seemed to express that this was more than just about being in a program—­it was about getting out, seeing her grandmother, and so on. I almost thought that being accepted might also represent being seen as a good person, as someone with potential. S also spoke about how much she wanted to go home, and how she was feeling about being “violated” by the judge. Shayla was never able to confer legitimacy on the alternative-­to-­incarceration program because she primarily perceived it as a means to an end—­freedom from incarceration. She located her aspirations and hopes outside of the program itself, in college. Shayla engaged in a form of “creative compliance” in which her participation in the program is on the surface one of compliance, but she is actually seeking out sources of change for herself that exist beyond that program.46 Thus, her process of change and growth is in part frustrated by her feelings that she is unable to exercise her abilities to express those capacities for change but is instead fixed into her identity as a marijuana addict, unable and incapable of change until she has done her time in the program. Like Shayla, Malcolm, a black teenager from the Bronx, was also sentenced to an alternative to incarceration program after he was arrested and charged with a felony as an adult. Malcolm was a taciturn, wary kid who came from a very large family. His mother suffered from an addiction, and he had bounced around from family member to family member, eventually ending up with an uncle who lived as a woman. His uncle would frequently come to court for Malcolm, and Malcolm, who always tried to wear the latest fashions and convey a cool demeanor, seemed pained and embarrassed each time his uncle stood up to the court bar to speak on his behalf or to tell the judge what Malcolm was doing wrong at home. Malcolm felt that the outcome of his case was preordained and that his acquisition of knowledge about the case was “not going to change nothing,” because the judge was “gonna do whatever he wanna do.” I interviewed him one day in his alternative to incarceration program, which was located in his neighborhood. Located in a small neighborhood storefront that had been converted into a program space, kids would sit around and do their homework, gossip with each other and program staff, and play video games after school. Malcolm was frustrated by his counselor there, who he thought was too hard on him, and was always threatening to report him. He said, “I don’t have no freedom now. I still gonna keep on going back and forth to court. Don’t know

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when I’m going to be locked up. In here, I could get locked up. I don’t have no freedom.” He felt that the case was interminable—­that it “could be going on every day.” Dejected and frustrated, Malcolm wondered what the point was of continuing on with the program and his court appearances, because he felt that “right now, I see it is going to be me getting locked up and then coming home. That is the way it’s going to end.” He said, “I’m trying to do better in school. I’m trying hard—­ain’t nothing changing . . . it been like that for eight months.” Looking back after his first arrest, he felt like “well if I’d just got arrested before and got locked up right there, I wouldn’t be going through none of this.” I asked him if it would have felt better to have just been locked up; he said, “It don’t feel better, like it’s not gonna ever feel better to get locked up, but that’s how they making it seem.” Malcolm later spoke about how the indeterminacy of the program “affects everything” and that his frustration over this led to his feeling that he may just want the certainty of jail instead. He said, “. . . still having no freedom at all it just makes you wanna do something like, makes you wanna go past your curfew, whatever.” Malcolm felt the program had set him up to fail and that jail was in some ways a more straightforward path to freedom. Like Shayla, he described the direct relationship between the frustrations of the program and his desire to break its rules. Just a few years later, he was arrested and charged with robbery in the second degree and sentenced to four years in state prison. These feelings of frustration with the indeterminacy, and perhaps the all-­ encompassing nature of the programs sometimes led some teenagers to resist the terms of the program, seek out forms of what the political scientist Cathy Cohen describes as “lived opposition” and “intentional deviance.”47 Approximately five months after he had been arrested and charged with robbery, Billy called me and asked if I could find out a way that he could actually get back in to detention (he had spent some time there, but was released by the judge), because the frustration of being out and not knowing when his case would end was “driving him crazy.” His feelings were compounded by the fact that his parents could not afford to pay for him to get the clothes he wanted for school. He expressed a desire to be in jail, where the clothes he wore and how he looked wouldn’t matter. He also said that he felt like going out and robbing someone so that he could either get the money he needed to pay for the clothes or face the almost-­certainty of a prison sentence. Cathy Cohen argues that some counter-­normative practices and acts of deviant resistance like the ones that Billy describes cannot be understood simply as acts of deviance or of politicized resistance: these acts, decisions, or behaviors are more often attempts to create greater autonomy over one’s life, to pursue desire, or to make the best of very limited life options. Thus, instead of attempting to increase one’s power



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over someone, people living with limited resources may use the restricted agency available to them to create autonomous spaces absent the continuous stream of power from outside authorities or normative structures.48 Billy’s urgent desire to gain some sense of control and certainty, and his willingness to put himself at risk of a substantial prison sentence, speak to the complicated nature of deviance he describes. His ability to exercise agency is deeply frustrated, yet he also expresses an extraordinary desire to engage in the only form of action he feels he has available to him, which is violent. The responses of the teenagers to the sprawling nature of their court cases points in part to the contradictions present in interventions that are aimed at protection and control but are experienced as sprawling and constricting. It is notable that the ways in which individuals like Billy seek to resist these interventions are through further deviance. Young people’s intimate knowledge with the repressive forms of governance they face is potentially a force behind their resistance to those forms of governance. This intentional deviance is a way of combatting the forces, albeit one that results in their continued enmeshment in the system. Expe rie nce s of Voi c e le ssne ss and Powe r le s sne s s Teenagers’ responses to these interventions relate in part to their feelings of powerlessness in their legal case and their inability to determine the outcomes in their case. They would often describe feeling hopeless about the indeterminacy of the interventions and paranoia about the legal actors in their case. A number of them felt that the legal actors involved in their interventions expected them to fail.These perceptions ultimately play a role in guiding the choices that young people make about complying with the interventions as well as their motivation for a greater opportunity for social inclusion.49 Young people expressed frustrations with both their voicelessness and their feeling that they were not heard even when they had voice. Terrell came to the McClary residential facility after he absconded from an earlier placement in a residential treatment program. He was arrested on a warrant and returned to court, where he was sent back from custody. He was frustrated with his experience in court because his lawyer told him that he would not have to do any time in custody. He said he would have more readily accepted his placement if his attorney had been forthcoming about its possibility: “I just think that the lawyers really need to listen to [kids] more.” Izzy, who spent nearly three years in custody for a robbery he committed at age fifteen, said that “they [lawyers] probably don’t even care” what young people think, and that he ultimately “didn’t feel like the choice was in my hands” when it came to the outcome of his case. These emotions are in part engendered by the

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structure of the legal case: it is often to a young person’s detriment to speak in court, because their pleas of innocence, attempts to explain themselves, or their expressions of change may actually hurt their legal defense. Thus, many defense attorneys, and even judges, will stop young people from speaking in court, except at moments when their speech may be safe, for example, during an allocution at a guilty plea, or when young people can describe their compliance with treatment.50 Dialogue has little room in this context, except for very narrowly circumscribed—­and potentially scripted—­moments.51 Other scholars have found that the expression of voice and participation are key to individuals’ judgments of fairness in the court context.52 Young people often felt that while the court was a setting in which their lives, motivations, failures, and progress were debated openly and at length, they could not play a role or offer any account of their own self or narrative of events in that setting. Malcolm, for example, said “I think it’s not right because it’s about me . . . and I don’t get a chance to say something.” Similarly, Shayla was frustrated about not being able to speak for herself, especially when the stakes were so high: for example, she failed a drug test in her alternative-­to-­ incarceration program and got into a fight with another participant, and was potentially going to be remanded to custody, but was unable to speak during the court hearing which was called in response to these incidents. She said of her court appearance: usually when you get up there like, you can’t say anything. I’m getting to the point now that, if she [her lawyer] doesn’t say what I want her to say, I’m just going to like cut her off and start talking myself, like listen here, Judge, like I appreciate everything [the program] has done for me, it’s been a whole six months I’ve been there, like I learned so many things, but I want to start school and I don’t want to stress myself out. Izzy noted that “we can’t even speak in the courtroom” and that there was a “zip on our mouth.” José said that his lawyer “didn’t listen” to him. I asked a group of young men at Hooper whether they were told explicitly that they could not speak or they just felt that way—­they said that they just “got the vibe” that they shouldn’t speak. Malcolm similarly recognized that speaking wasn’t going to help him get a better outcome in court: “when I first started, I was like, I could say whatever I want, but then again I don’t know if this would be a good thing.” Panama said that his lawyer “seemed like he was scared of the DA” in his case, and that he wondered, “why aren’t you defending me?” He also said that his lawyer never came to visit him while he was in detention, a common experience for the participants. In part in response to the criticism that young people are often tokenized rather than called on for their meaningful participation in reforms, system-­ involved youth perspectives have been solicited more frequently in recent



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years. It is not uncommon to see system-­involved young people headlining juvenile justice reform events, speaking at lobbying days, and helping to design reforms. State and nationwide commissions and panels almost always involve system-­involved youth; in fact, each state has a juvenile justice advisory group responsible for distributing federal monies to local agencies. These groups are required to have a formerly system-­involved youth member. This movement toward inclusion and voice was started by individuals who were incarcerated, who recognized that those who have been in the system should become a part of developing solutions about it. However, it was unclear whether this form of youth participation—­in a reform context—­actually elevated and expanded youth participation in the court, alternative to incarceration, and residential facility context. The dangers of tokenism reside in the risk that the participants already have a “credibility deficit” in the minds of the listeners, thus making the listening process objectifying as opposed to meaningful.53 Young people and their families also expressed paranoia about the court process, which seem to be related to their feelings of powerlessness and voicelessness in that process. Angela, the mother of Billy and Marcus, frequently spoke about how she felt that her son’s attorney and the prosecutor were “working together,” which she felt resulted in her son’s harsh punishment. Other young people and their parents frequently described their concerns about all court actors “working together” and were attuned to the conversations that took place between them. George’s mother, Rose, said of her son’s attorney, “It looked like to me he was right down with the DA, the judge, and all of them,” and that that her son had been “railroaded” by all of them. The participants often located their concerns about their public defenders around their pay structure, with one young participant noting that “they get paid to just look at your files—­it doesn’t matter if they win or not.” Victoria said that her lawyer in her case “wasn’t paid,” so “I knew he wasn’t going to go all out.” She said that “he did try to get me less time,” however. She said that “he never really told me anything,” but he did talk a little bit to her mom. Others expressed the sentiment that because the lawyers are not paid for each case, they do not feel the incentive to win, so they are therefore not invested in keeping young people out of jail. Rose said, “That why I call them appointed lawyers. Point you right to jail.” The participants’ fears about being excluded from court cases were often highlighted during court hearings, when defense attorneys would engage in collegial conversations with prosecutors or would speak at the bench with judges or law secretaries. In her research about the juvenile courts, sociologist Alexes Harris has argued that the juvenile court reforms of the 1960s resulted in a redistribution of power in the juvenile courts, granting prosecutors more power, and making judicial decision-­making processes reliant on “therapeutic” aims more tenuous.54 This has also potentially created the need for defense

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attorneys to appeal to the enhanced power of prosecutors. Although the collegial nature of the process was, for some attorneys, a critical part of obtaining a negotiated settlement that was, they felt, in the young person’s best interests, the young people interpreted these conversations with much more suspicion. Other researchers have found that young people lack trust in their defense attorneys if they are paid by the state.55 Social-­psychological and psychiatric discourses are often in tension in the juvenile court context, in which a substantial number of the young people who face a judge have been diagnosed with a mental illness. Thus, their displays of paranoia may be also “read” as indicative of signs of delusion, and thus a mental disorder, which could arguably serve to further alienate them from these figures of authority. Governmental actors are often perceived by young people as an undifferentiated mass, whether they are legally endowed with the young people’s trust and care, as in the case of their defense attorneys, or in opposition to them, as in the case of the prosecutors—­many of them represent “the system” that represses them.Yet criminal defense is intended to act as a “shield” for people from the abuses of the state.56 There are some well-­documented reasons for some of the obstacles facing defense attorneys in achieving this goal, including a lack of funding, adequate training, and supervision. There are, of course, a number of public defenders who are able to provide representation that is perceived by young people as supportive and vigorous. However, the prevalence of the perception by the young people that all court actors were in some way functioning together revealed some of the potential sources for young people’s subsequent decisions to withhold information from their attorneys or lie to them or to experience them as oppositional to their interests. It was common for teenagers to deploy information strategically with their attorneys. They often presented a narrative about their lives and cases that reflected their understanding of their attorneys as actors endowed with the power to represent a version of themselves, and not always faithfully. This happened in part because of a lack of understanding about the confidentiality of the lawyer–­client relationship, but also because of their sense that their attorneys were colluding with the prosecution; young people may also struggle to fully comprehend the concepts of confidentiality and client loyalty.57 This meant that a young person like Michael, who was charged with gun possession as an adult, may present his attorney with a narrative of the facts of his case that would be a kind of “truth” he felt would be best equipped to exonerate him. He said that a group of boys from his neighborhood, whose names he did not know, asked him to hold on to their gun for a little while. His attorney did not believe this version of events, but Michael was also fearful about revealing the identities of the individuals whose gun he held, for fear of retaliation.



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The young people, seeing that staff in juvenile facilities had a low assessment of their moral worth and value, would often also express concern that the “system” more broadly was rigged as a “set up” for their failure in life. Newz, an African American teenager who was a seasoned “Honors” stage resident who had achieved some of his own juice in his facility by acting not in a “bad” way but in a deferential and polite manner to staff, spoke about the younger people who first entered the system by saying, “A lot of people think they can beat the system, but they can’t.” He continued, “Nobody can beat it—­it is set up for you to fail.” He had learned that he could not try to make the program revolve around him by being bad because “you will fail.” Thus, he had made a decision to succumb to the program, to become institutionalized. His decision connected to Michael’s decision to become a “badass”—­g iving up meant, for each of them, succumbing to what the adults in charge expected them to be, either unruly fighters in jail or hyper-­compliant yes-­men. Sam, another older teenager from New York City who had been to Hooper twice after he violated parole when he was first released, felt “set up” when he was released from custody for the first time and was obligated by parole to return to a neighborhood where he knew he would be unsafe. I realized that in part what he meant was that his parole officer had a low estimation of his worth on the street. Although he made a request to his parole officer to live elsewhere, his officer told him “you’re gonna be alright,” indicating that Sam’s safety would not be compromised if he stayed in his neighborhood, and the officer refused to allow him to move. Sam was frustrated by his officer’s inability to recognize the danger that he felt he was in. Sam subsequently reconnected with his former gang to obtain protection and was then involved in a homicide, for which he was rearrested and sent back to custody.Young people like Sam speculated about the possible ways that judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys made money by pushing for incarceration; Tony, from Hooper, made a more concrete claim: he said that people in “the system” would rather the young men be locked up than give them a job. As we met in early 2009, shortly after the global financial crisis, Tony was well aware of and referenced the dire unemployment figures.58 Sam similarly claimed that the state may actually think that it is better to “contain us” rather than to “keep us out there causing havoc” because “that’s one less person to pay for.” I also often heard young people, both in my research and my work at the public defenders’ office, refer to the idea that system actors—­including public defenders—­were being paid to send people to jail and prison. Conspiracies about the system and its insidious intentions have long framed conversations about criminal justice system interventions and government interventions among poor people of color, particularly because the system has long been marked by its relationship to enslavement, brutality, and harm against African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of

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color.59 During the time I was doing my research, a prominent case was published in the news about Pennsylvania judges who were in fact taking money from private juvenile residential programs in exchange for the placement of kids in their centers. The phrase “set up” spoke in part to the undercurrents of paranoia that have framed conversations about criminal justice system interventions and government interventions among black people.60 It may also represent or be symptomatic of a recognition of the colonial relationship between the state—­ represented largely by white power-­holders—­and the people controlled by that state—­largely black and brown—­described earlier. A deep sense of cynicism and injustice about the criminal justice system has long existed among black people, whose relationship to the system has been marked by its connection to slavery, brutality, and harm. Feelings and expressions of insecurity and paranoia in the face of these interventions reflect the sediment of racially unjust forms of punitive governance aimed at the communities the young people come from. Distrust of defense attorneys, judges, and prosecutors flows directly out of a longstanding history of racialized repression on the part of state actors toward people of color. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption among some of the participants was that every intervention in their lives, however benevolently framed, ultimately leads to confinement. Police stop-­and-­frisk practices have tripled in New York City since 2003. In 2009, African Americans and Latinas/ os were stopped and frisked nine times more often than whites.61 “Getting hassled” by the police on an everyday basis, particularly in the context of the rise of more aggressive policing strategies, may influence the “collective consciousness” of those individuals—­and in particular, people of color—­who face the most scrutiny.62 The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that “history” is the foundation of habitus or dispositions, in the sense that unconscious processes and habits may be created by objective structures.63 The young people also recognized that they were treated as unable to comprehend or contribute fully to their legal case. Indeed, researchers have found that many juvenile defense attorneys often advocate for what they perceive to be their client’s best interests, as opposed to their expressed interests, which may have an impact on young people’s sense of alienation from the process but also reflects the strains of paternalism that may motivate such advocacy.64 The participants also experienced court procedures and discourses that were difficult for them to comprehend. Maya, for example, said, “Half the time you don’t really know what they be talking about.” This confusion perhaps contributed to the alienation that young people felt from the court actors. It has been argued that the construction of children in public is often one of “moral incompetence” and that this position may deter young people from “engaging with or seeking advice from adults.”65 The young people often



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expressed that they could not depend on the help of others to earn their freedom from the court processes. Izzy and Terrell indicated that they were unable to be recognized as key actors in their court cases. Both ultimately decided that their attorneys were not working in their best interests, and they thus shut themselves off to building a relationship with them. Izzy never felt or expected to trust his attorney; he spoke about him in the same tone he spoke about other court actors, as someone who was functionally involved in seeing him be incarcerated and who was indifferent about his future. In the interview selection that follows, Izzy does not distinguish between the judge and the lawyer when he discusses his experience in court: A: What was going through your mind [at the moment you got sentenced]? I: I’m doing good in [detention], I’m thinking I’m coming out in a couple

of months. When I go up, it’s a totally different story. Like I didn’t know nothing about the court system, so I was told lies from the bench. A: And what had you been told about going upstate to OCFS? I: Oh, if you do good where you at, you go before the parole board, which I knew nothing about, they will let you go home in a couple of months. A: And was that what your lawyer told you? I: Yeah, that what’s my lawyer told me. A:   . . . So he said OK, you’ll be sentenced, and there’s a good chance you could get home? I: He said don’t worry about it, you’ll be home in a couple of months. I could do a couple of months up top. Izzy ultimately spent a year and a half in an OCFS facility. These reflections about his attorney and the judge, made after being released from custody, demonstrate his alienation from those court actors, and his sense about the unfairness of the process. Izzy ultimately resigned himself to a period of custody, not demanding more of his attorney, not filing for an appeal in his case, nor investigating the case any further. When he learned that he was to spend much more time in custody than his lawyer suggested, he said he felt like he “can’t really do anything” about it. He felt defeated and simply ready to do his time and come home. He said, “I was just so, you know, it is what it is.” The young people often felt that they had no control over the outcome of their cases. Some felt that their future incarceration was inevitable. At the very least, they felt they would be enmeshed in a system of coercion, whether it was prison or foster care. Tory felt that he did not have a “choice” in court and that even though he felt that he had a personal capacity to change, he wasn’t able to prove it: “I just wish that it was my choice about whether I could leave [my residential program] early or not, ’cause my lawyer . . . feels I might make a mistake and go back to jail. I don’t feel I’ll make a mistake

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because I know I’ve been through here and I don’t want to be back in jail, but, I don’t know . . . see you feel like you want a chance to prove yourself, right?” Tory felt that there are particular dimensions of his personal processes of change that cannot be articulated in a simple way—­or at least the way that is demanded by the courts, which focuses on how few incidents he has been engaged in, how many treatment modules he has done, and how well he has done in school. Over the course of his time in residential treatment, he spoke about his changed perspectives on friendship and family, his feelings about maturity and being someone who his peers looked up to, and even his abilities to articulate some quite complex emotions. However, these dimensions could not necessarily be captured in a treatment report, or even, he felt, in his lawyer’s words to the judge. Some of the young people expressed more ambivalent responses to this feeling of powerlessness, in part because they were proud and confident as they progressed well through their programs. This was enhanced by the public assessments of change that occurred in the courtroom, with judges openly congratulating young people who were doing well in programs or even asking an entire courtroom to applaud for a young person who had done “well” in a program. Billy captured the ambivalence that accompanied this powerlessness when he said, “I don’t have no say so, except maybe to do well here [in the program].” He knew that he could grasp some sense of power through his active participation in his program, which involved group work and individual therapy, in addition to meeting regular reporting goals for the court (such as curfew, program attendance, and drug testing), which tended to be the more active markers of his progress in a court appearance. But he also acknowledged that he could ultimately end up in prison, regardless of whether he did well in the program itself. Recogn it ion and R e spe c t Some might understand these young people’s actions of avoidance or dismissal of the agents of authority in their lives as a form of “condemning the condemners,” or a strategy of neutralizing their delinquency.66 Yet this strategy may also reflect their feelings of alienation from “the system.” The young people could be responding to the humiliation engendered by their “social invisibility,” or the lack of “individual identification” they experience between themselves and the figures of authority in their lives.67 The philosopher Axel Honneth describes recognition as the notion that the other person possesses “social validity,” and as such, one can “do justice” to them.68 It is arguable that the young people believe that many system actors lack this “social validity” because these actors do not sufficiently recognize them.Thus, systems of liberal paternalism, which prioritize the care and protection of young people, and the need to facilitate their responsibilities and their agency through intervention,



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actually neglect to recognize these young people as agents. Young people’s feelings about being misunderstood may play a role in inhibiting their growth. Young people’s frustrations about their experiences in the system and their feelings about its lack of fairness are not uncommon experiences, particularly for marginalized youth of color. Researchers have found that young people, and especially young people of color, tend to view the police less favorably than adults.69 In their study of young people from New York City, the researchers Jeffrey Fagan and Tom Tyler found that cynicism about legal authorities increased among young people over time after their repeated interactions with those authorities, whom they viewed as harsh and unfair.70 Several social psychologists have explored the relevance of procedural justice for young people in the context of research on individual’s attitudes toward the police.71 This early literature found that procedural fairness mattered to young people and that even very young children may be able to make moral assessments about certain procedurally unfair circumstances.72 Class, race/ethnic, gender, and sexual inequality and injustice pervade the lives of many of the young people whom I interviewed and certainly may influence their deeply held beliefs about fairness in a broader sense. Thus, young people’s assessments of fairness and justice may also connect to their experiences of poverty and disadvantage. Lind and Tyler’s “group-­value” ­theory of procedural justice demonstrates that an individual’s investment in the fairness of authority is deeply connected to a feeling of inclusion in society.73 This theory notes the importance of the “feelings that one is viewed by authorities as a full-­fledged member of society.”74 The diffuse, expansive, and indefinite nature of the interventions that the young people face play a role in limiting their sense of freedom. It shows that some of these interventions neglect to recognize the role that structural impediments play in frustrating young people’s opportunities for exercising their choices, as well as the subjective domains of experience which may help them to grow, such as their opportunities to express their “voice” and their interests in their legal cases.

C hap te r 4

The Responsibility Trap

David Brooks knew what it was like to be considered unworthy. Before he became a Youth Division Aide (YDA) in a juvenile facility, he was a young black man growing up in one of the most impoverished and violent neighborhoods in Rochester. After attending college on a football scholarship, David took a job as a YDA, working with kids who came from the same neighborhood where he had grown up. By the time I met him at Hooper, he had worked for the state for more than twenty years. He was married, had children, and had built himself a comfortable, middle-­class life. For people in some parts of upstate New York, state jobs like the one that Brooks has are the only vehicle to a middle-­class life. After manufacturing jobs declined in the years following World War II, state jobs increased during the 1960s as New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller expanded the state’s public administrations and authorities; state colleges; universities; and other public programs.1 Line staff members at juvenile facilities like Brooks often made well above the median income for their counties, particularly if they worked overtime. One juvenile facility line staff member told me, “When I was growing up, anyone’s parent who worked for the state was like a God.” Brooks was invested in his job. He believed the teenagers under his charge could improve. He had worked in the system long enough to see behavioral and treatment approaches come and go, depending on the political climate or what was en vogue among the commissioners in Albany. Instead he offered the kids a kind of tough love approach. Brooks began working in the system in 1990, a unique moment in the history of juvenile and criminal justice. The Democratic governor, Mario Cuomo, was firmly committed to the war on crime and would lead the largest prison building project in the state’s history.2 Leonard Dunston served as commissioner of the state juvenile justice agency. A black man appointed by Democratic governor Cuomo, Dunston began his career as a street outreach worker. This experience led him to commit the agency to providing positive opportunities for development. He enhanced aftercare programming, enlisting the support of people like Eddie Ellis, a formerly incarcerated former member 98



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of the Black Panther party, to create a cultural enrichment program for young men of color coming out of facilities.3 But Brooks also arrived in the facilities at the beginning of a peak in youth crime in New York and in the country. The symbolic representation of those crimes was the Central Park jogger case, which happened in April 1989: five young men of color were accused of brutally attacking and raping a white woman in Central Park. Four of those young men were sent to juvenile facilities in New York. By 1995, a Republican governor, George Pataki, was elected in New York, and he appointed a new commissioner for the state’s juvenile justice system, John Johnson, who came from a correctional background. The year that Brooks started working in the system, admissions to the residential facilities increased substantially—­by more than 20 percent from the previous year. The majority of the young people coming in were black and Latino and male. Young people coming in for drug-­related offenses increased by more than a 500 percent and more than 125 percent for firearms-­related offenses. There were close to 2,500 young people who entered care in the system in 1990.4 By the time I met Brooks in 2011, there were just ninety-­nine kids admitted to custody that year.5 The group of young people in the facilities I studied were born during the 1990s. Significant political and economic changes happened during this time, which would have consequences for the lives of the young people and the staff in the juvenile facilities. Life in juvenile facilities cannot be understood without examining the broader political climate staff and young people exist in. Juvenile and criminal justice systems are the sites of state-­level projects of crime control, and their practices reflect state-­level ideologies about crime and offending. Criminologist David Garland analyzed the history of the criminal justice system in the twentieth century and identified a clear shift in state ideologies in places like England and the United States away from the idea that the state is fully responsible for preventing and controlling crime toward the idea that individuals and communities should take on these responsibilities. The new ideology focused on people charged with crimes owning up to their engagement in those crimes. This has been called a “responsibilization” strategy.6 Garland argues that responsibilization is not simply about government relinquishing its authority but rather is a form of governing-­at-­a-­distance, which actually extends the ability of the state to influence the lives of individuals. Responsibilization practices are linked to neoliberal political and economic policies, emphasizing individual freedom in the marketplace. Under neoliberal policies, “each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-­being.”7 To accomplish this, neoliberal policies have focused on limiting state spending on social welfare; privatizing previously public entities, such as prisons; and asserting the prominence of the free

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marketplace as a source of individual and societal success. Although there are no private prisons in New York, the state’s juvenile justice agency increased their reliance on a federal program that would allow the state to use federal funds to support the placement of young people in privately operated not-­ for-­profit agencies; this process began in the 1970s, and today New York City relies almost entirely on this program to fund the placement of young people. Yet the history of neoliberalism in this country has not been solely about shrinking the role of the state in individuals’ lives: political scientists have found that the governance of the poor has taken a peculiar turn—­the state has reduced social welfare benefits while amping up social control—­it is both paternalistic and neoliberal.8 Some have argued that the state, in offering what it says is a form of protection, actually engages in domination by imposing rigorous standards of behavior and respectability, punishing work regimes, and harsh punitive consequences for noncompliance with state agencies.9 In the youth justice context, the shape that this has taken has been what one scholar terms “repressive welfarism.”10 These transformations in the global economy were significant for life within the juvenile facilities because the impoverished children of color made up the great influx of children committed to these facilities in the 1990s.Within the context of the management of the poor, the term “personal responsibility” achieved an elevated status in social life and discourse during this time. During the height of welfare reform, we saw this in the language used by politicians and welfare workers alike. Mothers dependent on welfare were seen as being “irresponsible” and their personal problems and sufferings not as symptoms of poverty, of racism, or even of state policy but of their individual failures.11 This extended to their children: in the context of the juvenile justice system, the language and rhetoric used by policymakers and lawmakers focused on young people being held accountable for their actions, on owning up to the personal failings that led them to the system: arresting and punishing people was a direct way of ensuring such accountability.12 By 2008, the police weren’t arresting as many young people as they did in the 1990s in New York, but the idea that young people could and should be held accountable for their actions and take responsibility for them was a clear ideology expressed by many—­not all—­adult actors in the courts and the juvenile facilities, including by Brooks. Many criminologists have recently claimed that the philosophy of neoliberalism can be seen at every level of the criminal justice system. I would argue that in the juvenile prisons, the approach embraced toward young people is not purely neoliberal but rather rooted in the idea that young people should be guided into an acceptance of the responsibility for their actions. Staff members like Brooks embody the complexity of this approach, which includes an older and more enduring idea that has existed for so long in the lives of young people charged with crimes: that the young person needs a strong—­and even



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sometimes caring—­hand to support them in achieving change and in expressing self-­controlled and motivated actions. It is not quite neoliberal as much as it is part of an age-­old concern with the management and submission of the working poor; what previous scholars have less seriously addressed, however, are the ways that the system itself has become more recently oriented around the submission of primarily poor children of color, yet one where the staff members themselves in the facilities are also increasingly people of color.13 The transformation of the global economy changed the lives of facility staff members like Brooks. The rhetoric of responsibility resonated with those who had managed, like Brooks, to find stable employment in a stagnant rural economy. They believed that they had worked hard and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, despite significant obstacles. Facility staff, many of whom had grown up in impoverished upstate communities or had moved up to the area in search of a better life, sought out this state job in an effort to gain some social mobility in the context of an economy with limited opportunities for individuals from working class backgrounds with limited education. The New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) was willing to hire someone with just a high school equivalency and offer them a pay rate that exceeded that of many jobs in rural New York. To obtain and keep a job like the one that Brooks had on its surface seemed like a triumph of personal will and responsibility—­a success in the face of limited opportunities. People like Brooks also felt emboldened to talk to young people about pulling up their bootstraps and embracing a sense of personal responsibility because they had faced similar economic and structural challenges—­and seemingly overcome them. Brooks felt that he knew and understood the teenagers in the facilities because “I was one of them.” As he held his fingers just a few inches apart, he said that as a teenager he was “this close to being locked up.” He recognized the young people’s misbehavior and felt he knew what worked to control it and change it because he had been raised in the same way as they had. He felt that “these kids respond to fear” and that he was able to get them to follow his program standards because he conveyed to them the need to “listen to you because you can kick my ass.” He felt strongly that “respect is driven by fear.” This came from experience: when he was in the eighth grade, he was suspended from school. His football coach scared him, and because he didn’t want to fail that coach, he worked hard to go back to school so that he could stay on the team. Brooks felt like his background—­and those of other staff members like him—­was an advantage in his work with the kids. “I think they look at it as these guys are real,” and that “they know I went to college,” and “a lot of times they are surprised” by me. Brooks felt that the kids were “raised and bred to have people fear them,” but “that’s just the street mentality” that they come from. He felt that they’ve “got a wall so thick, it is hard to get their trust.”

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Throughout his twenty-­one years working in the facilities, Brooks, like many of his peers, felt he had become an expert in what worked for the kids under his care. His approach treaded the line between compassion and toughness. This style, shared with his coworkers from similar backgrounds, emerged out of their personal history and experience working in the facility, not necessarily what he had been trained to do. YDAs like Brooks are tasked with running a facility unit. They usually work with one other YDA, and they have eight-­hour shifts, but, during the time I was doing the research, they often worked sixteen consecutive hours at the facility as a result of mandatory overtime. They are technically responsible for movement and control, but because they are the staff members who spend the most time with young people, they end up doing much more with them than simply watching them, punishing them, and making sure they move smoothly through the facility. They talk them down from a crisis, play cards with them, suggest books for them to read, help them with their homework, talk to them about girlfriends, boyfriends, college, and religion. One YDA described his role as a “de facto counselor,” “role model,” and “house parent.” Another YDA said, “I’m the psychologist, bartender, and cab driver” for the young people. Brooks had honed his tough love approach over the years; he knew that building strong relationships with the young people enabled him to do his job daily. He believed in balance: it was important to be hard on the young people when they “acted out,” and it was also “very important that we have conversations with the kids when they are not having problems.” The Be havioral Chang e Syste m One of the expectations of staff members like Brooks at the facilities was that they monitor the residents’ behavior and decide whether they would be ready to ascend a stage in a behavioral change system. System administrators developed these stages to provide incentives for good behavior and consequences for bad behavior. The treatment program in OCFS, as in other juvenile correctional institutions, is a tightly guided system of change. The behavioral change system is an amalgamation of various cognitive change curricula and forms of behavioral modification that are used in juvenile facilities and correctional facilities across the world.14 The program has many stated aims, including reducing offending, encouraging prosocial behaviors, and shaping young people into responsible and productive wage earners. The institutions involved a mixed emphasis on obedience and punishment, reeducation, development, and treatment.15 Depending on the level of residential care (nonsecure, limited secure, secure), residents advanced to a new stage in the behavioral change system after an administrative review process. In secure facilities, it has taken over six months for teenagers to earn their first stage in this a behavioral change system.16 This



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system is premised on the notion that young people will “modify” their behavior in response to various consequences or rewards that it produces.17 However, even with the possibility of shifting behaviors to adapt to the program, it’s still impossible for many teenagers to advance to the highest stages. In the residential child-­ care context, there is a healthy debate about the generalizability of such incentives and earned privileges systems.18 This debate focuses on the idea that young people’s motivation to succeed inside facilities—­and thus their behavioral adjustment to such regimes—­may not be sustainable outside of the facilities, where parents rarely impose similar token economies at home and where behavioral change is not contingent on the threat of coercion and incarceration. This debate wasn’t happening much on the facility floors. Upon entering a facility, teenage residents are given a manual in which they learn about the stage expectations and rules they need to follow. The basic rules require deference to staff authority, compliance with rules and procedures, “work[ing] out problems” through treatment programs, exercising “self-­ respect” and respect for others, honesty, cleanliness, and being quiet.19 Major rule infractions could result in a meeting of a disciplinary committee or the arrest of the young person. Residents who violated facility rules were entitled to a quasi-­administrative hearing. If they commit a facility-­based infraction, teenagers charged as adults (Juvenile Offenders) can lose the opportunity to leave after two-­thirds of their sentence have been completed, the minimum amount of time they serve when they first arrive at the facility. Staff members like Brooks were expected to police the facility rules, and they had the power to write disciplinary slips, called “levels,” if a resident violated the rules. Teenagers in the juvenile facilities wore different color shoelaces that symbolized the place they were on the behavioral change system—­white shoelaces represented the “Orientation” stage, identified as the “Reluctant Learner” stage in staff training manuals, and green shoelaces represented the “Honors,” or highest stage (see Table 4-1). When residents were in the orientation stage, staff were expected to teach them that they “will be watched very closely by staff,” according to their training manual. In their own manual, residents are taught that if they follow the staff directives, “it will also improve the way you control yourself.”20 In the next stage (Adjustment, described as an “Enthusiastic Learner”), a resident is expected to work without direction, demonstrate improvements in programs, and to show “other evidence that you are accepting your placement and understand why you have been placed here.”21 In the third stage (Transition, a “Cautious Performer”), residents are expected to take more initiative in their deference to the rules of the program, using the “skills” that they have obtained in the facility (such as “anger control” and “problem-­solving”) and show that “you are able to say that you feel sorry for your crimes and take responsibility for your negative behaviors,

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Table 4 - 1 “The Stage System”

Orientation

Adjustment

Transition

Honors

Reluctant Learner (White)*

Enthusiastic Learner (Blue)

Cautious performer (Yellow)

Competent and Committed performer (Green)

Watched closely by staff.

Demonstrates acceptance of placement.

More initiative in deference in ­program, demonstration of skills and responsibility for actions.

Leader to peers and cooperation with program expectations.

*Color denotes the color of shoelaces which corresponds to each stage in the system. Source: This chart has been developed from information in the OCFS resident’s manual.

without blaming others.”22 In the highest level stage (Honors, a “Competent and Committed Performer”), a resident should be encouraging his or her peers to “be positive and to make good choices” by showing “improved self-­ esteem by cooperating with staff and program expectations.”23 The use of the word “performer” in the staff manual, of course, indicates the way that young people are “performing” well in the program. While Brooks was not shy about administering level slips to young people, and he, like all staff members, filled out the various forms and paperwork required in the behavioral change system, he was less interested in getting the kids to follow the facility rules than in getting them to do their schoolwork. Brooks felt strongly that educational success was their route out of their lives in the criminal justice system. While Brooks was certainly not alone in his interest in emphasizing schoolwork over behavioral change, many staff simply enforced the behavioral change rules because they were required to but also because they knew that obedience would help them do their work more easily. The principles behind the behavioral stage system that was used in the facilities—­and used in juvenile facilities across the country—­stem from the idea that, through these interventions, individuals will be prepared to make more rational choices about the world around them, particularly about committing crimes. The young person’s evolution toward these choices closely follows models of moral development developed by the psychologist Jean Piaget.24 Developmental psychologists have advanced theories of learning about children’s purported malleability that clearly resonated with juvenile justice administrators intent on creating interventions that could facilitate changes in “bad” teenagers.25 Psychological theories were first introduced into juvenile facilities in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century.26 Jean



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Piaget, an influential theorist of children’s moral development, argued that “development is a journey away from disorder and failure to discriminate between self and world, toward order and discrimination, a ‘transition from chaos to cosmos.’”27 Piaget was interested in “assimilation, accommodation, [and] adaptation,” and although he was influenced by psychoanalytic theories, his focus was seemingly on the processes and elaboration of cognition.28 Piaget argued that the moral development of young people involved their acceptance and understanding of social rules. Thus, if juvenile justice interventions could help rule-­defying teenagers to understand social rules, they may get set back on the path of appropriate development (because the assumption is and was that by committing crimes, they are inappropriately developed). The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, a follower of Jean Piaget, argued in his “cognitive developmental” theory that moral behaviors are related to the development of skills of rational reasoning.29 Kohlberg and others appeal to the notion that individuals are endowed with the “capacity for rational thought.”30 These theories have contributed to the perspective that cognitive skills can be enhanced and developed within individuals, ultimately leading to self-­mastery.31 These perspectives have arguably become influential in interventions used in juvenile facilities. Cognitive behavioralists believed that “crime was the outcome of insufficiently or unevenly developed rational or cognitive capacities” in individuals, and thus developed interventions which sought to address those capacities.32 Kohlberg and others argued that young people who engaged in delinquency had failed to advance from “preconventional” (or “rule-­obeying”) to “conventional” thinking (or “rule-­maintaining”) stage.33 These stages map closely onto the shoelace stages used in the residential facilities. Also influential in the thinking about interventions in the lives of young people charged with crimes is the criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi’s self-­control theory. These scholars argued that low self-­control is the primary reason for individuals’ engagement with crime. For Gottfredson and Hirschi, low self-­control stems from poor family socialization and disciplinary practices.34 Self-­control or “personal control” has long been a preoccupation of those involved in studying the causes of juvenile delinquency.35 Cognitive behavioral therapies like those used in OCFS, now dominant in juvenile justice interventions, were introduced in the 1980s into Canadian and American prisons in part because they appealed to the desire of prison administrators to introduce programs that were affordable and could be easily taught to front-­line correctional staff and thus lessened the system’s dependence on outsiders for program provision.36 For many years, those outsiders who arrived in prisons represented left-­leaning social welfare organizations, activist groups, and other organizations who were committed to prison reform. These individuals were deemed to be problematic and incendiary following the famous

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disturbance in Attica prison in 1971, in which the prison was taken over by the people incarcerated there and the state’s governor at the time, Nelson Rockefeller, ordered the National Guard to open fire on the facility, killing numerous guards and incarcerated people.37 Cognitive behavioralism also arrived in prisons and juvenile facilities in the context of a widespread rejection of traditional correctional methods that were aimed at addressing individual pathologies and the underlying causes of crime.38 These methods were seen by correctional administrators to be too time-­consuming and incapable of producing tangible results. Myriad evaluations of cognitive behavioral programs in the juvenile justice context have pointed to the ability of such programs to reduce recidivism.39 These studies have largely relied on the use of questionnaires and surveys that analyze the extent to which young people engage in “cognitive distortions” and randomized controlled trials of the impact of the interventions on subsequent delinquency. What they haven’t studied, however, are how these programs have influenced young people’s senses of themselves, their identities, and their life trajectories. The primary aim of cognitive behavioral interventions, to prevent reoffending, constructs an offender’s will or agency in offending as a malleable quality.40 However, these strategies cannot be untangled from the long-­standing history of concern by adults working in the juvenile justice system and other child-­saving institutions with the preservation of childhood vulnerability.41 In other words, it is necessary to look at these interventions as ones that embrace a paradox: they seek to stimulate young people to become active in their own process of responsibility taking but in a way that actually involves submission to the regime and the people who were its representatives. A number of adults in the system—­regardless of their own racial identity—­also embrace a desire for young people, and particularly young people of color, to act deferentially toward them. For them, the ideal resident is the one who is ideally compliant. Every Wednesday in the facilities, school shuts down for the afternoon, and a few of the residents have a meeting with their youth counselor, a teacher, and occasionally a YDA like Brooks. These Treatment Team meetings happen about once a month for each resident. The rest of the residents who are not meeting with their counselors usually sit on their units, with no planned activities. The youth counselors are expected to fill out a form called a “Resident Behavior Assessment” at this meeting. The resident’s progression on the stage system is based on this assessment. They are also sometimes also given “Behavior Improvement Plans” at the meeting (see Figure 4-1). Staff members also reviewed the number of level slips that a young person had received during the meeting. The number of forms that track a resident’s progress through treatment is often bewildering for staff members and residents alike. In addition to the



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Resident Behavior Assessment form, the counselor has to fill out a Resident Progress Report (see Figure 4-2). There is a different progress report for each stage that the resident is on. Paperwork constitutes a substantial part of the working day of staff at the facilities. Counselors and aides sit at desks on the units that look out over the main common area and the young people’s rooms, writing in enormous log books in which they register movements, unusual incidents, and young people’s participation in the “program” of everyday life. Staff members have the books with them almost everywhere they go. Young people were as conscious of the forms as staff were; level slips could also be given out for positive forms of behavior, and some young people put these slips in their parole files or what they called their “portfolios,” which were binders of positive information that they maintained throughout their time in the facilities. The residents also know that any incident required a stream of paperwork that was extremely burdensome for staff members to fill out. For both residents and staff members, the behavioral change system can feel scripted in that they must follow a tight set of rules and expectations that are laid out for them, rather than organically responding to the demands and expectations of the facility programing.42 The programs are largely aimed at encouraging residents to embrace the principles of the program, rather than discovering an internal motivation to be successful in the program.43 Staff members like Brooks recognized that much of their daily life was spent enforcing the rules of a program rather than having the time to build relationships and seek to understand young people and why they were in the facilities. Slam was considered by the staff in his facility to be a difficult resident. After he failed to complete the requirements of his community-­based alternative to incarceration program, his judge sentenced him to time in a facility located in a rural part of the state. According to a staff member at the juvenile facility who filled out a Resident Progress Report about him, Slam engaged in multiple incidents and rule violations, which are the markers of resistance to change in the institutional setting, at least in terms of his ability to be released and to receive a higher level stage. Yet he complied or exceeded with all of the expectations listed in the report, except for the expectation to “describe acceptable methods for controlling impulsive behavior and use them with staff direction.” In this case, Slam’s initial delinquency offense was less important in the context of the juvenile facility than his continuing misbehaviors after he was arrested, both while he was in the program in the community and at the program. While doing an alternative-­to-­incarceration program in his community, he lived with his grandparents, who had adopted him after his mother abandoned him as a child, choosing to maintain her drug addiction. While in residential care, Slam started receiving letters from his incarcerated father for the first time in his life, learning that his father was going to be released within

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months and wanted to see him. The letters from his father were affixed to the wall of his room. However, when Slam’s abilities to make choices and solve problems were evaluated by facility staff, they did not take his father’s incarceration and imminent release into consideration, even though they may have played a role in shaping his behavior in the facility. There are expectations of residents to behave in a particular way inside of the facility, and the “skills” they learn are supposed to have some bearing on the resident’s life on the outside. The residents are expected by the system to be engaged in this process. Yet staff members like Brooks knew that even though they were expected to fill out these forms, and, as a result of filling them out, were somewhat invested in their utility as a tool, for the most part, they relied on their own strategies for change that existed outside of the paper-­based systems. Brooks, like a number of other staff members, was skeptical that the behavioral change system fully worked to change individual behavior. He understood that some of the actions and behaviors that were expected of the young people may have felt foreign or unrecognizable to them. Brooks would encourage the kids to “fake it to make it” through the behavioral change program, because he felt he had had to do some faking of his own in his life. When the kids asked him how he got out of his neighborhood and to college, and he told them that “I faked it until it became a habit.” When the kids questioned him about the inauthenticity of faking it, he would reply, “Guess what? We all fake it . . . faking it ain’t that bad.” Brooks, like many staff members I talked to who had worked in the system for a long time, felt that the new commissioner of OCFS, Gladys Carrión, had introduced reforms that “made it difficult” to keep up norms of behavior and standards of consistency. Like many others, he complained about the introduction of more ombudsmen, who were responsible for oversight, to the system. During the time I was doing research, ombudsmen would come regularly to the facilities, and young people were encouraged to call the ombudsman’s office with complaints and grievances about facility life. Brooks said that a teenager told him that the ombudsman told him, “I don’t have to do nothing.” He said he responded to the young person by saying, “Do you think the ombudsman’s kid does nothing?” The staff members’ critiques of the oversight process may have been somewhat predictable; no one likes having outsiders looking in. There have been strong cases made for external oversight of prisons and juvenile justice systems, and it is arguable that the introduction of the ombudsman to the facilities was an important step in providing a level of accountability that had not previously existed in the facilities.44 However, one of the issues that the staff began to identify was that the ombudsman were not truly independent;

F igure 4 -1.   Behavior Improvement Plan

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F i g ure 4 -2 .   Resident Progress Report

they were in fact employed by OCFS, and their oversight of the agencies, and thus their ability to hold staff accountable, presented some degree of conflict in the facilities. Lo sing Cont rol It was nearly impossible to go to a facility without hearing staff members talk about how the facilities had descended into violence since the new



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commissioner had arrived. During the time that I was doing my research, the state relied heavily on overtime, as many staff members were calling out sick and missing work, in part, they said, as a result of some of the reforms that were happening.45 Brooks’s work partner, Barton, explained that so many staff members were on overtime in his facility because they were “injured like crazy,” an explanation I heard from other staff; their supervisors would tell me that they felt that staff were engaging in foot dragging and malingering, not coming into work because they simply disliked the way the reforms were making the facility operate. Barton noted that the job was “tough” on the kids of staff who worked at facilities. Barton’s father had been a YDA at the very same facility. His father had missed a number of his sports games growing up. He too was a black man—­more than 50 percent of the staff in the facilities was black. On a typical day in the facility, as the twelve young people he supervised start preparing for their mealtime, Brooks started barking at them to get ready. The young people lined up, shouting out their room numbers as they did. He told the residents that if weren’t on their doors in fifteen seconds, then he would start escalating the punishments against them. As the young people quickly fell into line in response to his commands, Brooks yelled at them, “We set the pace, you don’t!” He explained that as a young person ascended the behavioral stage system, he would no longer need to ask for permission to move freely about the unit. When we arrived in the cafeteria, the young people ate in silence in observance of a facility-­wide rule that they refrain from speaking to each other during meals. Brooks spoke about how one of his goals in leading his unit was to let the “house take care of themselves,” and that ideally it was important to “get the kids to regulate themselves.” Brooks felt that young people’s self-­regulation or self-­control would make their lives, as well as those of staff, easier. Brooks felt that it was important to instill in the young people the idea that “you’re not going to make it unless you’re doing good program.” He felt that the behavioral change rules would ultimately provide benefits to this group of young people who “don’t know how to follow directions” and that the program was intended to instill this sense in them. Brooks felt that “we fail if a piece of the puzzle is missing.” He gave the example of how there were four members of the gang the Crips on the unit at one point, and though it took them a little while to figure out that the Crips were there, once the problem was known, they could manage it. Barton and Brooks said that they believed in developing “consistency in the program” and that if they achieved this, their program worked well. Brooks also said that the program was also very school-­oriented, and they were focused on “challenging them educationally.” He said to me that as a young white woman, “You had people telling you you would do well,” but

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these kids did not have that (and nor did he, as he was growing up). He felt that the emphasis on school “doesn’t leave time for other bullshit.” But Brooks was also known for being serious and tough, focused on control and discipline. He said that “when a kid comes here, he knows he is coming to our house.” He spoke about how “we make our own schedule here.” He said that he and Barton had decided that if the young people on the unit didn’t do their homework, “gym won’t happen.” He talked about how it was important that the staff members were “on the same page” with each other and how that didn’t always happen, especially in terms of getting teachers on board with their ideas about how the program should be run. He said, for example, that he didn’t personally mind if a young person’s pants were not pulled up, but if another staff member on duty with him cared about this, they needed to enforce it together. He said it was important to recognize that the kids weren’t just dealing with one staff member, they were dealing with the entire staff. He spoke about how the unit is “almost like family.” He said that in some parts of the facility, there was a “prison mentality” among the young people and staff, which he rejected; he felt strongly that the mentality made life in the units break down. Maintaining Cont rol Brooks believed that the kids needed to feel “you’re in control” of the units to feel safe themselves; “We force the kids to adjust” to the unit, which “becomes an expectation.” He said that a young person usually enters his unit and is then in counseling for two to three days because he is “not conforming with the program” in the rest of the facility and that “he’s gonna realize that he’s not in control.” He said that most kids realize this. He gave an example of a kid who was in the counseling room and said that he was ready to talk to the staff, but Brooks said to the kid, “We don’t conform to you,” and the kid would have to stay in the room a while longer until he got “things straight.” He said he tells the kids, “We’re going to control you, you don’t have control.” On the wall of one of the units where Barton and Brooks worked, there were some caricatures of staff members that a young resident had drawn—­Brooks’s caricature had a picture of him saying a version of “Shut your trap.” Some other staff members felt that they needed to regain “control” from the young people, seeking out what they felt was a need for more “safety” in their environments. Many staff members felt that control had been yielded to young people in the new facilities; this was a particularly prominent sentiment expressed by white male staff members. A middle-­aged white male administrator at one facility argued that the young people, who he said were already “maladjusted and manipulative,” had become more so in the new environment. This staff member said that the new policies had “empowered” the young people, and this was “tantamount to putting a gun in their pocket and



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holding us hostage.” This narrative about a transfer in control was central to some staff members’ comments, often directly to young people, that more overt forms of control would make the environment safer. Staff members frequently expressed feelings of responsibility for the safety and rehabilitation of young people inside, but ultimately a kind of resignation about what might happen to them after they were released from the facilities. Their perception was that the teenagers in the facilities came from environments that lacked structure, and thus that the facilities themselves needed to impose a kind of order or “structure” over those young people’s lives; this perception was largely derived from stereotypes and assumptions rather than a meaningful sense of the lived realities of the young people. It was many years in the making—­the idea that a juvenile facility could offer young people who committed crimes a sense of daily structure was built into the founding philosophy of the juvenile justice system. Yet the young people themselves had a wide range of experiences as children—­structurelessness was not, however, always the defining feature of their childhood existence. The notion of “structure” was also reinforced situationally in the residential facilities: staff instantly separated young people at the start of a fight, and the teenagers were required to keep their hands behind their back whenever they walked through the facility (although this requirement was eliminated soon after the reforms began). The architecture of their common living areas emphasized the separation of young people through the arrangement of chairs in a row facing the front of the room, where the main security staff sat, and where there was a television, rather than in circles or in a way that might be conducive to conversation between residents. Brooks felt that OCFS had taken a “cookie-­cutter” approach to dealing with the kids in their reforms and that they’re “selling woof tickets” to them—­or providing them with empty promises of success in their future lives. “If you open up a crack for these kids,” he said, “they manipulate” the situation easily. He, like a number of other staff, felt that the agency was focusing on becoming kinder and nicer toward children without an attendant emphasis on structure and control. He felt that the kids “will exploit” those staff who are “nice.” One of the approaches attempted during the 1990s by facility administrators, when Brooks first began working in the agency, was to develop interventions based on a young person’s supposed risks of reoffending. Contemporary court interventions with young people in the United States and elsewhere in the world are often justified with reference to a range of empirical research that has been done on young people’s “developmental” pathways to antisocial behavior, rooted in the notion that there are certain risk factors, like exposure to physical and sexual abuse, interrupted school histories, and neglect, that have prevented children from meeting a series of developmental milestones

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that most allegedly normal young people have achieved.46 The court interventions are intended to provide a fix for those problems, primarily by using cognitive behavioral interventions aimed at adjusting young people’s decision-­ making and impulse control capacities—­those arguably focused on responsibility taking and responsibility making behaviors. Starting in the 1990s, when Brooks had just begun working in the system, the agency developed and implemented a treatment model derived from research in Canada that was responsive to the risks of reoffending and the “criminogenic needs” of young people.47 The interventions that staff used in the facilities include various kinds of cognitive behavioral programming, including Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Multisystemic Therapy, Moral Reconation Therapy, Aggression Replacement Therapy (ART), Structured Learning Techniques (SLT), Moral Reasoning, and Adolescent Portable Therapy.48 ART was introduced into the facilities by Leonard Dunston, the commissioner who led the agency from the 1980s until the 1990s, and the program was expanded nationally after it was first introduced in New York.49 ART involves teaching youth how to build social skills, to control their anger, and to develop their moral reasoning. Thus, it is consistent with the model of development proposed by the early developmental psychologists like Piaget. When I asked Brooks and his partner Barton what kinds of interventions they used on their unit, they said, “We make it up as we go along.” Brooks said that “ART is ridiculous, I’m going to tell you straight. It’s bullshit.” He suggested that the ART model didn’t mimic the real-­world provocations that young people would face on the street. Brooks felt that he should teach the kids that “you’ve gotta prepare yourself for angry situations.” He shared that if the kids told Barton to “suck his dick, he goes crazy,” suggesting that many individuals get angry and cannot simply control their anger—­that these provocations are a part of everyday life. Instead of implementing ART, Brooks and Barton would use informal techniques with the young people to teach them about managing their frustration. They would try to teach the kids that “you don’t always have to respond to something.” When I asked them if they felt that this was a kind of anger management tool, they said yes. Some staff members felt that straightforward behavioral techniques were best equipped to manage the young people—­that they should be yelled at if they made a mistake or restrained if they were being obstreperous. For example, a teacher, when speaking about his frustrations with a new disciplinary model in the system said, “If a dog comes and pees on the floor, you don’t talk nicely to him.” Another staff member discussed how he had employed the same techniques of sanction and reward with a young person that he had used with his dog, referencing his dog’s electric collar. Of course not all staff members embraced this strongly behaviorist orientation to young people, and, much like in any school or external child-­serving



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institution, the facility staff members represented a range of personal and political ideologies, particularly about young people’s pathways to crime and offending, that were often in conflict with each other. One of the interventions that was being expanded in the facilities during the reforms in New York was DBT, “the application of a wide assortment of cognitive-­behavioral strategies combined with a philosophical emphasis on dialectics.”50 Late in 2011, when DBT was being rolled out at Hooper, Brooks said that “whenever I hear acronyms, I get nervous,” because “it’s the next bullshit” program that they bring in, and “you may say that that they have mental health issues” but they don’t, because “they’re criminal thinkers.” He explained his opinion that even though the young people under his care were called teenagers, and sometimes children, they actually lived lives much like adults—­ “these are adults,” he said, and they are having sex, paying bills, and taking on the responsibilities of adulthood, but in a “less developed” mind. Instead of focusing on their feelings, he said, you’ve “gotta train them not to eat your ass.” A white staff psychologist who had worked at the agency for a number of years similarly felt that the treatment models that were being used weren’t appropriate for the population of young people in the facility: he said the new interventions are a “square peg, round hole” problem—­there is nothing really to “object to” in interventions like DBT, but that making it a success in the “correctional environment” is not something that was “intended.” He said that they need to modify these programs to the “secure environment,” noting that they had only been used in environments where young people weren’t under lock and key. Countless times, staff members would say that therapeutic interventions were inappropriate for a locked facility environment; their sentiments revealed an age-­old tension between care and control: they were expected to be jailors while also providing treatment, a role tension they struggled to manage in their lives. Brooks’s words about “criminal thinkers” didn’t come out of nowhere or simply reflect his personal philosophy about offending. In fact, he had been asked by agency administrators for years to use an approach with the young people that was rooted in the assumption that they engaged in critical thinking errors that led to their offending. These ideas were firmly ensconced in juvenile residential facility curricula, which included courses called “Thinking Errors” that were still in place in many facilities that also used DBT. Although DBT has a strong evidence base, the staff members’ interpretations of it suggest that they had not been fully immersed or even fully understood how the intervention could be efficacious in young people’s lives. The discipline of psychoanalysis, which formed the backbone of early interventions used in juvenile facilities, played a pivotal role in the development of ideas about adolescent criminality and criminal thinking. Psychoanalytic

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theories about the relationship between the mother and the child became the locus of concerns about child and adolescent adjustment.51 The American post-­Freudian tradition of ego psychology, manifested in the work of Anna Freud and Erik Erikson (among others), focused in particular on notions of self-­mastery, ego growth and defense, and adaptation.52 Ego psychology theories influenced the practices of those aimed at treating delinquency, such as Edward Glover, who founded the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency in England, and August Aichhorn, a disciple of Anna Freud’s.53 Psychoanalysis also played a role in juvenile justice practices and group treatment for adolescents aimed at halting “neutralizations.” Neutralizations are said to be “excuses and justifications that deviants use to rationalize their behaviors.”54 These neutralization-­halting practices, popular in juvenile facilities, which involve the prevention of youth engaging in “thinking errors” or cognitive distortions, are partially rooted in psychoanalytic theories about defense mechanisms located in the realm of the subconscious.55 Many of the treatment modalities used in the facilities encouraged the development of rational thinking in young people, and the elimination of cognitive distortions, “faulty beliefs” or “thinking errors.” Following is a sample of language from one of these intervention manuals that existed in New York’s facilities: You are capable and worthy of positive changes in your life but you are the only one who can make them happen. What would be a more responsible and rational way of thinking? I can clear up my beliefs. Many young people cling to the false belief that life is always fair to everybody else. The emphasis of the program modules is on engendering change in young people by helping them to eliminate their feelings of victimhood. The “thinking errors” curricula were influenced by theories which relate the neutralization of one’s deviant actions to the development of delinquency.56 Neutralizations could include inconsistencies, denial of fear, or failure to plan ahead.57 The sociologist David Matza famously argued that the focus of the juvenile justice system on identifying the source of young people’s involvement in crime to their family backgrounds and the environments in which they grew compounds the problem of neutralization, and thus, delinquency. Young people become aware of the discourses used to define their delinquency and draw on them in explaining their actions. However, by doing so they can be seen to be offering explanations for their behaviors, rather than taking responsibility for their actions.58



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As black men working in a facility filled with young men of color, Barton and Brooks felt it was impossible to evade discussions about the racism that existed in their lives and the lives of the young people under their care. The official curriculum about neutralizations suggested that a young person’s critique of racist criminal justice practices might be evidence of their evasion of responsibility for their actions; a number of white staff throughout the facility embraced this ideology. One white male facility director refused some books that I offered to donate, including Race, Crime and the Law, by Randall Kennedy (he had never read the book), because he said that young people needed to focus on taking personal responsibility for their actions and that the title of this book might suggest that they could blame racism instead. A white male judge, while speaking to a group of young men at Hooper, echoed this sentiment when he told them, “You have the keys to your jail cell in your control.” These notions that “getting out” of treatment are connected to an individual’s focus entirely on themselves is one that has increasing purchase in contemporary prisons, which have highly individualized forms of punishment and treatment.59 Other efforts to engender ideas about “personal responsibility” were evident in a number of staff members’ use of the expression “You come here alone, you leave here alone,” which was propounded by a number of staff members in institutions, often in an effort to discourage young people from engaging in conflict or seeking out the approval of their peers. It helped that the program of treatment interventions and behavioral modification constructed the ideal participant as wholly responsible for his or her actions.60 But as a black male who had grown up in a predominantly black and heavily policed neighborhood, Brooks knew that the young people’s relationships to racism and responsibility were complicated. He understood that the young people were naturally suspicious of the white YDAs because “kids know the cops are white,” and they saw the YDAs’ power as closely resembling that of the police. He felt that it was important to “break race down” for the kids in the facility and that “we talk about it.” He spoke about how “being yourself ” is important; implicit in this idea was that staff needed to present their genuine, unencumbered and authentic experiences of racism to the young people. Barton said that the kids would often tell him about racist staff members, but he said that he tries to tell the young people that “this is life”—­the racism expressed by the staff members toward them would be their reality. He said, “Sometimes you’ve gotta eat it” adding that “anything is a teachable situation.” He had distributed an article about how poor African American people have bad dental health because they lack insurance, and then he set up a group discussion on his unit about this article. Brooks’s sociological approach to this issue contrasted somewhat with his focus on young people’s need to follow the rules of the program but perhaps represented the balance

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that he felt must be struck between recognizing the structural forces behind young people’s experiences and their need to combat those forces in their personal choices and lives. He felt that it was important to teach young people about “pushing back” against the assumption that they would fail; he avoided using the words “fight back” because he felt that fighting had such negative connotations in their lives. Barton and Brooks would frequently tell the kids on their unit to “shut the fuck up.” Laughing, Brooks said that this expression would probably not be looked upon favorably by those in power, but that it was one which worked well on the unit, and was about teaching the young people to stay quiet in appropriate moments, avoid conflict when it was unnecessary, and realize when it was best actually to stay quiet to avoid further trouble. Brooks and Barton said that they ran groups almost every day on their unit, rather than the youth counselors who were technically tasked with such a job. During their groups, Barton and Brooks talked about family life and parenting with the young people. Brooks felt strongly that “they are all our sons.” They would tell the kids things like “we’re trying to save your life, son,” along with “shut the fuck up,” testing the boundaries of toughness and love. Re spon sib il i zat i on P rac t i c e s The requirement for teenagers to take responsibility for their advancement or progress in treatment is common to programs aimed at reducing offending.61 The central premise behind these programs is that the denial of responsibility represents an externalization of blame, and thus the displacement of the processes of change to sources beyond one’s control.62 Thus, the objectives of treatment—­that young people will move from having externally related goals to internally related ones—­is related to these models. There is an implicit link that is made between these “excuses” or processes of externalizing blame and a continuing inclination to offend.63 Yet criminologists Shadd Maruna and Ruth Mann, drawing from extensive research on the processes of responsibility-­taking in sex offender treatment, have argued that the relationship between excuse-­making and recidivism may not be so straightforward because excuse-­making itself is a normative reaction to shame, blame, and stigma.64 In his research on long-­term offenders who desist from crime, Maruna has found that there may be processes through which desistance from crime occurs because of some forms of self-­deception, in which one reconstructs one’s identity as a nonoffender.65 Young people noted the ironies of the thinking errors curriculum in their lives. Newz, who spent four years in two residential facilities and went through multiple cycles of treatment programming, said that it was nearly impossible not to engage in a thinking error, as defined by those who designed



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the curriculum for the programs: he said that eating too many cookies, for example, could be representative of a thinking error. The range of therapeutic offerings was not consistently implemented across the facilities, and some staff engaged in a kind of “mix-­and-­match”–­ style approach to the therapies, some abandoning previously used interventions in favor of the latest “silver bullet,” the words of one staff counselor, who brought me into his office to show me a discarded pile of books on Moral Reconation Therapy, which he had been asked to implement, albeit briefly. According to an assessment of the treatment interventions in OCFS conducted by outside evaluators: our conversations in several of the facilities revealed that some of the staff were confused about the distinctions—­or similarities—­between the various therapies and, more importantly, how they were linked to an overall agency philosophy regarding the treatment of committed youth. Staff and youth in one facility knew the acronyms of the different approaches (some of which were listed on a bulletin board) but had difficulty explaining what they stood for or entailed.66 I observed staff members experiencing the same confusion in all of the facilities that I visited. Starting around 2008, OCFS introduced new treatment modalities and implemented a new system of care, called the Sanctuary Model, which was aimed at recognizing the trauma that young people had experienced before confinement. The roll out of these new programs was different in each facility, and yet rumors about their implementation dominated facility life—­the changes were rapid and constant. Brooks felt that “I’m starting to think that the agency doesn’t care anymore” and that they’re just motivated by saving money. Agency administrators and key reformers across the state would often repeat the same claim in public forums and in the media: it cost more than $200,000 to incarcerate each child in New York’s juvenile facilities. Brooks said, “You can’t tell me that you’re spending as much as you are” when the school program was as inadequate as it was. Staff members like Brooks and Barton had the power to enforce compliance with the rules through the use of physical restraints. Physical restraints were used to control young people who were seen to be posing a threat to themselves or to the safety of others in the facility. The staff in OCFS facilities were trained to do prone restraints, which involved holding a young person face down on the floor while holding his or her hands together and then handcuffing the hands and legs together—­this is also known as a “hog-­tie” restraint.67 Staff can also confine young people in their rooms if they deem them to be defiant, or they can request that a young person be escorted to a

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room confinement area if he or she has resisted staff directives. He or she stays in that area until it is determined that he or she is ready to be released. Shortly before I began doing research, the rules governing the use of restraints changed, narrowing the criteria for triggering such restraints. This happened in part in response to concerns that restraints were being used too often as a tool for treatment and were resulting in high levels of physical harm to both residents and staff. During that time, each facility started keeping track of the number of restraints that happened in them, and there were regular statewide meetings of facility administrators and administrators in Albany, who would review the restraint reports. Facilities were pressured from the administrators in Albany to lower their use of restraints. The decision to place limits on the use of restraints was highly controversial among staff members who had long relied on the belief that restraints could be used as a means of securing compliance in treatment.They would often talk about this decision as one that was key in removing their “tools” for control. In the staff language, there is also a conflation of “rehabilitative assumptions with managerial prerogatives”; their reference to Skinnerian-­style behavior control also ultimately provides them with an easy route to controlling the young people under their care.68 Brooks said that if a kid said to him, “I’m going to punch you in the face,” he would “knock him down.” He said that he does this because everyone on the unit is watching; if he restrains the young person, the other kids will see this, see where he stands, and presumably be deterred from misbehaving. He felt that there were some units on the facility where staff members had lost control over the young people and that “kids are refusing to do program unless they get up with their friends.” He said that the kids there were “ganged up” there and that the facility had allowed them to be. He felt that there was no response from the central office about the gang problems and violence they were facing. Of the central agency administration, he noted, “They think they pay us to take an ass whupping.” He said that if staff members get hit by the kids, they are discouraged by facility administrators from reporting it. Other staff members spoke about restraints in the context of their own experiences with physical punishment. Mumford started working at OCFS as a YDA in 1988, shortly before Brooks. He had always worked at a secure facility, where young people charged as Juvenile Offenders were sent; many of those young people would go on to prison. Mumford, a black man, said he had learned that it was important to let the kids know that “there are consequences.” “When they go up to the big house [prison],” he said, “it is not up for debate.” When I first met Mumford, he was sitting on a unit eating some fruit, and he was making exaggerated faces as he put the fruit in his mouth, making the kids on the unit laugh at him. He wore a button on his uniform with the number 10 on it and told me he wore it every day to remind himself that his standard with the kids was a “10”—­that he would give his best



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to them every day.Yet, like Brooks, Mumford embraced the idea that the kids must be physically disciplined: “When you let the kids dictate the program without consequences,” he told me, “and no one is held accountable,” there are problems. He said that “whipping” kids is a “deterrent.” When he was a child, his father would beat him if he did something wrong. His mother would say to him, “Wait until your father comes home,” and he said that he would hide under the couch and “piss in bed” in fear of his father. Interestingly, he implied that this was a strategy that worked to impose discipline in his life, even as he described the extreme fear he felt of his own father. He felt that “a little physicality” worked with this group of kids. Ramirez was another frontline staff member who had grown up experiencing physical discipline in his own family. In his fifties, he had relocated to upstate New York from the Bronx, where he had grown up. He had also worked for the agency for many years. He felt that under the new system, “I just think they took too much away” from the staff, and how “I grew up and used to get the belt.” He said that because he was from the Bronx, “I see some of the stuff that they gotta go back to” such as gangs, and “some of the things we put up with now you never heard of ” in previous eras. “There are good kids here, but they get lost,” he said. Ramirez, like many staff members I spoke to who had worked at the agency for some time, spoke wistfully about the agency’s past: he said “I used to love these kids,” that “they would take care of me,” and that there was “no disrespect” from them. “I used to take care of them,” he said, and “I used to read these kids.” He, like Brooks and many other staff members, felt that things would fall apart for the kids when they returned home: he said that when the facility sends them home, “it’s like sending an alcoholic to a bar to work.” Barton similarly felt that the young people were simply returning to environments where they would regress: “a lot of them go back to the neighborhoods they are from, and their survival techniques set in.” He felt that “you first have to train the young people that you can’t punch someone in the mouth.” Brooks similarly felt that there were “very few success stories” after the young people had left the facility. Like other staff members who felt the young people returned to structureless environments when they returned home, he said, “You take a lion from the jungle and “he’ll conform,” and you put them back “out there” and “they’ve gotta survive.” Barton added that until the kid “feels safe” and “until he doesn’t feel he will be victimized,” he will not be able to take on the program. Around 2013, a member of the State Commission on Corrections, an oversight agency that had access to video surveillance footage from the facilities, illegally released footage of young people assaulting a staff member, and those videos had circulated throughout the news media. Many staff felt vindicated by the videos—­that they showed how difficult they felt their jobs were. Brooks, like many staff members, felt that they had been portrayed as brutish

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and harsh. He said, “We have been so villainized in the media” and “I don’t think anyone understands who we are dealing with,” referring to the young people under their care. “I don’t blame Carrión,” he said. “She’s just another commissioner who doesn’t know.” The approach that Barton and Brooks took to the young people—­the idea that they were their collective responsibility—­clashed somewhat with the official, on-­paper ideas about individual responsibility that circumscribed the young people’s behavior in the facility. Under the models of development embraced officially by the agency and promulgated through the paperwork, a young person who never moves beyond the white shoelace stage—­perhaps because he or she talks back to staff too much or gets in too many fights—­is considered to be unchanged or underdeveloped. Rather than perhaps what some have termed an African worldview, which might value collective responsibility for problems and issues, the value-­orientation in the facilities is centered around individual responsibility, or what has been identified as a more middle-­class, white, and Western orientation to responsibility.69 In fact, it was on Brooks’s unit where I witnessed the only group work I saw during my entire research experience. The group discussion was focused on drug and alcohol.Young people were expected to write and present a personal biography, which included an account of their dependency on drugs and alcohol. One young person started arranging chairs in a circle in the middle of the unit, which typically had the chairs facing forward, toward the television. Everyone sat down in the circle, including me, Barton, and Brooks. After everyone sat down in a circle, the resident who had been pulling the chairs into a circle started asking a series of scripted questions to the resident who had done his biography. He asked questions about the resident’s drug use history, which included how often he used, what triggered him, who used in his family, and so on. The questions and answers were somewhat formulaic; each resident read from a piece of paper in front of them. After the questions and answers, Brooks initiated a discussion about the residents’ responses to the questions. Brooks felt it was important to note that tobacco was a substance and said that it was important that the resident had put tobacco down on his form about his drug use history. Another part of the discussion was about marijuana use and dependency and whether there were differences between heavy use and addiction. One resident talked about how he used heavily but that he didn’t think he was addicted. There was one other resident in the room who said that he had a marijuana addiction problem. After the discussion, Brooks asked the residents to go around the room and gave feedback to the resident about his presentation. Most of his responses were monosyllabic and brief. Brooks said that we then had time for another presentation, and so another resident went to his room and got a piece of paper out to read from. This resident seemed a bit older, and it turned out that



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he had been on the unit for longer and was about to be released from the facility. His piece was about responsibility, more generally, and about some of the things he had learned in the facility, like about humility, learning how to “shut the fuck up,” and recognizing where he had gone wrong. Some of the things he said sounded a bit like platitudes about personal responsibility—­simply regurgitations of facility-­based language—­but some of them were quite specific to his situation, making it clear that he wasn’t just repeating back what was expected of him. He also spoke about the need to ask for help. After the resident spoke, he got quite a lot of positive feedback from Brooks and Barton. They talked about how far he had come, and Brooks said that it was a shame he was leaving so soon because he felt that he needed more time with the resident to really feel like he was making progress with him. Brooks said that there was another resident in the facility who was charged with murder, but he was a “good guy”; yet the crime, which took place in just fifteen seconds, meant that his life was essentially over. The group discussion that followed included a complex mix of meanings and messages; on the one hand, the young people were expected to engage in scripted programs of change; on the other hand, their own processes of and struggles with change were recognized by the staff members who knew them for so long and so well. Shortly after the group meeting that day, one of the residents on the unit came up to his door and gestured toward Barton, asking to speak with him. He was unable to get out of his room because the residents were locked down in their room during the shift change that was happening in the facility. Barton went into the resident’s room and spoke with him for a little while. He came out and said that the resident was feeling paranoid that he might be jumped by other residents (he had remained in his room during the entire group session). Barton and Brooks explained that the resident was going to be released in a month but had nowhere to go and he was “unraveling.” Apparently, he had come to the facility from foster care, and he had stolen from his foster parents, which is why he was arrested. He had exhausted a number of his foster care placements, and the state had not found any other placements for him. The staff explained that the counselor had been searching for placements, but there wasn’t anywhere or anyone who would take the teenager. The shift change began, and two new staff members showed up. The four staff members began talking about the teenager. All of the staff seemed to agree about their concern about the kid, and the fact that he was unraveling. They also spoke about their feelings of helplessness in the matter; technically, the resident’s community placement was the responsibility of his youth counselor, who wasn’t really doing any work to ensure that this placement would happen. The YDAs had no responsibility for aftercare placements and in fact were discouraged from helping young people with them. One of the YDAs

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who had just arrived spoke with me about how she thought that there must be good mental health placements in the city, and she thought that he might have a diagnosable mental illness, but she did not know for sure. In fact, although the line staff members spent the most amount of time with the young people, it was only the counselors or the mental health staff, who saw the young people more infrequently, who knew whether they had a mental health diagnosis. The YDAs felt frustrated that nothing was happening for this young person who was going to get out, so several of them had taken it upon themselves to try to research placement options for the boy. While we talked, he paced back and forth in his room. We would all occasionally glance back at him. Brooks loved to read, and he would often bring books from home for the kids on his unit to read. He recognized that “these kids love to read” while they were in detention and in the facilities because it kept them occupied in the face of extreme boredom, helped them to feel a sense of escape, and gave them access to worlds behind the bars. In particular, they loved the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games series, and other fantasies or books by Walter Dean Myers, a young adult author whose books captured the lives of young African American teenagers. Brooks and other staff would often talk to the young people about the books they were reading at home with their own children. I observed Brooks and several other staff members engaged in reading clubs on their units. Brooks and Barton kept in contact with a lot of the kids after they left confinement, which a number of other staff members told me they did too. Officially, the agency barred staff from staying in contact with young people to protect the young people from the possibility of sexually predatory behavior. But the young people themselves would frequently call back to the facility, and the staff members felt conflicted about following the official rule. “When they get in trouble, they call us,” Brooks said, “What would we be if we turned our back on them?” He continued, “To do this job correctly, you better be invested” in the young people. Brooks felt that the central administration of OCFS “haven’t drawn the link between education and recidivism.” His assumption was that if a strong academic curriculum was brought into the facility, then kids are “thinking more,” and they also know more about the “consequences of their behavior.” He said that as soon as the kids started caring about their grades, the staff members feel like “we got them.” For example, they noticed that there was a gap in the schedule between 9:30 and 11 am when no educational services were happening. They created a study time during that gap. The People– ­P rac t i c e R e lat i onshi p There were a number of facility staff and administrators who engaged in small acts of resistance against the broader structures of the program to try to facilitate better outcomes for young people. Criminologists have identified



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a gap between theory and practice that exists in present-­day criminal justice programming where staff members exercise their discretion to try to meet the immediate needs of the people they are working with. This gap is where the work takes place that arguably reveals some of the flaws in the architecture of the behavioral change model. It was revealed to me when I would observe staff members affectionately hugging a young person who had made parole or releasing the shackles from them, temporarily, while they were in court. It was also revealed to me in the complex interactions between facility and state administrators, facility staff, young people, and their families, when those administrators would come to recognize that it was often the power of their discretion that could be exercised to bypass a state requirement that stood in the way of a young person’s success. In short, these moments of discretion confirm that the staff and administrators are not automatons of a binding system; they are human beings responding to a restrictive and powerful state apparatus. The small moments mattered in conveying that. The people and practices in facility life are like overlapping tectonic plates. The practices, envisioned by theorists and academics, translated by administrators, are intended to address the perplexing puzzle of youth misbehavior. The people—­line staff—­are expected to implement these practices. Yet facilities are living, breathing organisms—­the people in them do not always react and respond to the practices in the way intended by their creators. As the people meet the practices, like tectonic plates, the seams are not always aligned. While there is no single story or even clear typology of a frontline staff member, David Brooks conveys the complexity of the people–­practice relationship. For many outsiders seeking to reform facilities, Brooks’s and others’ appreciation of tough talk and physical restraints were antithetical to their view of the appropriate treatment of children; yet throughout my time in the juvenile facilities, I witnessed staff members like Brooks embrace this perspective while also expressing extraordinary warmth toward young people. These seemingly contradictory positions may have reflected their somewhat complex relationship to their jobs. As individuals who were expected to focus their day on getting young people to follow the rules of the facility, with the broader goal of translating that rule-­following into conformity in the community, yet who saw that rule conformity was more about performance than actual change, the staff would often grow frustrated and fall back on ideas and beliefs that felt familiar to them—­those they knew from childhood and from their own socialization processes. Their engagement with the treatment programming, and thus their uses of it in the context of facility life, thus reflected their ambiguous relationships to conformity, defiance, violence, and trauma. The staff perspectives on treatment programming may have also reflected their ground-­level responses to what they saw as the limits of treatment programs that, in their minds, embraced an irrelevant and inaccurate view of

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young people’s capacities for change. Recent critics have challenged the theoretical underpinnings of the rational problem solving model, drawing from recent advances in cognitive science to point out that “when making judgements individuals do not necessarily go through a process of sustained reflection and logical analysis but often rely on the immediate perception of situations and more intuitive processes.”70 The services provided to residents are linked to the assessment that young people are administered at intake, despite research indicating that none of the risk assessment tools used had prescriptive validity or reliability.71 There have also been no systematic evaluations of the quality or effectiveness of facility-­ based programs, although some of the models themselves are ostensibly “evidence based.”72 In recent years, the state has made efforts to used cognitive behavioral approaches that are more strongly evidence based, but the question remains as to whether those programs, even as they are refined, will raise similar challenges for young people and staff. The criminologist David Garland suggests that the recent trend in harsher penal sanctions in places like the United States is partly driven by the idea of people who offended as “rational opportunists or career criminals whose conduct is variously deterred or dis-­inhibited by the manipulation of incentives.”74 The construction of the rational offender who is governed through a system of punitive interventions has played a role in the development of interventions aimed at reducing offending. Cognitive behavioral therapies embody these concerns.

C hap te r 5

Change from the Inside The walls of the institution cut the child off from real life, force him into fantasy experiences so that it becomes difficult for him to correct his wishful thinking with reality. —­August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth

When vehicles enter Hooper secure center, they must drive into a chain link enclosure, the entrance and exit of which are controlled by an officer watching a video monitor. Drivers wait in the enclosure until they get approval to enter from the staff inside the control booth. The facility has a preapproved gate list for each day, which allows for a relatively easy entrance for those on the list. As I drove up to the facility one day, I saw four state police SUVs pull out of the enclosure, one of which was the canine unit. After I entered the facility through the pedestrian walkway, which included a similar chain link enclosure, I learned that the state troopers had just finished searching the facility. The search had lasted for two hours. During that time, a transport van from a New York City detention facility, with one recently sentenced teenager and the staff member tasked with escorting him, had been sitting inside of the chain link vehicle enclosure while the search was conducted. The glass for the passenger seats of the van is encased in steel mesh, so the teenager could not see out of the van. I entered the facility at the same time as the staff member who had transported the teenager. He was a middle-­ aged black man. As he signed in, he wearily told the staff inside of the control booth that he had been sitting in the van for two hours outside the facility waiting for the search to clear. After a three-­hour drive from New York City to the facility, the young person and staff member had to sit in the chain link enclosure together, waiting for the facility to be “cleared.” The police conducted a search of the facility after a staff member reported a smell of marijuana on one of the units. The report of the smell triggered a call into the state police, who arrived to conduct a full facility search in which they upended beds, spilled food, ruffled through papers, and shook out books, looking for the offending substance. The search left young people and staff frustrated and upset. 127

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In the facility, there is a classroom used by students in a specialized educational program that has windows facing out into the chain link enclosure. During the searches, the young people and staff who were in that classroom saw the detention van sitting in the enclosure—­the kids recognized it as the van that many of them had come to the facility in from New York City. They talked about how unfair it was that the young person who was about to start his first day in the facility had spent much of it sitting in the van, unable to look outside of it. In many ways, the teenager in the van represents young people’s experiences of change from the inside—­“the inside” represents their views on change from inside of locked juvenile facilities, but it also represents the internal processes that they undergo while they are inside of these controlled spaces. Often, we see and read about young people’s experiences inside of juvenile facilities and in the system as those filled with abuse and exploitation—­through representations like photographs or documentaries of teenagers in confinement and stories about the violence and punishment in the facilities.1 If we view the van from the outside, we might perceive the unfairness and randomness of a system where security trumps dignity and where eliminating drug use in the facility, and holding individuals responsible, becomes prioritized over ensuring that the immediate needs of the individuals—­the youth and the staff—­in the van are met. We would see a young person exit the van in shackles, a small figure overwhelmed by the apparatus of incarceration. Yet, if we enter that van, we might experience a different story. We might see one where the divide between system and youth is not as clear—­where the young person and the staff member have shared interests and pains; where the young person copes with the ambivalence of his position, free from the facility, yet confined; and where the full confusion of confinement is represented by the design of the van itself, an enclosed space where the person inside has no ability to see or understand where he is being transported or what is happening to him. This, in many ways, is the experience of confinement for so many young people. Facility life does not tend toward extremes of violence and chaos. Rather, it is filled with boredom, introspection, confusion, and alienation, among other emotions. These emotions help us to understand the harms of incarceration in young people’s lives; for if a facility does not tend toward abuse and violence yet remains profoundly stifling for so many inside, is it actually allowing them to grow, develop, and build their characters? In many ways, what is most crucial is young people’s route into the facility. We know already from the experiences of Michael, Maya, and others that teenagers enmeshed in the criminal justice system are considered to be “bad,” ungovernable and discardable. So many of the teenagers who enter juvenile facilities across the country are trapped in a moment of alienation and despair before they enter those facilities—­they are stuck in their lives,



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deemed unworthy, ungovernable, and unmanageable, immersed in systems of control that are beyond their control. For so many of the young people, the crime they committed, or their probation violation or parole violation, did not hold as much significance for them as the experiences they were having before they were arrested. Their arrest may have been one of many cases they had, or a short moment in their rapidly unfolding teenage years, or even the product of being the enemy of their local police precinct. Even for those charged with significant and serious crimes—­rape, homicide, or a serious and violent robbery—­their lives before committing that crime, and surrounding that crime itself, were often full of profound and difficult concerns and questions. Their sentence to a juvenile facility loomed large in their lives—­they were being sent to a place that communicated to them that they were flawed, wrong, and in need of change in their lives. Their experience in the facility thus represented a kind of deep freeze in their lives, in that they were removed from their homes and their lives to deal with themselves. The structure of the juvenile court system and its goal—­to intervene in children’s “best interests”—­also communicates to them that their crimes are symbolic of broader flaws in their characters, their moralities, and their sensibilities. And yet, the adult ideas about what was bad and wrong with them often differed profoundly from their own ideas about what might have been going wrong or have been difficult in their lives. As with many teenagers, the group of teenagers entering the facility had responsibilities, families, and lives that presented them with complex challenges. Many of them were also trapped in educational, legal, and social service systems with little power to advocate for themselves and limited choices to extract themselves from their homes, lives, families, and systems they often found to be oppressive and alienating. As the British criminologist Jo Phoenix argues, the group of young people who are in juvenile justice systems are often overpoliced and underprotected: “young people are held to account (i.e., punished) for their actions when many of those actions are shaped by conditions over which, because they are still children in the legal sense and at times developmental sense, they are utterly unable to change or affect.”2 It is arguable that this precarious position of being overpoliced and underprotected resulted in young people’s despair and alienation both before and during their time in confinement. When they entered the juvenile facilities with those emotions and were forced to encounter adult-­constructed and managed interventions that often disregarded those emotions, they developed strategies to cope that were unique to their age and to their experience. On th e St re et s: L i fe b e fore Confi ne m e nt Olivia knew what it was like to feel underprotected. She remembers the day she first met Damien, an adult charged with protecting her, but who

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instead exploited her. She was twelve years old, living with her elderly grandparents, and had recently started taking care of them after her grandfather had fallen ill. She would go shopping, cook for them, and take care of their everyday needs. She said, “I used to clean for them. They used to make sure that everything, everything was all right, laundry and all that. And, basically I just made sure they had what they needed.”When her grandmother started getting sick, “basically what I did was just like, okay, I don’t know how long I’m going to have my grandparents, so let me just do what I gotta do. So I could survive.” That is when Damien offered her a solution. She remembers what she was wearing when she first met him: “I had on some black tight jeans with a pair of black flats and a white shirt with a little top, and I had a bra on, and I had it stuffed with socks, and I had my hair swooped to the side, coming down.” Olivia was born a boy, so the socks helped give her the appearance of a girl. “When I was younger,” she said, “I wanted to be a woman, like a girl, not even a girl, I wanted to be a woman, cause I never felt young, I never really had a childhood, so I felt like, I had my titties, I was twelve years old with my fake little titties.” Damien picked Olivia up that day, even though she put up some resistance to him: “I told him like I don’t need no ride, I’m fine. But the thing was I was only twelve years old, so the thing was I was feeling grown. I was always feeling grown so like it was just crazy. . . . I used to do it on my own so I was really waiting for somebody to come through, but him the way he approached me at the moment I didn’t really like want to you now like to get in like I wasn’t feeling it, so I crushed him off but when he came back (laughing), it was over.” She was drawn to his light brown, watery, cartoonish eyes. Damien let her be who she wanted to be—­he called her his “baby boy” and paid to get her hair done like a girl, but let her dress like a boy.3 Just a couple of weeks after that, Damien asked her, “Are you going to let me be your pimp?” She was shocked. She said, “When he asked me that, the first thing that came to my mind was, you need somebody to love you.” So she agreed to work for him. She would pretend she was leaving for school in the morning, but Damien would pick her up instead. Damien and Olivia started traveling around the country so that Olivia could act as an escort. It was not the first time that Olivia had sex with older men; when she was ten, she had sex with a man in his late twenties. Olivia’s therapists called this act “rape,” but she denied this label. She said that her first lover “changed my life,” and that “I thought I didn’t want nobody else but him.” When she was out doing work for Damien, Olivia would tell her grandparents that she was visiting her father. Olivia’s grandparents never found out what she did. She felt an enormous amount of guilt. Olivia led a shadowy existence, with no adults really caring for her. Even Damien withheld money from her, so she lived under an illusion of survival: he would pay for her to get her hair done and for her to buy presents for her family members, but he



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never actually paid her for her work. I asked her how the transactions worked, and she said: O: well . . . Shew, that was the worst part of all. That was the scariest part,

A: O: A: O:

A: O:

because when you think you that you being slick, and that you gonna get a certain amount more, and that you can hide what he think he getting, and it’s one of his regulars, and he call them to check and see if you made it behind your back, and you go to him, and he know what you supposed to have and you hiding it, it’s hard. It’s just crazy. So you’re supposed to give everything? You’re supposed to give him everything . . . And his job is to give you food money, and stuff like that? He gave, with me, what he gave me really, he didn’t really, honestly he didn’t really give me nothing, cause I was really, you could say, staying with him, cause I used to like go, like I told you I used to take care of my grandparents in the day and I used to go out at night. When I was out at night, doing what I did, I used to stay with him, and the next morning, I would get up and go take care of them. So it was like the only thing that he provided me with what I didn’t really need because I had on my own, he provided me with shelter, that’s it really. And whatever clothes I felt that I needed, whatever shoes I felt I needed, he bought ’em for me, and he gave me the money. If I needed money he woulda gave it to me. But when I would go out and do what I do, and give him the money, he wouldn’t give me nothing else. Cause at the end of the day, I would be sleeping right next to him. And that was your reward? That was your compensation. That wasn’t my reward for it, but that was his way of rewarding me.

This was the context in which Olivia arrived in OCFS custody after she was arrested and adjudicated as a delinquent when she was fifteen years old. She had been in and out of family court, mainly for prostitution charges. She was initially placed in a private residential program but was then modified to a state juvenile residential facility. Olivia’s placement in confinement involved not only an immediate severing of ties from her pimp and from the lifestyle she was living, but also separation from her family and the uncertainty of an indefinite period of placement. Although Olivia recognized the limits of living a life where she was being sexually exploited, she had not left that life willingly. She still loved the man who exploited her. Before she entered the facility, in fact, she didn’t think she would be long for this world: In terms of my future, I was thinking [long pause]. I was thinking I wasn’t going to be here. And it’s not only because, you know, not only because

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I didn’t think my grandparents was gonna be here but I don’t think I was going to be here either because, I was just, you know doing things that was risking my life. It was like when it came down to the future it was just like, whatever tomorrow’s just another day, that’s how I used to think about it so when it came down to my future like, I would think like okay, okay, whatever, I’m gonna be dead. So, I’m just gonna do what I gotta do to survive for today, and tomorrow’s another day so, come tomorrow, it’s just that it be tomorrow. (Starts crying) So, that’s how was, and that’s how it took me a long time to him, start finally planning for the future. I never thought about a future. I never ever thought about a future. And I’m not even going to sit here and lie to you. I never ever thought now okay, I’m going to go to college and never thought, I merely get a high school diploma. I never ever thought about that. Because I didn’t think I was gonna make it. Olivia’s alienation was profound; her despair was palpable. And yet her sentence forced her to interrupt that sense of herself; it required that she confront her past and contemplate an alternative path than the one she had originally chosen. E nte ring th e Fac i l i ty For so many young people like Olivia, entering a residential facility prompts questions about whether the process will make their lives better. They wonder how a system so analogous to all of the other systems they have encountered in their lives could actually help them to grow and change. Many of them wonder why they couldn’t be trusted with the freedom to change their lives without being sent to an institution. Finally, they wonder how their experience would go—­how would they ultimately get and stay out? A number of young people experienced feelings of ambivalence about their freedom as they entered the facility. Some, like Olivia, who knew that their lives on the outside were not making them happy or healthy, could see that the facility offered them an escape from that life, but it was an escape that they knew might involve its own pain and deprivations. Other young people, especially young men, found that the facility offered a respite from their near-­ constant exposure to police violence and the violence of their peers; they would continue to be in a place where they were policed, but they were also escaping their near-­constant exposure to violence, and the stress of engagement with violence, on the streets. A number of the teenagers entered the facility with feelings of loss and regret. The most well-­documented form of loss for young people entering juvenile facilities is their separation from one’s family, yet for many of the young people I met, like Olivia, their relationships to their families were



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complex, ambiguous, and sometimes very negative. Many were in foster care before they arrived in placement; some had parents who were incarcerated; others still had parents who were neglectful or absent. Even those with parents who were present and supportive had a complicated relationship to the loss that accompanied their sentence. All too often, stories about loss and separation do not recognize that children involved in the justice system often face angry, fearful, and frustrated parents after they have committed crimes. They have parents who want them to leave home because they feel they will change when they are punished or want them to leave home so they will be safer than when they live in their communities. Thus, their sentence and their departure from home is not a straightforward process of sadness and separation; it is one tinged with regret, pain, and suffering as well. Many young people also struggle with feelings of guilt and regret, or denial and disassociation, that often accompanies the experience of engaging in crimes that harm others, but there is little opportunity in their time before entering custody to address those feelings, particularly through the formality of the adjudicatory process. The sentencing process itself, which involves a formal requirement that they allocute to their guilt and the facts of their crime, or in which they are found guilty by a jury, cannot possibly capture the complicated emotional landscape that accompanies a finding or admission of guilt. Teenagers who enter juvenile residential facilities find themselves forced to acknowledge that they are not only physically contained, but they are enclosed within a system of behavioral control that deeply shapes their everyday lives. This kind of programming distinguishes juvenile prisons from adult ones: young people’s daily lives are highly structured by the routines and rhythms of the program that include their required school attendance, their participation in treatment programming, and the unique approaches to their bodies and minds that have much to do with their youth. The young people and staff call this way of approaching daily life in the facilities “doing program.” Doing program allows teenagers to acquire considerable privileges, including more time on the phone, more money to spend in commissary, better jobs, and access to more personal items, such as music players. Ultimately, doing program bought residents more space from staff members, allowing for more time to talk to peers, spend time alone, or experience less intense disciplinary standards. Sociologists of prison life have studied the way that this process is one that requires people in prison to make particular kinds of adaptations to the pains and deprivations of imprisonment.4 When confronted with these pains and deprivations, they argue, individuals develop unique strategies for responding to these conditions. In juvenile facilities, young people’s adaptations to confinement are unique to their age and the structure of everyday programming and life.

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Most teenagers who entered the facility viewed “the program” with a great deal of skepticism when they first entered confinement. Most residents quickly saw that the program wasn’t individual or group treatment; rather it constituted the entire experience of daily life—­every bodily movement, yes or no, and choice was the program. The structure of this program, from the expectation that residents make their beds neatly, to their polite behavior toward staff, was reinforced at every moment of the day. Even when young people had downtime, they were watched by staff, and any unusual movements they made were logged into the large ledger books that staff members kept in front of them. The teenage residents in the facility were often skeptical that the programming would actually help to change them, and thus they struggled with the idea of authentic engagement with the program. They experienced these daily rituals and interventions in their lives as punitive rather than helpful, disciplining rather than rehabilitative.5 They knew, then, that their recruitment into this system of control was fraught: if they did the program, then they were implicitly consenting to a system of punishment that they had totally submitted to, rather than one that they were active participants in.6 Some teenagers spoke about a journey that they had undergone in which they had “realized” about why and how program should be done. Tory was sent to a private residential facility where, he said, “At first I wasn’t really doing good.” For him, that meant “not making group and, schools slips, there’s a lot of stuff.” It meant that he wasn’t actively participating in the behavioral programming and everyday expectations of the facility. But he realized that “I’m going to be here for a long time,” so he decided he “might as well do good.” Although he knew that if he did well in the program, he would be able to go on home visits, it didn’t really click with him at first. Then he realized that the people who went home, called “A men,” got to go home, stay up later, and have more freedoms inside. He said there was “no point in . . . not bein’ ‘A’ man, without goin’ home twice a month to just wiling out and not making my group.” But he realized that becoming an ‘A man,’ or doing good, would require hard work: Me, I have to work for hard for it. Other people might not have to, like. Other people might, just by the way they act they get a two,7 because that’s how they is, but me, I have to change what I, like what I do everyday. I can’t do, if I wanna make my group, I gotta get good points so I can get my group, be good, clean up, like you gotta step up, like let’s say is you do your chore? You could step up and you’ll get a three cause you really like, let’s say the school when you do a chore like, you don’t get no slips, and you just have a regular day, and you get a two, but you like you go to school, you get a good slip, then you do other people’s chores, and your chair, you don’t game play, play act, right? You’ll get a three.



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Tory decided to “do good” in part after going to court for an update on his progress and discovering that his sentence was going to last considerably longer than he first expected. Thus, rather than spending his time avoiding in-­facility responsibilities, he started taking simple steps, such as doing chores or going above and beyond his normal responsibilities. “Stepping up” for him meant taking responsibility, but in a motivated way, such as “stepping up” and being a father to a child. “Being good” is, for Tory, about meeting expectations. He also distinguishes himself from those for whom being “A man” is easy, or perhaps, an act. He does not deride those people but suggests that being “A man” is harder work for him. Yet Tory’s preoccupation with obtaining points suggests that his compliance with the program, and his decision to “adapt” to it, is not a straightforward recognition of the benefits it will afford him in terms of his personal change but rather a way of relieving the pressures of confinement. Newz was facing a sentence of up to nearly a decade in custody, and he entered his placement uncertain about how he would do his time. He was arrested when he was fourteen years old. Like many young people, he had already spent some time in residential treatment facilities, so he knew a little bit about institutions that were focused on behavioral management and control. When he arrived, he felt like he knew what was ahead of him. “I tried to make Hooper revolve around me,” he said. He felt partially empowered to do this because he is physically big and strong—­he intimidated a lot of the residents and staff members. The fact that he is black was significant in his characterization by the newspapers who wrote about his case, describing him as a “thug”—­so rarely is the term “thug” applied to young white men. It was clear that facility staff similarly felt that Newz represented thugishness. At one point in time, Newz was two points shy of making a higher stage in the behavioral change program, which meant that he had to wait twenty-­ five months to even be considered for another stage. He said that he then decided to go “off the wall” because “I said, you know what? Forget it, I’m not trying no more.” However, another resident helped him realize that his esteem with staff would decline precipitously if he chose to resist in this way, and this would have larger consequences. But he later realized that his efforts at making the facility revolve around him wouldn’t work: “I was new, so I messed up.” He realized that that staff would think that “It’s going to look like he don’t want to change, he’s an asshole, he’s like that and so it happened and I realized right before my eyes it was going to happen. So I said you know what? I can’t do this. I’m not going to let that come true. So I started getting my act together. I eventually got my adjustment stage.” Newz had to accept that life inside was about “adapting.” He realized that he “didn’t really adapt to” the previous residential treatment facility he was in. Newz struggled with the idea of complying with treatment, resisting it, or performing it. In some ways, he had little to lose: he had a long sentence

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ahead of him, and he didn’t have much to go home to. Newz spent the first four years of his life living with his mother, a prostitute, in the room where she took clients and was then sent to live with his father, who sold drugs. He had also recently been reunited with his birth family, whom he was separated from after being placed in foster care as a result of his mother’s neglect, and he felt he needed to demonstrate to his younger siblings that he could be a role model—­maybe by becoming a successful resident, he could do this. He said he didn’t want to be like his mother. Newz equated messing up the program with an abandonment of his siblings, like his mother had. Knowing few other routes to performing well in the program, he started imitating a new resident who he thought “did perfect program.” He said, “I used him as competition.” He decided that he was “gonna be a Mr. Robot. I gonna do everything perfect. I so I started living my program off of robots.” After he started doing what he did, he said that the staff in the facility “left me alone.” By the time he reached the highest behavioral stage level, where he wore green shoelaces, he felt that he had earned respect from residents and staff “because of my laces.” As Newz observed the other resident—­the Mr. Robot—­he noticed that the resident was showing a strong level of submission to staff authority. Newz noticed that he was “raising his hand, and for not necessary things,” like asking his teacher, “can I get a pencil? Or when he know he can get it he still, ‘can I get it? can I do this?’ And ‘can I do that?’” Thus, when Newz became more attuned to what the program involved, he realized that it was, quite simply, about “behav[ing],” and then, the higher he ascended in the behavioral change system, “leadership.” At first, he said, his decision to engage in the program was a “performance,” but then, he felt it “became real.” After he had done the program for quite a while, Newz realized that his performance may have been less real than he initially thought, but rather that it straddled the line between realness and performance. He recognized that for him to get through his time in the system, he had to fake his way through it to reach authentic engagement. He decided that if he could change himself, then he could do better on the outside, when he was released. A: N: A: N:

What do you think about the robot thing now? You know, if you do it long enough it becomes you. Yeah. I was told that as well. See some sometimes you gotta fake the funk, know what I’m sayin’? And, it happened.

Newz’s notion of change was arguably tied to the experiences of his childhood, although he admitted that he had never shared them with staff at the residential facility, even during the stage in his sex offender treatment when



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he was required to tell his life story as part of the process of “reform,” but also to move toward release from the treatment program.8 Like Olivia, Newz had to develop survival skills at an early age. He remembered leaving his house as early as age four to go and buy food from the local corner store. He said he pulled on a pair of his father’s pants to go outside. The four-­year-­old Newz, struggling to hold up oversized pants that represented adulthood, knew from an early age that survival in a context where he was receiving few forms of support might require some form of imitation. Newz never had a chance to talk about his early childhood experiences with any staff members in the facility; his family secrets stayed with those of us on his defense team who had learned about them through our own investigations. When I first learned that Newz had reached the Honors stage, I was slightly surprised. In particular, I was surprised to learn that he had made it past the Transition stage, the third stage (a “Cautious Performer” in the staff handbook), in which residents are expected to take more initiative in their deference to the rules of the program, using the skills that they have obtained in the facility (such as anger control and problem-­solving) and show that “you are able to say that you feel sorry for your crimes and take responsibility for your negative behaviors, without blaming others.” This was surprising to me because as long as I had known him, Newz was resistant to speaking about the crimes he had committed. Even at his plea, when he was expected to describe what he had done, he spoke elliptically about the crimes. As his legal team, we did not see his sex offense as indicative of psychopathy but reflective of the deep and embedded forces, particularly from his childhood, that led him both to offend but also to struggle to make sense of his own actions and gain insight into them; thus, we felt his silence about his crime reflected his inability to make sense of his actions and his lack of insight into them, not necessarily his denial of them, as the court might suggest. An Honors stage resident, who wore green shoelaces, was described as a “Competent and Committed Performer” in the staff manual. According to the resident manual, a resident should be encouraging his peers to “be positive and to make good choices,” showing “improved self-­esteem by cooperating with staff and program expectations.” Newz distinguished his process of imitating the other resident from what he called “institutionalization.” The term “institutionalized” was used by young people and staff to refer to the young people who were actively resistant to the regime and thus not “doing program.” Young people and staff perceived institutionalized people as undisciplined and unaware. They were seen as dependent on confinement and lacking a critical engagement with it. Other residents had described Newz as “institutionalized,” which he did not like. When I asked him why he did not like it, he said that it was because, “in a way, I am.” Newz said that as someone who is institutionalized “you forget

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that you are in jail. So it’s like, when you’re a robot, you are constantly thinking about being in jail.” Billy spent time in a juvenile detention facility and on Rikers Island, where institutionalization also mattered. While he was in the detention facility, he saw that the kids he was locked up with “just had the attitude that they didn’t care, they didn’t have a positive attitude as I had.” He felt that while he was in detention, he maintained his positive attitude by “not getting institutionalized.Thinking about being incarcerated they whole life. Thinking about other things, like going to school, trying doing right while you were still in there, to prove to somebody that you can like do something with yourself as you don’t gotta be in here and act like a knucklehead.” For Billy, being institutionalized was about resisting the regime—­being a knucklehead. He said that he felt a lot of kids thought that it was their destiny to be incarcerated. He said that they just give up, they “just say I ain’t going home, like, I don’t even care, just get in fights. When they have the ‘I don’t care attitude,’ they basically just keep fighting.” For Billy, being “institutionalized” represents a resignation that one is and will always be incarcerated. It is about losing hope and believing that one is bound into “the system” for life. Billy argues that the “institutionalized” person is at greater risk of staying in jail because the judge will look at his record while he is in jail and decide that “this could be a very dangerous person to let out to the streets.”9 Billy implicitly recognizes that there is a dynamic relationship between one’s in-­facility identity and the imputation of delinquency. He says that institutionalized people feel like “I don’t care, I was already here, I’m back again, it’s nothing to them. It’s like a process, something they used to bein.’” Those who openly resisted the system felt that succumbing to it represented submission to a power structure that was racist, oppressive, and fundamentally pointless. José said that when many residents came into the system, they were “hostile” to the idea of it, because they had lost faith in the ability of the system to help people. They may also have been frustrated by the feelings of alienation engendered by the court process, the experience of being arrested, and generalized feelings of injustice and alienation that the experience brought about. José and many other young people believed that the system was oriented around profit, and it was thus easy for system administrators to sacrifice the rights of the residents. Other teenagers spoke about the interconnections between prison and slavery, and the long legacy of racialized humiliations that the processes of imprisonment are simply a continuation of. Stax said he had initially resisted the program because he felt that it lacked legitimacy in his mind, but then he made a deliberate choice to “fake it” so he could receive more privileges in his daily life. Maya, in a moment of frustration and resignation about the facility she was in, said that everybody who is “doing the program” was “faking it.” She also expressed frustration that



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“everybody is trying to control us.” Elena also felt that “nothing is real” inside and that authentic relationships, respect, and connection weren’t possible. Panama, an older resident at Hooper who was on the Transition stage, which was a stage right below Honors, said that some of the younger residents would say to the Honors and Transition group members that “the system got y’all,” and “you’ve changed.” Panama argued that this kind of accusation did not bother him because he was at least closer to going home than those who accused him of succumbing to the system. Newz similarly spoke about the young people who “fight” the program as individuals who aren’t able to get “out,” saying, “I don’t know about you, but I want to stay out.” Panama and Newz, although literally speaking about being released from the facility, also argued that the process of institutionalization means someone’s identity becomes entrapped in the cycle of incarceration, and reliant on it. Eddie, another resident at Hooper who, like Newz, was on the “Honors” stage of the resident behavior system, also struggled against the idea of being institutionalized. Eddie was someone who appeared to be “doing the program” but also resisting it. At times, he was considered a “model” resident by staff and administrators: he was on the student council and was involved in planning a social event that took place in the summer of 2009 and involved a number of girls coming to the facility. He was often introduced to visitors who came to the facility, including administrators from the central office.10 He participated in a college-­level course, which was reserved for the best-­behaved residents. He was serving a sentence of fifteen years to life, and he had not only been at the institution for a long time but also had status and respect as a “lifer” among both staff and the young people.Yet, in a twist of irony, the staff also acknowledged him to be an in-­facility leader of a gang. Eddie felt that his period of incarceration had “made me the way I am.” He said he had become “disciplined, respectful,” and he had “loyalty.” He said that these qualities came from the facility and the “program” that he had engaged in there. He had been affected in small ways about how to act and behave through living there and through the program. He felt he had learned “responsibilities” and how to be a “man” from the place. Eddie suggested that his sense of responsibility was cultivated from the facility, partly through the experience (and thus the interactions with his peers, the opportunities for leadership, both licit and illicit, among them), but also, like Newz, by observing, mimicking, and modeling himself after the behavior of staff. As someone facing a lengthy sentence, Eddie was going to be transferred to the adult Department of Corrections when he turned twenty-­one. As he got close to the time of his transfer, Eddie got involved in a fight on his unit. The residents there were asked to “lock down” in their rooms, but the electronically activated locking system broke down. During that period, he got

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out of his room and physically assaulted a staff member; he subsequently transferred to an adult prison ahead of his twenty-­first birthday.11 Although his actions could be straightforwardly read as evidence of the continued presence of his “criminal” mindset, the context of the incident is also important: according to the staff members, Eddie was designated by the young people in his unit as a leader and was sent out to attack a staff member who was unpopular and threatening. This suggests a more complicated dynamic at play than a simple regression into criminality and thus institutionalization. Eddie enacted the role that was clearly marked out for him within the institution and was even endorsed by staff: he was a gang leader and a “leader” in the behavioral change system, a model of autonomy, and also ultimately capable of making “choices,” albeit resistant ones. When Eddie arrived at the adult prison after the incident, he said that he had been well prepared from his previous facility to take care of himself and that he would make his bed and fold his clothes every day, even though he wasn’t required to, as he had been at Hooper. I asked him whether he felt he was “institutionalized,” and he said that he wasn’t, because, he indicated, he had some of the requisite self-­possession and self-­knowledge that might distinguish him from someone who was institutionalized. Khalil, another young man who had spent time at McClary, similarly spoke about how it took him a while to become “unprogrammed” upon his release from the facility. He said that he had been “programmed” to follow the routines and structures of everyday life ingrained in him, such as the time he went to the shower and waking up early. Eddie struggled throughout his time with who he was and how incarceration had shaped him. In a conversation at the residential center, he spoke about how “we got that jail talk in us,” describing some of the difficulties he thought he might face in shedding the dispositions of institutional life once he would be released, and thus pointing to his recognition that the “jail” identity is also something that is not easily abandoned. Eddie spoke only elusively with me about the violent incident that he had been involved in. However, he lamented the fact that he had been “kicked to the wind” by the staff and administrators who had previously supported him, in part because he had so explicitly deviated from his performance of comportment and upright behavior that had earned him his Honors stage status. He pointed to the ironies by which his identity as a gang leader was tacitly acknowledged, but his explicit acts of violence were uniformly condemned and became the cause for his excommunication from Hooper. Both Eddie and Newz described some of the tensions inherent in the notion of “institutionalization”: the term can symbolize both a resistance and a submission to “the program.” This reveals the anxieties young people faced in trying to maintain their sense of control over their own process of change



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while “doing program” in confinement. Eddie and Newz felt they had the ability to recognize the ways that the expression of self-­mastery and discipline may also help them to keep a kind of psychological distance from their environment or exercise control over it. Thus, for them, “doing good program” was not simply about submitting to it. The expression “fake it ’til you make it” was used by staff and young people throughout the system to describe the performance of treatment.12 From a therapeutic perspective, those individuals who perform treatment could be understood to lack “readiness” for that treatment and thus have poorer long-­ term outcomes.13 However, alternative interpretations suggest that faking it can help to move individuals toward change. Faking it or “passing” has also been encouraged in drug-­treatment programs because there is an assumption that people may reconstruct their selves through this process.14 Some researchers argue that the structures of juvenile correctional programs, in which progress in treatment is tied to rules, reinforce these processes of manipulation.15 However, undergirding some research is the assumption that there may be potential for young people to authentically engage in treatment. This could be considered a process of developing “blind faith” about the powers of treatment and ultimately submitting to its supposed effectiveness.16 Faking it could also be a form of “censoriousness,” by using the language and discourse of treatment to subvert it, a way of “taking on” the system, “beating it” before it beats them, and reducing lengths of confinement.17 Young people often invoked the language of “faking it” in an effort to distance themselves from the institution, to point to the hypocrisy or idiocy of treatment, and to express a sense of autonomy. It could be a means of what the criminologist Ben Crewe calls “frontstage compliance and performed commitment” to “accelerate progression through the system,” while maintaining a stance of resistance toward it in the backstage by being a “player.”18 It is of course nearly impossible to discern the degree to which “faking it” is actually happening, in the same way in which “change” is not clearly demonstrable.19 Once performances are repeated, they can become “naturalized” and may even become “sedimented” in a way in which they become central to a person’s habitus—­or their dispositions, routines, and modes of being.20 Yet in the residential juvenile facility landscape, “fake it to make it” was an expression that reflected a more self-­aware and reflexive state of being as opposed to full and complete submission to the project of governance. When I asked a group of older adolescent boys at Hooper what kinds of behaviors would be necessary in moving from adjustment to the transition stage, they said, “You have to be active.” Movement through the stage system could not be done in a passive manner but instead required a serious level of engagement with the program; this also meant that the engagement had to be highly visible, or sometimes enacted in an exaggerated manner.21 The color

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of a resident’s shoelaces, which symbolized this progression, was the outward expression of this level of participation. However, it became difficult to distinguish between performances that resisted the dominant treatment discourses and the actions of those that may have submitted to them. As Ben Crewe argues, “It is almost impossible to gauge from the ‘public transcript’ whether an appeal to the dominant value system represents a prudent and strategic performance of ideological concord or genuine ethical incorporation.”22 Falling Bac k One strategy for a more reflexive engagement with treatment was what young people described as “falling back.”23 This expression conveys the full complexity of “doing program,” as it is simultaneously defined as “doing program” and not participating in aspects of program life. In this sense, it represents the tightrope-­like quality of program participation. Falling back, in slang, means to lay low, or chill out.24 Young people defined this expression as “mellow[ing] out” and “straighten[ing] up.” Residents who “fall back” are those who “want” to change and who decide to pull themselves back from the “negativity” of the institutional environment.25 For a number of young people, falling back was about finding a small place in their confined lives where they could carve out a sense of freedom through the process of internal change that wasn’t imposed on them from above. It was a place where they could grapple with themselves without being forced to be understood in terms of their “criminal” identities. Some young people spoke about a degree of sincerity in their process of change, and one that was related to a personal insight or turning point in their lives. Olivia said that when she was initially placed in treatment, she wasn’t interested in “participating.” But then, she said, “This past year, I really started caring” because “I felt like I had to change.” She located this source of change in a therapeutic alliance that she had built with a psychologist in a previous, private placement, which she was ultimately kicked out of. Olivia felt that she could truly change when she had let go of her feelings of love for her pimp, Damien.These feelings about Damien, she later revealed, were deeply intertwined with emotions about her family members; the pimp played a father-­like and protective role in her life, which had been missing for her. Olivia was in confinement because of an assault charge, not for prostitution. Her time inside forced her to understand more deeply the life she had on the outside: “Everything that I was out there is draining now.The memories is coming back, so everything is just like slowly brushing off. Everything is just slowly brushing off. So it’s taking time to go away, but it effects me too because it depresses me.” Olivia had to find strategies for coping with her depression on the inside. She didn’t find them in the treatment groups. She said, “The groups to me is



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like . . . sometimes they can be very pointless because, especially to me because I know personally, I feel as if I know what and what not to do, and I feel as if I know right from wrong, and I feel like I know what to do if a cop stop you and I feel as if . . . like all that stuff is like, it’s jus . . . it’s late to me, like, I already know this stuff. But some of the groups, I can actually benefit from, like, so it’s jus. . . .” Olivia recognized that the groups were limited in what they could give her. She found that they were helpful in some instances, “like I didn’t care about the future but now like, to think, like OK, I want that to be something in my head, like when I get out ‘what am I gon do? Am I gon hit that person and get back in here again? Or am I gon walk way?’ So I like the groups like that.” She found that the groups assisted her in ignoring other teenagers who annoyed her—­a common occurrence in a facility that generally only had a handful of young people at once. The facility would often reach a boiling point of tension if there were just a few internal conflicts between the teenagers. Olivia felt that she learned from the groups that “all you gotta do is learn how to ignore. If you can ignore somebody, if you can ignore negativity, you will be the best person that you can ever be.You can be the best.” Yet even in Olivia’s words about the treatment groups there was a persistent idea that she was seeking a way to be invested in her future outside of the facility, which cognitive behavioral strategies to walk away, or ignore, could not ultimately address. Many of the ways that Olivia described her process of change were about more deeply educational, relational, and spiritual dimensions of her life, which people and programs at the facility couldn’t provide. Olivia felt the counselors were not that helpful to her—­that they provided “support, but not comfort.” She felt that “some people so used to the American Dream, quote on quote, that they just can’t handle the real life.” Olivia was elusive here, but she was referring to the primarily white and middle-­class counselors who worked in the facility and whose own lives and trajectories may not have allowed them to see or understand her life. She told me that she wanted to write a book about her life, and it would be titled Hood Start: Not the American Dream. Olivia found solace in writing poetry and engaging in school, and in dreaming about going to college, something she had not thought about before entering the facility. Ironically, going to school was not really considered “doing program” in the facilities, even though school took up most of the days. In fact, the story of juvenile facility life told in the public media and in reports about facilities, the story of juvenile facilities often neglects to recognize that these are in fact, primarily, schools.26 Olivia also found comfort in relationships—­in helping other residents understand that their lives could be less difficult. She said that she would tell other residents, “You can make it. And you can make it, and you can trust me, you can make it.You can be at the bottom, like . . . it’s so easy, it’s so simple, like

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all you gotta do is put your mind to it and you can make it, like I told you, I did not believe that I was gonna make it this far. I did not even imagine turning sixteen years old. I thought I was going to be gone before I turned fourteen. So, I feel good. I feel more than good. I’m happy that I made it this far.” While she was at McClary, Olivia met and fell in love with another resident. In many ways, their relationship was the most normal one she had ever had. They flirted with each other, wrote letters to each other, and finally confessed their love to each other. Being in the relationship with the other resident allowed Olivia to realize that Damien was actually abusive and harmful toward her. But, she realized, “I don’t hold a grudge because in a way I feel as if I learned a huge lesson from him, so I don’t really want to hold a grudge against him even though I really like, I despise him, hate him.” She said that if she saw him on the street he would probably stop the car and ask her to get in, but “once he realizes that . . . [I’m] not the same little boy that I was before, he might get a little aggressive, probably get out, probably try to chase me . . . probably try to block me in a corner.” Damien had a history of hitting Olivia, and she knew that he was capable of doing it again. But Olivia felt that she could resist the temptation of him if she saw him again: she said, “I don’t want that those gold teeth in his mouth, I don’t want that look, that look, that sincere look in his eyes to manipulate me, I don’t want that pretty skin to manipulate me, I refuse to let that happen.” She thought about what she would have done differently on the first night she met him to refuse his demands. Olivia felt that since she had been locked up, she began to identify the differences between her “needs and her wants.” She said: This past year since I’ve been locked up, I realize that everything I’ve been doing, everything I used to do was just like I ain’t gonna say it was pointless, because I used to always get something from it . . . it was something that was just adding on to comfort and pleasure. I didn’t need it. I wanted it. And that’s the thing, I think I told you before I used to confuse my needs and wants. And I used to mix them up. And when I used to mix what I needed and what I wanted, I had a problem. So, since I’ve been locked up I realized that, you know what, what I need and want don’t have nothing in common. When she did this, it helped her to realize that she had been manipulated by Damien—­that she had been made to think she was on the path to making a lot of money and to finding material comfort, but it was quite the opposite. While she was inside, she decided that she instead wanted to be a train conductor—­a job that would allow her to go on different kinds of journeys from the ones that Damien had taken her on. Other young people like Olivia spent much of their time inside engaged in a deep process of introspection while they were in the facilities. Victoria,



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who was facing a sentence of one to three years for a robbery case, said that she realized while she was in the residential center that she put her mom through a lot while she had been away from home. She said that when she was at home, “I was easily influenced,” and now “I learned to just focus on me.” I asked her what she learned in the facility, and she said that she “came to myself ” and “I found myself.” She said that she started writing in a journal and that when she looks back at her journal notes from when she first got there, “it’s like I’m reading about a different person.” Victoria talked about how she kept to herself, bonding with a few staff members, drawing and writing in her room, but mainly tried to avoid other young people as she worked on “changing.” José spoke about how “when I first came in to [the system], I followed the rules, but I didn’t understand them.” He said that he “didn’t care” and that he “faked it at first.” His change came when he got sentenced and was “sent up here”; within about a year, he started “improving himself ” and learned how to be more “humble.” José frequently spoke about the process of change as being important to him in his in-­facility identity. He held a coveted job in the kitchen and was allowed to participate in a social event with girls from the outside because of his infraction-­free record. He often spoke about how younger residents hadn’t yet learned how to change and that “kids have to be willing to change and learn.” He frequently contrasted his choices to change with those of the younger residents, saying, “Maturity is a state of mind, not of physical being.” José, elusive about his past but clear that he had “made mistakes” and gotten caught up with the “wrong crowd,” thought it was important to point out that he came from a close-­knit, intact family. He spoke frequently about how he had disappointed his family and how he desired to change so that he could fulfill his potential as someone who had had more privileges than those around him. For the residents, “falling back” meant not participating in open and active resistance to the regime, at least in the form that was made emblematic by the more younger residents who were said to embrace a “street” culture. It also meant becoming more thoughtful, pensive, and quieter and, paradoxically, taking the time into one’s own hands. In this sense, it became a form of resistance to the institution, but not one that was easily discernable by staff members. In this state, young people can say that they’ve taken more control over their time, but it also involved engaging with the power structure, thus facilitating its reproduction and acknowledging its legitimacy.27 Residents who “fall back” tend to be highly literate and intelligent about the institutional terrain and what “doing program” involves. Olivia, for example, was smart enough to know that if she said to staff members that she had learned a few good lessons from group treatment, she would be respected by the adult staff members who administered that form of treatment. Olivia also knew that if she opened up just enough about her past, staff members would

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feel that she was sufficiently engaged in the program. Newz and Eddie knew how to “show leadership” in Hooper, which was a larger facility of older boys and where the demonstration of leadership involved a more clear display of self-­control and seriousness. For many of the boys, becoming literate in the institutional landscape involved the cultivation of listening and observation skills, competency in mimicry, craft in the use of “street” and institutional language, and the capacity to take risks in jeopardizing an official status to maintain status with one’s peers. It involved the use of “hidden transcripts,” code words, and secret languages, as well as dominant institutional discourses, frameworks, and ideas.28 In other words, it was a kind of balancing act: these individuals constantly negotiate different forms of “authenticity,” and seek out forms of self-­expression that may be respected within the competing worlds that exist in the institution. It was arguably the girl’s facility where it was the most difficult to “fall back” in some ways because the girls were almost expected to be difficult, and thus their efforts at time alone and introspection could be read as evidence of mental illness or difficulty. Thus, for the girls, “faking it” actually didn’t represent a status that would garner them that many privileges. Obstacles to Falling Back One of the primary barriers to young people’s process of change, falling back, and discovering space for themselves was the pervasive inactivity in the facilities. While active engagement with the program was seen as a necessary part of progress, a large part of young people’s time in the facilities was spent “doing” very little. The young people faced intense boredom. This generally occurred in the afternoon and evening hours after school, during school vacation times (or on days when there were teacher trainings or school was not in session), and on weekends. During school “vacation,” when the teachers did not work in the facilities, there were almost never any activities planned for the young people. When nothing was planned, young people sat on their units and watched television, played video games or cards, read, or worked on their homework. Although some staff in the facilities made efforts to combat this boredom, including the initiation of reading groups, crocheting, and recreational competitions, these activities were rare. Almost all of the activities in the facilities centered around school, group treatment, and time in the gymnasium. During the summertime, some facilities offered arts and other activities that extended beyond the traditional school curriculum, but during the school year, these activities were rare. Logistical and security concerns predominated in the facility; it was hard to find the appropriate number of staff to supervise outdoor recreational activities, or even enough space. Staff members also experienced this boredom and were given few incentives or resources to change the situation.



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In fact, when I first gained access to the facilities, I anticipated that I would focus my research on treatment programming and group work. I spent nearly three years doing research inside of the facilities, from morning until late at night. I remember observing only a few treatment groups happen during the entire time I was in the facilities. When I asked staff members why there were not more groups, I was told that they happened less and less since the reforms had been introduced into the facilities because the staff felt that they were too focused on security and control there.29 Even individual therapy was rare—­it almost never occurred inside of the boy’s secure facility, and only sometimes occurred in the girl’s facility. During my time doing research in the system, there was only one psychologist devoted to the entire network of juvenile facilities across the state. When I asked Gina, for example, if therapy had helped her address her needs during her time in confinement, she said, laughing, “What therapy? I’ve never seen that before.” A number of the young people spoke about their feelings of being “cooped up” and how those feelings contributed to a sense of listlessness, boredom, depression, and fighting. The young men at Hooper said that they had “too much free time” and that they needed to expend energy and be “more productive.” They said that this experience of boredom and being “cooped up” might exacerbate the negative experience of a bad phone call or their difficulty in thinking about home. A number of the young people spoke about the ways that the boredom had an impact on the levels of fighting in the facility. One young man at McClary, for example, said that sitting around all the time “just frustrates a lot of people and that’s how we clash.” Slam said that the boredom made him “angry.” In speaking about her boredom, one young woman said, “It makes me depressed.” She wished for structure and fun “at the same time,” noting her desire, like many others, for there to be a balance struck between stimulating, pleasurable activities and a clear and coherent system of rules and guidelines. Staff members also openly acknowledged the negative impact of boredom on facility life. One facility director said that “the less you do with kids, the more aggravating they’re going to be.” The boredom of staff members was also visible; some Youth Division Aides fell asleep during the classroom and study hours (they were expected to sit in the classrooms at all times), which had a visible impact on young people’s motivation. The idleness experienced by the young people and conveyed through the staff played a role in shaping the emotional climate of the facility. While active engagement was an expectation of treatment, the realities of facility life meant that young people often lacked the energy and motivation that might make that engagement more active and creative. The irony of this boredom was that it was experienced in a context in which the weight of the behavioral change “program” was quite deeply felt.

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Doing Me The participants who were in residential care overwhelmingly expressed a form of agency that was solipsistic. This is a sense of agency that is grounded in the notion that only the self can possess the tools to effect change in one’s future. The expression “you come here alone, you leave here alone” best embodied this form of agency: it circulated throughout residential institutions and was used by both young people and staff in a mantra-­like way. However, the repetition of this term belied the experiences of young people within the institutions, as they would often find that survival rested on their ability to mimic others, develop relationships and bonds with others, and to sustain their connections with those on the outside world. The notion of “freedom coming from within” can be found in some narratives and literature written by people who have been in prison and is one that is arguably a source of ontological security and grounding for people experiencing incarceration, and a source of relief from some of the feelings of loss of control that imprisonment evokes.30 A number of the young people felt that time in custody was their sole responsibility and that it was entirely “on them” to do that time; this may be distinct from this notion of freedom from within. After leaving jail, Izzy’s girlfriend spoke reflectively about how some people made the “choice” to go to jail and stay in the jail “life” and become dependent on it, saying, “Yeah, they get used to it. After a while you get used to it. And once you get used to it, it’s over for you.” She spoke about how there would be no one in the institution to help, and thus it was necessary to rely on oneself to emerge through that time, and not “get used to it.” Young people would reflect these notions of individualized progress in their descriptions of treatment. Newz said that while he was in the residential facility, “I’ve been in control 100 percent of the time” and “every decision I made was on my own.” Olivia similarly spoke about her realization that the only way she could do her time in residential custody was to “do me.” Elena arrived at Marshall girls’ facility after bouncing around in foster care for a number of years. She was frustrated with her experience in the child welfare system and uncertain about where she would live and with whom she would live as she was awaiting the possibility of being released. She felt that her status in foster care had prevented her from being released, and she felt voiceless in the court process: “I feel like if I had spoken, I would have gone home.” Elena was on the student council at Marshall girls’ facility and was considered a “model” resident. She initially conveyed a well-­developed position about where she stood in her program. She suggested that each person should exercise “responsibility” in her program and do it to her best degree and that no one should not let other people interfere with that process. Elena spoke about how each person’s program was her “responsibility” and that this could only be accomplished successfully alone. She embraced the official,



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institutional language of “choice” and spoke at length about how important it was to stick to the program. Elena spoke about the need for residents to recognize the benefits they would reap if they did program: “If you want help [in this facility], you’re gonna get help.” Elena also said that she wanted help “a long time ago” (e.g., at the beginning of her stay there); she said that at first she did not get it, but now that she “does the program,” she has the help she needs. However, Elena later revealed that she had been physically restrained a number of times, suggesting that she had not always clearly occupied the role of model resident in the minds of staff. She said that the way she had learned to survive confinement was to remember that she was there alone. Another young woman, who Elena said was in confinement despite being wrongfully convicted, had given her the advice “you come in here alone, you leave alone.” In the context of her discussion about the frustrations about her pathway to confinement (as well as about the pains of imprisonment), Elena’s words about being “alone” in the program are arguably distinct from her putative embrace of the formalized treatment ideology of individualism and choice. They are a form of individualism that is more resigned and less active than the treatment program envisions. Elena feels alienated and alone, and despite official efforts to provide her with “help” in finding a foster care placement, she rejected the idea that the system was aimed at helping her. She expressed some resignation and sadness, saying “anything that happens in here, it’s not real,” speaking elusively about relationships, friendship, and also about the lessons imparted by the program, which, she argued, had no relevance in the “real world.” Elena’s narrative reveals some of the complicated ways in which official discourses of change can become assimilated in young people’s language, and thus “faked,” but also lose their traction as young people grapple with the nature of individualism these narratives require. In the “program,” Elena was sometimes constructed by staff members as recalcitrant, at times as mentally ill or dependent, and other times as a model resident. The paperwork and the color of the shoelaces that marked her institutional identity reflected those ambiguities. For Elena, seeking groundedness was a complicated and difficult task, and one that was accompanied by a form of resignation. Elena’s early use of the language of responsibility in our conversation (and our first meeting) may have been an effort to “shore up” some of her more ambiguous feelings about self-­responsibility, and reflected her strategies at emotion management as she prepared to leave the facility.31 This sense by Elena and others that their time was “on me” was not straightforward and may have been more likely a stronger reflection of their assimilation and incorporation of official treatment language—­the need to “do program”—­in combination with their desire to find a way to cope through confinement. This idea of doing their time alone was also often belied by their actions: they formed strong friendships that continued after their time

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in custody. During focus groups, the participants would chat, gossip, and “parlay” (or chat or network). Eddie said that another resident, Sam, had provided him with the name of his private defense attorney to help him with his legal appeal. Newz spoke about the other resident who had helped him learn how to “do program,” noting “that’s my man right there. He’s the reason why I am a success.” Ellen, seeing that Christina was often distressed when she witnessed physical restraints, hugged and comforted her, speaking about her desire to support Christina through her time. At the girls’ facility, staff members published a newsletter with articles and poems by the young people; Ellen proudly displayed some work she had written, and Elena spoke about a poem written by another girl that had inspired her. The sense of support and friendship continued after confinement. Jacob, Izzy, Maya, Jamal, and the others who were released from custody continue to seek informal support and friendship from a network of young people they met in custody. Other participants communicate with their friends from custody through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and they call their teachers and former staff members to seek advice from them and tell them how they were doing. Se lf-­D iscipl i ne The facilities were full of contradictions—­despite acknowledging the importance of relationships and support, some young people would also speak about the need for hard discipline. In particular, many of the young men expressed a desire for control to be imposed on them externally by institutional actors or through situational controls because they felt that their efforts to exercise self-­control were insufficient. This desire was expressed in response to what they felt were the “temptations” of returning to “the street.” Staff and residents alike would characterize “the street” as a place where self-­control was difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Skippy was one of the young people who felt that he could only achieve a sense of self-­control—­not even change, just self-­control—­if other people imposed those forms of control over him. Skippy went to the McClary facility when he was fifteen years old. He was white and from Westchester County; he came to McClary from a residential treatment facility. He had walked out of the previous facility several times and gotten into a number of fights there. Thus, his sentence was modified so he could go to a more secure setting. Reflecting on his time at the previous facility, he said it was “really easy.” He even admitted to feeling the allure of being in a more secure setting so he could toughen himself up; he was a committed street fighter and felt that his time in the secure juvenile facility could help make him physically stronger and a better fighter. He said that if he stayed long enough in the facility “I might be big and huge.” He had heard through the grapevine that kids got



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physically restrained at the secure facilities if they got into trouble. He said, “I thought that’s what I needed.” Skippy was taught by his father that “if you have a problem, fight.” His dad had been in and out of jail, and both of his parents suffered from addiction problems. His life at home was chaotic, and he frequently fought with his mother and her boyfriend. He fought at school and in the street and was constantly getting into trouble. He was in and out of foster care. Skippy felt that his time in the facility wasn’t teaching him anything. Like a lot of young people, he noticed that the kids who did poorly in the facility were the ones who got the most individual attention from staff: “it seems like only the kids who are doing bad see the counselors.”Yet Skippy found that he struggled with his anger: “It scares me sometimes, I feel I can’t control it.” He said that “I get mad for a split second. . . . I think I’m bipolar or something.” He would find that “I’ll be in the meanest rage, then I start laughing.” Skippy’s father had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so he was concerned that he might have inherited it. Even though McClary was more secure than the previous facility he was in, he felt that it wasn’t strict or structured enough. He felt that “this place doesn’t really show discipline” and that there should be more “outcomes” for misbehavior, just like he had experienced at home, at the hands of his father, who would physically discipline him if he did “stupid things” like get poor grades. He felt that he should have been in an even more secure setting, “I still feel like I should’ve been in a secure setting,” because “I would’ve learned a lot more” there. He even felt that being in a boot camp would have really changed him. Skippy, who participated in local fight clubs with his friends before he went into custody, asked his aftercare worker if he could have an ankle bracelet because “I’m worried about fighting.”32 He grappled with the idea of resisting his inclination to fight once he got home. He said that “if I want to live where I am my whole life I have to stay the same” and that “I have so many enemies” at home. But he also found fighting exciting and appealing; it was an escape for him.33 Other young people were concerned that when confronted with the demands of street codes of retaliatory violence they wouldn’t be able to resort to the “problem-­solving steps” and anger management techniques they had been provided in treatment programs at the facility and would instead participate in the violence. Skippy also felt that the only way he could control himself was by being controlled by others. Shortly before he was set to be released, he left the facility with his counselor to go and visit the high school he was supposed to be attending after he was released. He felt apprehensive and ambivalent about the experience: “I feel like I’m going to get into trouble when I’m not always being watched, especially when I get out of here because when I went to the

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school there was no one there and I felt like really free, all I had was shackles on my feet and my hands were free and stuff to walk around, and I felt like, I don’t know, like I didn’t belong on the outside. . . . I couldn’t wait to go back.” Skippy had been inside of residential facilities for so long that “I’m used to being told what to do and stuff.” He still wanted to go home, “but it’s just like kinda like nervous.” He felt nervous about fighting, about joining his old friends, but also about drinking and smoking pot, which he had been doing heavily before he was arrested, but also which he knew his parents did. Other young people spoke about a desire to exercise a form of self-­control that has been described as “diachronic” self-­control, or “self-­binding,” in which people impose restrictions on themselves.34 For example, Shayla wanted to spend time with her friends but feared that she would want to smoke marijuana and start selling drugs again so that she could obtain the material goods she coveted, like sneakers and hats. She thus stayed inside her grandmother’s house and also avoided certain street corners where her friends socialized to prevent herself from engaging in these activities. Because she was also banned from the public housing projects nearby, where she had been arrested, she was not legally allowed to go and see her friends who lived there. Billy also decided to stay inside his home, although his decision to stay at home was in part motivated by his desire to avoid the constant scrutiny of the police. Billy later asked me if he could be placed back into detention to prevent himself from robbing someone again.35 Nearly eight years after I met him, Billy remains inside his home nearly all day every day; he still hasn’t completed high school, and he now has two small children. When I saw him recently, he told me, “I’m staying out of trouble,” which meant he hadn’t been arrested; yet he hasn’t held a job, hasn’t applied for public benefits, and hasn’t obtained his high school equivalency. He has also, at the young age of twenty-­two, faced significant stress-­related health problems that have remained unaddressed. These forms of self-­control that Billy and others engaged in were also external in the sense that young people felt that being indoors might also insulate them from the temptations they felt before they were placed into custody and offer them sanctuary from those temptations. In other words, they were places where a form of passive self-­control could be exercised. Within the residential facilities, a number of young people like Skippy spoke about their desire for “structure” and “discipline” to be imposed by staff members. Many staff members vented to me that the facilities had become more out of control and chaotic since the new commissioner, Gladys Carrión, had arrived and had been implementing rule changes about restraints. Over and over again, staff members would complain that there had been a loss of “structure” in the facilities since her arrival; in particular, they felt that they had been stripped of their “tools” for exercising control. It was always made clear to me by staff members that the word “tool” was a euphemism



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for a physical restraint. Some program staff in the facilities suggested that “structure” and “accountability”—­and in particular, the power of the physical restraint as a tool of accountability—­were necessary because young people came from environments that were so devoid of these qualities.36 Additionally, congruencies existed between notions of structure on the street and within the facilities. When I asked the group of older adolescent boys at Hooper what “structure” meant to them, Eddie and Sam offered that it was about how “everybody knows their place,” and that they know their “position,” so that “if you’re a nobody, be a nobody.” Thus, “structure” is about people knowing their place in a hierarchy and sticking to it. The young men at Hooper suggested that Jacob was a good example of this kind of individual: he stuck to himself, recognized the hierarchies of age and street allegiances, and yet was also a model of self-­discipline. Tony offered an example of a young person in the facility who violated this “structure”: a resident on his unit complained that he did not have enough sugar on his breakfast cereal; after he started complaining, everyone had to go back to their wing, and that resident faced “no consequences.” Sam said that if you get out of this “structure,” “there are consequences.” The participants at Hooper all said that this resident “structure” made their lives better in the facility. José reflected these sentiments when he said that that kids should be treated like dogs, because a dog clearly knows “who his master is.” Some young people bemoaned the recent shift in programmatic policies, which they felt “loosened” the forms of control that staff could extend over them, and discussed their desire for what they called a more “hands-­on” approach involving physical restraints. In fact, the term “looser” was used often by young people and staff to describe the evolution of the facility’s program since systemic reforms had happened: a staff member who allowed young people to “do loose program” would allow that young person to be undisciplined, some felt. Newz, who was placed in the facilities before the reforms occurred, spoke about how young people learned to “respect authority” in the old system when staff literally “slam[med]” them against walls. Other young men said that the environments were “calmer” when the staff used a more “hands-­on” approach. It is arguable that young people also desired an approach that was more explicit and direct in its expression of control; under the new system, control was exercised in less overt but perhaps no less powerful ways. Yet there were congruencies between these notions of discipline and the ways that young people described the violence in their lives outside of the facilities; the “old” form of overt control was, in some sense, familiar to them. Not only had these young people disproportionately been exposed to forms of parental discipline that mirrored that of staff discipline, they also spoke about the parallels between the violence of the streets and that of staff.37 José, for example, spoke about how he felt that “to control this environment, you need

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‘hostility’ from staff ” and that “we’re from the street” and so “we respect whoever” can instill that respect in a way that mirrors that expressed by individuals on the street. He said that “we just don’t like authority,” referring to the young people in the residential facility. He attributed this antipathy toward authority that young people in the institutions possessed to “the streets,” and he said that this process occurred through “socialization.” When I asked José what he felt “authority” meant on the streets, he said that it was about who gets the most money, like the “gangbangers.” He said that on the streets, people look at the police as just “snitches, cops, and pigs” and that they lack the authority and respect of the gangbangers. He was of the belief that younger teenagers “want to explore” and doing crimes meets “emotional needs.” José’s anthropological analysis of the young men in the facility, among which he implicitly included himself, reflected a confidence born out of his five years in custody. He spoke derisively about those peers who hadn’t come under “control” as he had. However, José’s analysis of authority also revealed his assessment of the relationship between authority in institutions inside and outside of the residential facilities and the role that those authorities play in the production of compliance, but not necessarily change. José recognizes that his compliance with facility programs—­and his demonstration of self-­ control—­did not necessarily translate into personal change as much as it represented deference or even submission to authority. But the institutions may have also been places where young people felt “out of control” and thus in search of a place where they could gain some sense of control.Young people’s desire for externally imposed control stemmed in part from their feelings about losing self-­control once they entered institutions but also from their desire for a sense of security and consistency within the institutional environments. These desires may also find their fruition in young people’s attachments to those individuals who are the sources of their subjection, such as the residential facility guards. St ru ggling wi th the D e monst rat i on of Change: M ov i ng On and Out Because the residential juvenile facility is intended to be an incubator of change, young people knew that they would be expected to demonstrate that change; however, if their process of change was not itself related to their crime but was softer and more internal, how to define that change to people in the system became murkier. A number of young people had adult convictions and would face a parole board that would determine their readiness for release. In New York, a young person’s completion of treatment programs and attainment of educational success means very little in the minds of parole, who overwhelmingly focus their decision-­making around the individual’s crime and his or her alleged level



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of dangerousness. The irony is that for many of the young people charged as adults who were sent to juvenile facilities, their entire time “doing program” actually meant little in the minds of the parole board. Almost all of the participants had been “hit” with more time after their first parole appearance. Many of the residents obsessed about their parole board hearings, and they frequently asked me and other adults about the best strategies for what to say and do in a parole hearing or for letters of support for the board. For young people adjudicated as delinquents, the judges in their cases had the authority to extend their placement until their eighteenth birthday. Staff in the juvenile facilities could recommend that a young person’s placement be extended. Thus, their progress in treatment did matter toward their ultimate ability to get out and stay out. Tony, the young man who had a sentence of fifteen years to life for homicide that he received when he was fifteen years old, often worried out loud about his future beyond bars and his eligibility for parole.Tony frequently asked about his ability to pursue careers that he had aspired to, such as being an attorney, with a felony homicide conviction. He also expressed some fears about where and how he would live on the outside. Thus, he recognized the serious obstacles he would face in building a life for himself after his imprisonment. On the inside, Tony was engaged in college-­level coursework and actively participated in religious services offered at the facility. He enjoyed writing, reading, and reflection and would often pepper me with questions about college, graduate school, and opportunities outside of imprisonment. He expressed an interest in “helping his community” and asked about how he might be able to do this. He spoke about his desire to act as a leader, even if younger residents who resisted the program would thwart his efforts. He said, “I feel a responsibility to help others” and that when he first came to the facility, he was immature, and there were people there who helped him. He said that there was a resident who returned to the facility on a parole violation who saw Tony resisting the program and encouraged him to follow the program. Tony wondered why the parole board would not be able to understand that he had grown up since he had first entered custody when he was fifteen years old. He asked, “How can you show this change?” He continued, “you mature a lot” after you are fifteen years old. Tony, like many others, struggled against the assumption that he had done wrong and would continue to do so and that despite his feelings about his internal, authentic processes of self-­ transformation, the parole board will ultimately decide to release him based on a cursory examination of his facility records. Tony struggles to express his humanity, his potential, and his similarity with so many others who have grown up and matured past their teenage troubles. Tony is now in a maximum security prison in upstate New York. He entered custody there in 2009 and will have his first parole hearing in 2019.

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By the time he reaches parole, he will have spent the primary years of his young adulthood behind bars. Like many people with lengthy sentences, he has received just a handful of visits from family. He has never had the opportunity to continue college, which he started in his juvenile facility. He has never received individual therapy to address the violence he experienced in his childhood. He’s grown physically large after years of lifting weights on the prison yard, but he has experienced limited emotional growth since I met him six years ago. The Contour s of Chang e Recidivism rates become the measure of success in a world of criminal and juvenile justice that is dependent on federal and state funding to steer programming and rehabilitative resources. Will young people reoffend if they take a series of cognitive behavioral interventions? Will their demonstration of personal responsibility lead them to accept fault for what they have done in the past and thus avoid doing the same in the future? Will the “structure” of facility life, coupled with the threat of physical punishment, ingrain a fear of consequences in their lives? Young people are deeply distanced from these questions about reoffending. Few teenagers behind bars are exclusively focused on how they will stop offending but are instead concerned with the broader dilemmas of living a precarious life as a young adult: how can they stay safe and free from incarceration and policy custody when they get home? How can they gain access to college and a career? How can they find love and friendship, support and certainty? These young people rarely ask whether the system can give them these things, with the exception of the few staff members who go above and beyond with them and who they stay in touch with them. They rarely explicitly identify a program, module, or intervention as the source of their hope. Instead, they grapple, in multiple dimensions, with how they can stay sane, free, and seek a place of reflection in a place that is, paradoxically, highly controlled but also deeply alienating, unchallenging, and unstimulating. Olivia left McClary and drifted to the wind. I searched far and wide for her—­on social media, through her family—­but I never found her. Olivia was one of a few teenagers, including Maya, whom I have never found again, despite the ease of access that social media allows for. Olivia’s disappearance is not necessarily a sign of her repeat offending—­although it could be—­but a mix of complex and difficult things. She could well not want to be found. The only sign that she was still alive was a moment last year when she turned up in the New York city courts database as a defendant charged with a minor crime. Skippy, now twenty-­one, is in jail. Sadly, as with a number of other young people in this book, the only way that I can locate him is through the publicly available Internet search for jail and prison inmates.



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The time eventually came for Newz to be released from prison, where he was sent from the residential juvenile facility on his twenty-­first birthday. He had few options about where to live upon his release. His adopted parents’ home was located near a school, a zone that registered sex offenders were banned from. Newz reached out to a few of us that he knew and asked for help; he learned in the prison that unless he could find a place to live, with a fixed address, he would stay there indefinitely. A team of us scrambled together to find any place that he could go, from a program in Albany, to ones in New York City, where he was from. He was systematically rejected from every program, until finally we learned that the main men’s shelter in New York City would take him in. Newz walked out of prison and into the city’s largest adult men’s shelter. I knew it well for its inhospitable conditions and its reputation for violence; a number of my adult male clients chose to sleep on the subway instead of spending the night in the shelter. Later transferred to a smaller men’s shelter, Newz struggled. The first time I saw him after he got out, he boasted that he had purchased a pair of expensive boots with money that his adopted parents had given him. He spoke proudly of the boots to me and a social worker who worked at my old office; after he left, we both talked about how struck we were by the incongruity of his existence: he had just told us that he couldn’t find a job, had been rejected from a number of programs he had applied to, and that the money that he had earned as a kitchen worker in the juvenile facility was running dry. Soon afterward, we lost touch with Newz; according to the New York State Division of Parole, he went AWOL from his supervision. He eventually turned up in the supervision of the New York City Department of Corrections; he has been charged with failing to register as a sex offender, and thus with a violation of parole. He remains in jail pending his parole revocation hearing. On the outside, José spoke little about his family, but rather about spending time outside of confinement enjoying his new found freedoms. Although he was required by parole to engage in anger management and drug treatment courses, José suggested a kind of ambivalence about the parole requirements. After he told me that all parole does is check in with him and sometimes come to his house, I asked if it would be helpful if parole was more supportive; José said no, because he usually goes back to his old ways if people are breathing down his neck. He said that he liked things the way they were right now, just being able to “chill” without anybody getting in his way. José implied that he had not gone back to offending but that he also did not want to engage in the model forms of responsibility laid out by the courts and “the system” in a broader sense. He uses the word “chill” to suggest his interest in relaxing, being left alone, and enjoying a relative sense of autonomy. Yet this lifestyle of “chilling” was also being sustained by income from his

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previous “old ways.” Thus, there is a tension in José’s newfound sense of being in the world.38 Residential juvenile facilities are in their very mission focused on facilitating change in young people. The apparatus of programs, rules, levels, and punishment was developed with the idea that the young people who enter the facilities must change their lives and their behaviors to successfully reenter the world. Yet young people’s relationships to these official notions of change reveal that their relationships to the institution are often as much about identifying and carving out a sense of ownership about their own process of change that is separate and apart from institutional norms about change. For those young people who embrace official ideas about discipline, like those who argue that they must be restrained or physically punished, their alignment with institutional ideas about behavioral control are in fact ones that may symbolize a submission to their domination and control. However, it is clear from hundreds of years of collective research knowledge that physical punishment, isolation, and separation are not conducive to human growth. The conditions of human growth must also be attuned to broader social-­ structural forces that relate to such growth. The world outside of prisons, detention facilities, and custodial institutions that young people charged with crimes face are ones that are racialized social systems. These are systems that are defined by the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla Silva as those in which “economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races.”39 These systems actually deepen the damage done by repressive social structures to the primarily black and brown and impoverished white young people by upholding a myth of progress and individual change that is just that, a myth.40 The interventions used in the juvenile justice system today focus on facilitating internal self-­ control within young people. As such, they are shaped by racial hierarchies and strategies of domination that insist on and demand that self-­control be exercised as a form of deference and submission. Any restructuring of this model or challenge to the hierarchical structure poses a threat to the racialized social system. “Threats” are represented through behavior that is deemed to be bad or “ungovernable.” Thus, there are few social incentives that exist in the juvenile justice system that provide young people with the conditions to move beyond their roles as deferential, submissive figures. State agents therefore absolve themselves of the responsibility of eliminating the many structural barriers that exist in these young people’s lives. The preservation of a racialized social system actually depends on these barriers existing, for they help to maintain a race and class hierarchy that the juvenile justice system depends on for its very functioning. Even though there have been contemporary nods to the sanctity of youth “voice,” self-­help and representation in the present-­day system and



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an acknowledgment of the disproportionate representation of youth of color, there are processes and systems in place at the front and back ends of the system—­through policing, parole and probation practices, institutional arrangements, and ideologies of “help”—­that actually preserve existing systems of racial domination and repression and result in the continuing need for a juvenile justice apparatus. These processes and systems were arguably set into motion with the establishment of the first separate juvenile institution in New York in 1825, when the impoverished children of immigrants to the country were served in a way that demanded their submission to the legal authorities who “helped” them.41 So many of the young people who enter custody are grappling with ideas about change; they want to be able to imagine better lives for themselves. Many of the young people saw the institutional focus on making them rule-­ compliant as something that didn’t serve their interest in building a better life for themselves; thus, although a number of young people found a way to follow the rules and thus make their everyday lives a little easier, they also focused on growing with the limited resources that they had available to them to grow—­time with friends, writing in a journal, reading, or talking to a sympathetic staff member. In short, the program itself did not play a significant role in facilitating change for young people; for them, change came “from the inside,” not from inside the facilities.

Conclusion

Our juvenile justice systems inhibit young people’s growth and development, treat the largely black and brown teenagers as discardable and worthless, and create more harm than they provide help. When I tell people that this is what I have found in my research, they ask me, “Well, what would you do?” This is the wrong question. The focus of so many liberal reformers for so many years on “doing” has had often-­fatal consequences for young people. Although I am preternaturally opposed to inaction, I believe that “doing” has all to often involved attempts to fix other people’s children—­to intervene, help, and change the individual, or even in some cases, the system. This has left us in an almost perennial state of “reform” but without any opportunity to seriously consider why we spend so much time attempting to fix a young person who has, in some cases, committed a single bad act over the course of just a few minutes. So, in short, I would ask instead: why do we keep on doing this the wrong way? For a moment in the 1970s, the concept of radical noninterventionism, or just “leaving them the hell alone,” was floated in leftist academic circles.1 This was rooted in the idea that the very arrest and reform of teenagers was the cure that harmed. Radical noninterventionism recognized that most young people will grow out of crime, and the more we fiddled with young people’s lives, the worse off they would be. Radical noninterventionism is rooted in the idea that we should just stop messing around with these kids and let them be. Instead, we should develop resources for their communities and fundamentally redistribute wealth, especially in a place like New York (one of the richest states in the country) so that the wealthiest are adequately taxed and there is enough funding for early childhood services, better schools, and more social supports. This is indeed a version of what I want. But I also think a fundamentally moral question remains unaddressed by the issue of radical noninterventionism. Today, among juvenile justice reformers, there is a popular belief, among large foundations to current and former system commissioners, that we should 160

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close juvenile prisons entirely. Indeed, some may say that my book is irrelevant because the facilities that I studied in 2008 are rapidly closing and changing—­ that under New York’s “Close to Home” initiative, the vast majority of young people are no longer even being sent upstate. That facilities are out of favor, and the ones that remain look and feel nicer than the ones I researched. But I have spent time in the bowels of the New York State Archives, reading the memos, letters, and reports of former system commissioners, advocacy groups, and wardens, dating back to the nineteenth century, and their words haunt me. Not only could the words from 1850 and 1950 be substituted for those of reformers today—­the call to do something new for kids; to make smaller, nicer facilities; to focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment—­but the kids inside have remained exactly the same. They’ve been shuttled around different facilities—­some small, some big, operated by agencies with different names, that look a little different or feel a little different, that are located within a few miles of home or hundreds of miles from home. Some kids who were once locked up are now on electronic monitoring or are at home and see a social worker instead of a juvenile facility counselor. But they are the same. These kids are the ungovernable. They challenge our notions of normativity, of safety and security. They are the children who we deem to be incapable of change and incapable of being changed, in ways that are deeply tinged by the sociopolitical dynamics of the time. Today, our notions of governability are deeply racialized; the children who are deemed to be worthy of being saved and who are exempted from deep-­end facilities are growing in number, but there remain a category of children, primarily black and brown and male, who are understood to be incapable of change in their own homes and in need of removal from them. These ungovernable children are then forced to be governed through behavioral change interventions that demand total submission to state authority. The facilities that I was in in 2008 now have a different behavioral change system—­the differently colored shoelaces have been discarded for a new model of behavioral advancement; some of the forms that staff had to fill out have been replaced by forms with different names; the Marshall girls facility closed and has reopened elsewhere. All of these changes have been made in the name of reform—­they have been done to make the facilities look and feel better and nicer.Yet, as some have argued, are they in fact representative of a trend of “carceral humanism” or “carceral welfare”?2 In this case, punitive practices are essentially re-­packaged to look nicer, to be more welfarist in their orientation, and to express a more seemingly compassionate approach. Yet they remain tied to the carceral state—­they are still a form of punishment. At Marshall, the girls can now paint their rooms, and they seem to engage in more treatment practices; there are also arguably changes that have been made in response to the Department of Justice investigation into the system that do a much better

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job of protecting children in crisis.Yet if the facilities are more broadly “nicer,” does this actually mean that young people’s lives will change for the better? I believe that my work suggests this is not possible. At the heart of the residential facility are children who are undergoing a process of change in their lives—­that of adolescence and young adulthood—­which is obscured, stultified, and hindered by the state’s focus on the child’s crime and their moral worth. The criminalized child is the crucible of this story. Criminalized children become the children unto whom work must be done to fix them, even though their own relationship to being fixed, their own internal struggles about the acts they have committed, their own sense of worth, and their very relationship to the adults who criminalize them is so seldom understood by them. In fact, in all of the thousands of pages of archival documents, the hundreds of interviews, the hours of fieldwork, I have rarely heard any adult exhibit empathy for this group of children but rather a resounding sympathy coupled often with a kind of condemnation. The reader might ask how it is possible to be both sympathetic and condemning. I think this is possible when a young person is understood to be ungovernable. The paradox of ungovernable children is that they are always the children who are seen to be in need of fixing—­the children whom we should help, feel sorry for, change, or address. But, as a class of individuals who are other people’s children, they are also seen as unwieldy, scary, capable of harm, inherently bad—­they are also, perennially, unfixable or ungovernable. What I am suggesting is that the hidden spectre of juvenile justice reforms is the unfixable and ungovernable child. The child is always the problem, not the confounding system that they enter, not the confusing and ever-­changing treatment practices, not the boredom behind bars, not the unreasonable expectations of conformity and compliance, not even their adolescent struggles to make sense of their identity and their relationships to themselves. The criminalized child is the problem. If they comply fully with the system intended to change them, they are a sociopath; if they don’t comply, they are resistant. If they reoffend, which the vast majority of children do who go through juvenile justice systems across the country, then they are in need of further governance. If they reoffend as adults, like Jacob, then they are not the problem of the juvenile justice systems and therefore are more easily abandoned. Young people’s experiences of being criminalized are intimately connected to the ways that the adults in their lives assessed their governability and their moral worth. These assessments have consequences not only for their routes into the criminal justice system, but also for their aspirations and their social mobility. Teenagers who are considered ungovernable in their communities are often sent to institutions, including foster and group homes, hospitals and mental health treatment facilities, juvenile facilities, and prisons, to be governed, but often, while there, they are found to be ungovernable. This

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perpetual state of ungovernability and unworthiness had deep and negative impacts on young people. Michael’s ability to behave in ways that were considered respectable by his teachers, or his mother’s ability to demonstrate her fitness for work while living in the homeless shelter, became the evidence on which their worth and value as social citizens were assessed by agents of the state. The assessments of them raised considerable questions about the relationship between young people and the state actors they encountered throughout their lives: what impact did these condemnations of their families and themselves have on young people? What motivated these assessments of worth? The young people I met found their own aspirations shaped and twisted by these negative assessments of their worthiness. These young people struggled to engage in behavior that was considered virtuous by those who had the power to deem it so, and they were thus considered to be worthless and bad. So, if they, like many teenagers, were only partially “bad,” what happened when they engaged in an explicit form of badness—­violating the law? A “bad” kid is one who is seen by adults as ungovernable, unable to appreciate and respond to the demands and commands of his or her schoolteachers and the police who monitor his or her community. This construction of ungovernability seriously hampers a young person’s navigation of the broader systems they must encounter to thrive. So once they encounter schools that turn them away, housing institutions that prevent them from living there because of a conviction, employers who deny them work, and parole and probation officers who presume they will fail, they often give up, withdraw, or turn back to offending. This is not because of their inherently criminal natures, or the “culture” of offending they come from, but it grows out of the very ideas about their worth that are produced and reproduced. In much juvenile justice rhetoric, it has become common practice to point to the conservative commentators of the 1990s who propagated racist, classist, and sexist beliefs about young offenders that resulted in zero tolerance policies toward them. Liberal reformers condemn these perspectives and argue for a welfarist approach to young people, one rooted in the idea that young people can be saved from a life of crime through treatment and interventions. Yet in many ways, this perspective entrenches an oversimplified idea of the young offender as a troubled young person who can change if only given the right forms of treatment and support systems. What this idea of the young person doesn’t include is the notion that it is the very pathological social systems they have encountered, coupled with the institutional racism, sexism, and classism, that have arguably contributed to their criminalization process. These social systems have caused the “young offender” to emerge. When those same social processes and systems inform the very treatments that young people are given—­for example, the cognitive behavioral therapies that are informed by

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the idea that the “responsible” subject who has fully accepted his or her fault in offending, or the family therapy that assumes it is the pathological (primarily black and brown) family that has erred in raising their children; or the risk-­informed technologies, which identify previous arrests as a source of risk without acknowledging that black and brown young people are arrested more often than white children—­these processes and systems are simply reembedded in the juvenile justice system. It is no surprise, then, that children continue to be rearrested, to get into trouble in institutions, and to be restrained by staff members who find them to be intractable and ungovernable. There are individuals and institutions in today’s juvenile justice system who believe that some children are worth saving and some are not. Some believe that there’s nothing to be done once a teenager who has been given help commits another crime, relapses, or goes on the run. Today’s juvenile justice system is arguably deeply liberal in its dependence on state intervention and reform to force positive change in young people’s lives, but strangely illiberal in its effects. These effects are often cruel and unusual, as the practices of lengthy sentencing, solitary confinement, educational neglect, physical restraints, and limited due process rights are reserved for the poorest, most seriously mentally ill, and most marginalized members of the system.3 We must craft political solutions for serious youth offending that actually transform existing social structural inequalities and relationships rather than preserving them. These political solutions include a fundamental transformation of the social welfare safety net for young people in peril: they must be provided with adequate access to safe housing through young adulthood, including and especially young people who are in the foster care system; they must be provided with expanded access to outpatient and inpatient mental health services, especially those that do not discriminate against children who have been accused of, adjudicated for, or convicted of a crime; they must have access to schools that love and nourish them instead of reject them; they must have real and meaningful access to employment, particularly during the summer months when they are not in school. We must cultivate notions of growth and change for young people—­ and ultimately freedom from injury, despair, and the grips and seductions of violence, which are themselves arguably produced by racism and structural violence. We should not treat the intervention into the crime as the cure or reforms to the police and punitive state as the solution, but instead we should boost the potential of the state to enact social good through the infusion and redistribution of resources to individuals whose growth depends on those resources. That growth involves life-­sustaining food, shelter, and medical care; unfettered access to nourishing relationships with friends and family; the highest quality education; and the ability to realize a collective dignity.

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We also cannot overlook the day-­to-­day lives of the individuals who inhabit these systems. We must not be seduced into the idea that abuse and violence must be physical and brutal to rise to our attention and that therapy is the antithesis of punishment. Juvenile facilities can have a deep and negative impact on the lives of the people who inhabit them—­staff and young people—­without ever including violence. Behavioral change regimes can be boring, confusing, and demanding in and of themselves, and this can have serious effects on an individual’s capacity to grow and change. I critique the cognitive behavioral programming in the facilities fully aware and respectful of the systematic and thorough research that has been done about these programs and the effects they have on subsequent reoffending. Other scholars will argue that the evidence is robust: cognitive behavioral programming and multisystemic family therapies have a greater impact on subsequent reoffending than any other approach. I don’t dispute these findings, which have important consequences for our understandings of the harms that young people’s offending can do in our communities. What I dispute are the ways that young people’s lives—­and their ability to live those lives—­are conceptualized in the approach those programs take to them. Simply understanding those young people as vessels for the application of management and control strategies, rather than human beings with complex lives in the pursuit of dignity is, in my mind, a fundamentally inhuman approach to them. These programs also inherently exclude a structural analysis about what leads certain groups of young people to be arrested; the groups of individuals who are studied are those who are sentenced to juvenile facilities, residential treatment centers, and community-­based alternative-­to-­incarceration programs, not the young people who I went to high school with at an elite private boarding school but who similarly challenged authority, violated the law, and made errors in their thinking patterns. What I would argue is that our question to find ever more effective tools for behavioral management in juvenile facilities comes at the cost of decency, mercy, and respect. Often, at the facility level, the most simple changes are the ones that can potentially have the most transformative effects on the lives of young people and staff. These are arguably the changes that are rooted in and responsive to the dignity of the individuals within them: like all teenagers, young people inside juvenile facilities seek nourishment and growth in multiple dimensions of existence: their minds, their bodies, and in their spiritual lives. When facilities focus exclusively on behavioral change programs, as many of them do, without an attendant focus on athletics, education, the arts, and the spiritual and emotional lives of young people, they ignore the multiple and varied ways that young people’s suffering and their strengths can be addressed and nourished. During my time in New York’s facilities, the athletic fields surrounding

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the facilities often remained sometimes hauntingly empty; although basketball games were common, and the young people would occasionally play some intramural sports, I was always struck by how seldom they engaged in athletic activities in the way that is common to their peers in high schools across the country.The same goes for artistic and creative activities; although high schools across the country see these activities as an essential component of adolescent development both within and beyond the classroom, almost no state juvenile facilities in the country include funding for such enrichment activities. If they do exist, they are conducted by volunteers or outside organizations. Young people who enter juvenile facilities do not stop being teenagers, and yet they are treated as if the act or acts that they have committed constitute the entire content of their character. This is a dangerous approach to individual growth and change; it misrecognizes the inner lives of young people, their needs, and their dignity. This book attempts to convey the harms that can be done when the bad child, rather than the extraordinary and promising child, becomes the center of our interventions.

M eth odolog ical Ap pe nd ix

The research study took place between 2007 and 2011. The New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), which runs the state’s secure residential facilities for young people charged with crimes, generously allowed me inside of their facilities to interview youth and staff over an extended period of time.1 The sociologist Loic Wacquant detailed the need to analyze of the dynamics of everyday life in American correctional institutions in the context of what has been termed “mass imprisonment” and noted that few researchers had found their way into prisons in recent years.2 Wacquant argues that it is important to scrutinize the daily life of these institutions to develop theories about the mechanisms that help to support, reproduce, and sustain mass imprisonment. Thirty-­nine teenagers participated in the first stage of my research, which took place for a year and a half, starting at the end of 2008. In 2010, I initiated a study about staff, interviewing more than seventy frontline staff members and administrators from across the state. In addition to analyzing young people’s and staff ’s experiences in the state’s juvenile facilities, I also talked to young people about their perspectives on court, detention, and alternative to incarceration programs. I was a participant observer in more than twenty meetings with system administrators, policymakers, and reformers about the processes of reform I described earlier. After I left the field, I continued to stay in touch with the young people, and I continue to visit juvenile facilities and prisons across the state, where I engage in teaching, sentencing, parole, and reentry advocacy work. I used a mix of research methods. I conducted focus groups and individual interviews, did extensive observational field work, and taught a group of young people in a research methods course, using participatory action research methods to gather data. The research sites in the first study included residential treatment facilities, jails, courts, alternative-­to-­incarceration programs, and group homes, as well as the young people’s homes, street corners, and the social networking sites they frequented.3 I spent time with the teenagers on the phone, in their homes, at restaurants, hospitals, welfare offices, funeral homes, shelters, and many other places. I did not live in the young people’s 167

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communities, nor did I spend the night in their homes. I built relationships focused on respect but also founded on a clear sense of boundaries—­as a young white woman from a privileged background in a doctoral program, I could not become a seamless part of my participants’ lives. I was there to learn, and inasmuch as I could, reciprocate that learning with my knowledge of the law and the system that these individuals had been so alienated from. The research involved the development of sustained relationships with the participants, as well as attention to the contexts that they existed in and the broader political landscape that impacted on their experiences in the courts and in custody. The research also involved interviews with the young people’s family members and friends, residential facility and community-­based program workers, and government officials involved in the juvenile justice system. The specific aims of the research were to:

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Understand how young people express agency in the context of the contemporary youth justice system. Identify some of the ways in which they believe they can get out and stay out of the system. Examine what role the state plays and can play in either inhibiting or facilitating young people’s exit from the system.

Ethnog raph i c and Phe nome nolog i cal Ap p roac he s My approach was strongly rooted in the interpretivist tradition of qualitative research and driven by the goal of achieving a contextual understanding of the lives of participants.4 Ethnographic approaches also seek to understand the meanings of action within a social world.5 Ethnography holds the potential to create a “dialogic” encounter between the observer and participant.6 Such methods help to understand how young people relate to their experiences of punishment, and the meanings they give to their experiences within this context.7 Ethnographies of residential facilities can aid in developing thicker understandings of the ways in which “institutional selves” are expressed and negotiated.8 Criminologist Ben Crewe argues that observational fieldwork in a prison can help to access the “hidden transcripts” that may illuminate some of the dynamics of prison life that relate to the study of individual agency in the face of coercive power.9 Ethnographies of coercive contexts are naturally limited by the researcher’s ability to gain unfettered access to the research site. Not only was I not incarcerated myself, I was unable to spend all day and night inside of the facilities as a true participant observer. There are also ethical complexities involved in choosing to participate in a context in which one is a clear outsider.10



Methodological Appendix

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Although motivated by the aim of painting a detailed portrait of institutional landscapes and experiences, this was not an immersive ethnography. My aim was to understand “how members accomplish, manage and reproduce a sense of social structure.”11 This approach was concerned with how human consciousness and perceptions are constitutive of the objects and structures that they exist in.12 Approaches to understanding processes of growth are difficult because it is often hard to disentangle performances from lived truths and experiences, and, in turn, these may be complicated by emotions. “Emotion work” is central to the “human capacity for, if not the actual habit of, reflecting on and shaping inner feelings.”13 This approach was used to analyze young people’s negotiation of identity and “change” in the continuum of punishment. It allowed for a closer examination of the role that emotion played in young people’s struggles to grow up and out of the institutions of punishment they encountered. Site Se lec t i on I chose two sites for my research: residential juvenile facilities operated by the OCFS, a statewide agency also responsible for the administration of the child welfare system, and the “community” in which the young people lived while court involved if they were not in institutional care. Notwithstanding my attempts to capture the breadth and depth of their experiences, this research design could not accommodate for the fact that young people frequently moved in and out of a vast range of institutions. I traveled to the residential facilities on a regular basis. I would typically spend between four and six hours in each facility on each visit. I chose one secure facility that confines young people charged as so-­called Juvenile Offenders (thirteen-­to fifteen-­year-­olds charged as adults) until they turn twenty-­one years old.14 Juvenile delinquents (seven-­to fifteen-­year-­olds adjudicated in family court) reside in limited secure and nonsecure facilities, and they are sent to these facilities based on an assessment of their risk and readiness for release at intake. Young people charged with delinquencies but who are assessed as having the lowest level of risk reside in “nonsecure” facilities, which are locked but generally do not have razor-­wire fences outside them. The girls’ facility, Marshall, was in a rural area outside of a small city in the northern, formerly industrialized part of the state. Marshall’s campus included the girls’ secure and limited secure facilities, the girls’ intake facility for the state, and a boys’ facility. The girls’ facility consisted of six living units that had anywhere from nine to sixteen girls on them. Both the girls’ and the boys’ facilities were brought under federal receivership after the U.S. Department of Justice found that the facilities had inadequate mental health treatment and that staff overused physical restraints.

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The boys’ secure facility, Hooper, is in a rural but more affluent part of the state than Marshall, closer to New York City. It has a budgeted capacity of 180 beds and had a smaller self-­contained facility adjacent to it that served as a substance abuse treatment unit. There are ten units in the main building consisting of fifteen beds each, with one mental health unit, as well as a unit called the Modified Services Program, which was used for boys from across the state who had committed a serious infraction of facility rules. The substance abuse program (in the adjacent facility to the main building) was for boys who are designated at intake as having a drug or alcohol dependency. It was widely regarded by residents and staff as a place that was more orderly, “easier” for staff to work in, and generally a more relaxed environment. Both facilities at Hooper are surrounded by concertina wire, a sally port that visitors must go through up on exit and entry, and every unit is secured by a lock that is controlled in a central security unit (but can also be accessed by keys provided to the staff). The movements of the residents are tightly controlled. Each residential unit goes to meals, gym and school at separate times (and some units actually have a classroom attached to them, so the teacher comes directly to the unit to teach). Residents are required to walk in a line to and from each activity, often counting their room numbers out loud as they passed by a control point, and were required to hold their hands behind their backs whenever they walked through the facility. McClary residential center was selected because of its status as a model program in the minds of state administrators and national advocates. It was perceived to be a facility that best embraced the therapeutic direction that the state’s administrators were moving toward. It is a non-­secure facility, thus representative of the least restrictive kind of setting in the state.15 McClary has a budgeted capacity for twenty-­two residents and comprises two living units. One of them is a mental health unit. There is a separate building for a gymnasium. There is also an outdoor swimming pool and other recreational facilities. McClary serves a number of young people who identify as transgender girls and who are openly gay males. The staff members were required to call the young people by their preferred names and genders per an LGBT nondiscrimination policy. Young people who were considered to be more vulnerable, either because of a serious mental health disorder or because of their histories of foster care placements, were also placed in this facility. I also visited four other residential facilities: a boys’ secure facility and a limited secure facility, both about two hours north of New York City, a boys’ non-­secure facility in the Catskill mountains, and a limited-­secure and secure boys’ facility near Rochester, a larger city in the northern part of the state. The second research site was in the community. I obtained access to the participants in this setting through my previous employer, a public defender’s office based in New York City. I had worked there as a sentencing mitigation



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specialist. A mitigation specialist compiles family histories, social histories, medical and mental health records, school records, and other documents to complete a dossier on the client that would aid in his or her defense or at sentencing. My job required that I made referrals for clients to community-­based programs and services and advocated for them in schools, welfare offices, and mental health settings. I attended and observed court appearances, visited with participants in the court holding cells and attorney visit areas, and at Rikers Island, juvenile detention facilities, and adult prisons. I also went to a police precinct, a parole office, the probation department, and alternative to incarceration programs. I engaged in participant observation in several committees of a statewide juvenile justice coalition, adopting a backseat role in these group meetings. I attended other meetings and conferences over the course of the year, including one held at the Rikers Island adolescent facility with the commissioner of corrections, as well as multiple police–­community meetings in the participants’ neighborhoods, city council hearings on the subject of juvenile justice, and multiple conferences and research presentations on juvenile justice reform in New York. Sampling The sampling strategies in this research were dictated in part by the nature of the sample (vulnerable, transient, and “hard to reach”), by theoretical and analytical considerations, and by practical constraints presented by the research settings. The final sample size was thirty-­nine young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-­one, with twelve girls and twenty-­seven boys. I engaged in theoretical and snowball sampling for the facility staff and other institutional actors and family members. During the first research stage, I conducted interviews with thirty-­eight staff members and engaged in informal conversation with a number of others. The second research study, focused on staff, involved more than forty site visits to facilities and interviews with more than seventy-­five staff members from the beginning of 2011 until the fall of 2012. Th e Communi ty Sam p l i ng P roc e ss The community sample was constructed primarily on the basis of existing relationships that I had with young people and their attorneys. Attorneys at the public defender’s office referred clients to me, and I would then ask the clients if they were interested in volunteering for my research, seeking informed consent. To deepen the observations and perspectives, I conducted interviews with nine family members of the participants. I spent hundreds of hours with the family of Billy and Marcus. I met the family early in the research and built a strong rapport with them. I helped the boys’ sister apply for college, I tutored

F i g ure A-1.   Population of Young People Charged with Crimes in New York

Juvenile Delinquents in New York State in 2006 (25,000+ total )

12% of juvenile delinquents placed in an institution away from home

There were more than 25,000 young people referred to court as juvenile delinquents in New York State in 2006 (the past year for which data were available), and 12 percent of those cases resulted in a young person being placed in an institution away from home. S OU R CE : KWIC, 2010 —Office of Court Administration Data set Young people (16–18 years) arrested in New York State in 2008.

Young people admitted to custody in OCFS (1,632 total )

1,009 admitted to custody from New York City

There were a total of 1,632 young people admitted to custody in OCFS in 2008; 1,009 of those admissions were from New York City. S OUR CE : Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), 2008 Annual Report

Young people (13–15 years) arrested as Juvenile Offenders

1,808 young people were arrested as Juvenile Offenders (13–15 year olds charged with serious offenses as adults) in New York City in 2009. S OUR CE : Gewirtz, 2010 16

42,554 young people arrested in New York City

Young people (18 years and under) on probation 33,610 young people arrested in the rest of the state

42,554 young people between the ages of 16 and 18 were arrested in New York City in 2008, and 33,610 young people arrested in the rest of the state in 2008. S OURCE : New York Division of Criminal Justice Services

7,187 young people (18 and under) were on probation in New York City in 2008. S OUR CE : Cannon et al., 2010 17



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their younger sister, helped the mother with some issues concerning her housing, and assisted the family in navigating the justice system, which they were often embroiled in. The boys’ father had spent a substantial amount of time in prison since he was a teenager, and I interviewed him about his experiences. I regularly spoke on the phone with the family, and they would call me when their sons were arrested (which happened at least six times during the course of the research) and ask me to come to the police station or court. I continue to speak and meet with the family. E th ical R e f le c t i ons My methods were rooted in principles of deep listening, drew from strong feedback and supervision, and were consistently focused on and respectful of young people’s confidentiality. A number of the participants had suffered from abuse and trauma, disproportionate levels of violence, and histories of mental illness, psychiatric hospitalizations and experience in the child welfare system. It was clear that these experiences, which would have exposed this group of young people to a wide variety of risk assessments, psychological evaluations, surveys, and requests for participation in other kinds of research, may lead them to feel wary that they were being exploited, concerned that the research would be used for purposes other than those that were stated (for example, a child welfare intervention), or distrustful of my motives. Another concern was that the research experience might further traumatize the young people by encouraging them to discuss their personal histories and experiences, and perhaps compound the distress they were already feeling. I was also attuned to the ways that my identity as a white woman, with its connotations of racial, class, and professional privilege, might affect the research dynamics. My concerns with young people’s relationships to (primarily white) authority figures, and my sense (and experience) that these relationships may be tinged with distrust, also led me to believe that I might also be perceived with similar levels of distrust by them. This research captured the voices of the young people by exercising a commitment to making their voices the centerpiece of the research. Alderson argues that the principles of respect and justice dictate in part that children as research subjects be respected as “sensitive dignified human beings.”18 Hollway and Jefferson express the need to pursue honesty, sympathy, and respect in the research context to mitigate dependence or avoidance on the part of both the researched and the researcher.19 Preve nt ing E xp loi tat i on in the R e searc h P roc e ss Some accounts of young people’s experiences of punishment can repeat the pattern of their systematic exclusion from discourses about their rights by

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decontextualizing their words and forgetting to recognize the ways that they can be part of the project to construct legitimate knowledge. Young people’s participation in research or policy endeavors can become tokenistic. These concerns have been raised and developed in the area of critical pedagogies and action-­oriented research more generally.20 These scholars have argued that the practice of engaging with and prioritizing the voice of the marginalized “other” is itself a resistant act, disrupting “exclusionary tendencies,” potentially promoting transformations of structures.21 Some potentially deeply upsetting moments for both me but especially for the participants (arrests, running away from home, loss, and death), for example, became interesting information for my work. Although I made note of these experiences, I also felt a strong ethical obligation not simply to make note of them, but also to treat them with the kind of humanity and urgency that were demanded of them, thinking sensitively and carefully about my role if I was asked for help or if I was not.22 Power imbalances in the research process can be minimized by being sensitive to the ways in which participants express their perspectives and feelings about their life worlds.23 Pierre Bourdieu advocates that sociologists do not simply try to “cancel the social distance” between interviewer and interviewee (in cases where that social distance exists) but to attempt to show that she is “mentally capably of putting herself in their place.”24 One of the themes to emerge in the research was young people’s consistent frustration with their lack of “voice” in the criminal court process. By recording their voice through the interview process and also responding to their stated frustrations (often with a simple acknowledgment of them), I played a role in the disruption of their narratives, and potentially shifted (in a small way) some of the power relations that they commented on. The participants also had the power to control what they did and did not share with me, as I had the power to decide what I focused on in my analysis. This also relates to the process of “framing” that has particular salience in the criminal justice context: how young people are understood, by whom, and at what point, plays a role in deciding how and where they may end up along the carceral continuum. I was potentially perceived as possessing that power to shape their outcomes.25 The interviews were driven by the sense that individuals may offer a different public portrayal of themselves than in private. They became a window into young people’s constructions of their identity. However, it was sometimes difficult to fully engage young people in this process. In contrast to my experience as a social worker, where my role in the context of a criminal case had an explicit emphasis on helping young people get out from under their legal cases, my role as a researcher with more ambiguous aims made these interviews more challenging. A number of the young people, especially the young men, were often reticent to talk to me during the interviews and potentially distrusted my motives. This was an unexpected challenge, and so I adopted an interview



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approach that began by asking them how they were doing, what was happening in their lives, and responding accordingly. This approach attempted to convey that the establishment of a relationship between us was critical to the research’s success. I also engaged in the practice, following Henry Stack Sullivan’s school of psychological engagement, of ending each encounter by acknowledging and affirming what we had discussed, highlighting key moments, and conveying appreciation and my own insight building process.26 Sullivan argues that individuals seek a feeling of “personal security” in interpersonal situations that relates to their need to “avoid, alleviate, or escape from anxiety.”27 Sullivan’s philosophy is that this process is deeply humanizing; it helps to remind people that they are not alone and that they are acknowledged and understood. Knowle dg e of the Fi e l d My knowledge of the criminal justice system in New York deeply informed this research process. My background knowledge of the social institutions, politicians, and key landmarks (parks where kids play basketball, stores where they shopped, physical structures, and so on) also aided me in establishing a rapport and conveying my knowledge of the street. My connection to the public defender’s office in Harlem also allowed me access to a great deal of information about neighborhood-­based incidents, trends, and so on that were useful in helping me to construct a broader picture of the research terrain. I attempted to mitigate the effects of exploitation by establishing other forms of reciprocity with the participants than that described above. There were times when I felt that I had built a strong rapport with participants inside of the facilities, but I could not locate them once they had been released. As I realized the challenges in finding time as well as in building the trust and rapport with the participants, facilitating access to various opportunities became one way of maintaining contact with them. It also acted as a form of social capital, which it became alarmingly clear they were missing, particularly as I received a number of unsolicited appeals for help finding jobs, programs, and help with college applications.28 My role in young people’s lives sometimes played an integral part in helping me to understand the very processes of liberal governance and abandonment that this book is about. I saw this when one of my participants, Izzy, asked me for help with a legal case. He had just been released from a juvenile facility and was trying hard to find a job and get back on his feet when he was arrested for riding his bicycle the wrong way down the street. Even though the charge was minor, it was a huge setback for Izzy because it could have implications for parole. It also added to his mounting distrust of the police and what he termed “the system,” which represented every government agency with which he had come into contact, including police, parole, and welfare. Izzy’s experience shaped my analysis of the governance of young people, but

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I also knew he wanted help in addressing the situation. Thus, I asked one of my friends who is a private defense attorney if he might represent him, which he did for free; it is highly unusual for people to be represented by counsel in minor cases like these. My friend discovered that the police had charged Izzy under an incorrect statute. As a result of my friend’s intervention, Izzy was exonerated of this charge. Ide nt ity and R e f le xiv i ty My identity as a former social worker (and the knowledge that accompanied it) also sometimes caused me to be understood in that way, as opposed to being understood as a researcher. My ethnicity and my gender, as well as my style of dress, also caused some participants and their families to think of me as a “helping” agent, and so they sometimes asked me for advice or help without knowing my background. For example, I arrived at the apartment of the grandmother of one of my participants who was incarcerated at Rikers Island, and she proceeded to take me on a tour of the apartment, showing me where her granddaughter kept her clothes, where and how she slept, where she did her school work, and so on. I sensed the grandmother believed I was there to do a home assessment, rather than simply being there to interview her. For others, particularly the sample from the community who had been introduced to me by the attorneys as a former social worker, it was more difficult to disentangle my researcher identity from that of a social worker, and so I was sometimes described by parents as a social worker, or someone “helping” their family or by one participant as her “advocate.” It was often difficult to disentangle my helping role from my researcher role. The research took place in contexts that were symbolically and literally “masculine,” as well as being segregated by gender. The residential facilities in particular were places where sexism was, in a sense, condoned by staff: I would often walk through the hallways of the facility and get stared at, commented on, and called names by the young men, and staff members at the facilities did not stop the young men from engaging in these practices, some staff members staring at me themselves. The working environments were also ones where homophobia and sexism were openly practiced and became a key way of making jokes, building rapport, and bonding. The participants themselves had frequently experienced strong forms of paternalism and masculine domination. Thus, my role as a woman who was embedded in these gender hierarchies became central to my forms of engagement, providing both limitations and advantages to the research. My gender may have also affected the tones of my conversations and the implicit “dangers” that staff in the residential facilities sometimes felt I was engaged in, warning me about the (sexual and financial) motives of the young men (and



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sometimes the young women) with whom I spoke and suggesting my potential to be exploited and manipulated because of my status as a white woman. The sociologist Howard Becker recognized that those interested in the study of deviance may chose to conduct their research through the lens of the subordinate member of an institution in an effort to break through the “refractory” nature of those institutions and challenge the “hierarchy of credibility” that exists within established orders.29 He argued that it is important for researchers to militate against the potential question of bias that their sympathies may raise. I initially chose to focus almost exclusively on young people’s perspectives, but I discovered over the course of this process that other institutional actors, including those in power, would help to deepen my understanding of the field. The relationships that I established with staff members in the residential institutions presented challenges with respect to the questions of politics and power and whose “side” I was on. My appreciative approach to the staff perspectives also raised some internal dilemmas as I began to develop sympathies for them and the difficulties of their jobs. One way I built trust with staff was through a “sponsor” at one of the facilities who vouched for my authenticity with other staff and my interest in hearing and recording their perspectives. The relationships I established in this institution also allowed me access to some key “backstage” conversations and pieces of confidential and candid information that were critical in my assessment of the psychosocial landscape of the institution.30 When I interacted with staff, I often expressed a kind of naiveté about institutional life, conveying a wish to appreciate staff perspectives, which I developed in response to what I observed to be some staff members’ forms of defensiveness in response to feeling that their expertise had been underappreciated by the new commissioner. A Psych o soc i al Ap p roac h I adopted what has been termed a psychosocial approach in the research and the analysis of the data. Simon Clarke argues that it is a “position whereby the researcher is aware of the unconscious and emotional dynamics that fuel the social construction of realities.”31 Ian Craib writes about the inextricable relationship between narrative accounts of one’s life and the experiences from early childhood that structure our relationships and how the disorganized features of the subconscious are in fact distinctly opposed to the coherence of narrative thinking.32 He argues: “It is best to regard narratives as defences: they enable us to survive in the world unless they become too comprehensive and inclusive, when they cease to be able to contain the disruptive flow of our internal world.”33 This approach also challenges the notion that the field

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data simply speaks the truth of an individual’s experience and thus calls for an analysis that is reflexive and acknowledges the research as an emotionally informed process. Psychoanalytic approaches may be useful in reading adolescents’ accounts of their lives, which are often influenced by child development narratives and frameworks which may be too neat for analysis. It is arguable that the focus on the subconscious complements the sociological approaches that are aimed at understanding the reproduction of social structure. Individual actions are both socially structured and play a role in structuring social landscapes. Yet there are ways in which the subconscious and emotions must be confronted in analyzing the reproduction of socially structured experiences, such as marginalization and alienation. Feelings of persecution, defensiveness, and anxiety, for example, which emerge in contexts of interaction with criminal justice authorities, are complex and layered emotions that are both deeply personal but also reflect historical and socially structured processes. By employing an ethnographic approach that is structured by a psycho­ social analysis, this research unearthed and revealed the texture of young people’s experience. Thus, it is not able to make broadly generalizable conclusions about the likelihood of reoffending and the overall “success” of interventions but is rather aimed at making sense of young people’s stories and understanding how they have been shaped and what they signify in the larger context of youth offending and youth justice.

Ac k nowle dgm e nt s

This book owes its life to the people who gave me access to their lives. The experience of facing a criminal charge is one of the most despairing, stigmatizing, and challenging experiences in one’s life. By spending time with teenagers inside of the jails and juvenile facilities, I have come just a tiny bit closer to experiencing the dignity, despair, and vulnerability they have, and I am eternally grateful to every young person I spoke to, and their parents and loved ones, for opening up their lives to me. To the facility staff members, probation and parole officers, lawyers, judges, and caseworkers who spent hours talking to me and teaching me about the system, I thank you wholeheartedly. Many of the individuals who work in the system are so close to the heart of problems and the solutions in the system, yet are so frequently misunderstood as being either overtly oppressive or bleeding hearts; I have found so many of the individuals who work in the system to be full of compassion, a deep and nuanced analysis of the challenges that young people face, and a full-­hearted understanding of the struggles of adolescence. I am also grateful to those, including Leonard Dunston, Peter Edelman, Ned Loughran, and Jim Purcell, who provided me with a historical perspective on the system. Nina is the inspiration for this project and the person who keeps me honest, who reminds me that an extraordinary life comes out of struggle and that the struggle is not over when one graduates from school or gets a job, even after facing countless obstacles. She has also taught me that tokenizing young people can cause great harm in their lives and that we must listen deeply, be patient, and respect their dignity and despair before, during, and after their time in the system. To my former clients who keep on calling and keep the work going, especially Champagne, Colesvintong, and Philip.You’ve got this. Elsie Chandler has been my analytical and emotional guide and the true and fierce warrior whom I seek to emulate for the rest of my life. You taught me to recognize the power of acting as a lightning rod in a system that hates children.You changed my life and you saved my life. Dwayne Betts is the intellectual interlocutor sine qua none. Dwayne, thank you for keeping me sharp and for being a friend in literature and in law. 179

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Acknowledgments

I have become the thinker that I am through the extraordinary intellectual mentorship and partnership of several key scholars (although there are countless others I am sure I have neglected to include on this list). For consistent and deep support and challenging me to develop my work seriously, I especially thank Ben Crewe, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Shadd Maruna, Osagie Obasogie, Shaun Ossei-­Owusu, Fergus McNeill, Josh Page, Tony Platt, and Jo Phoenix. So many additional thanks to Kofi Boakye, Avi Brisman, Johnna Christian, Léon Digard, Jonathan Jacobs, Issa Kohler-Haussman, Naomi Murakawa, Jeff Lane, Alison Liebling, Mikaela Luttrell-­Rowland, Robert Perkinson, Jothie Rajah, Randy Meyers, Michelle Phelps, Judah Schept, Michael Scholssman, Gilly Sharpe, Justice Tankebe, Robert Werth, and Alex Vitale. For my teachers, the warrior advocates: Daniel Abrahamson, Nancy Ginsburg, Jonathan Gradess, Tanya Greene, Tracy Huling, Rick Jones, Leonard Noisette, Alan Rosenthal, Benay Rubenstein, KJ Rhee, and Deborah Small. For the many colleagues who have provided support and collaboration: Christine Bella, Joyce Burrell, Peggy Cooper-­Davis, Hon. Michael Corriero, Khalil Cumberbatch, Michelle Deitch, Mishi Faruquee, Libby Fischer, Felipe Franco, Bill Gettman, Craig Gilmore, Jennifer Gonnerman, Cory Greene, Chino Hardin, Anthony Hough, Russ Immarigeon, Dionna King, Jim LeCain, Matt Joly, Laura McCargar, Zachary Norris, Gabrielle Knecht, Jennifer March-­ Prisco, Anna Roberts, Tim Roche, Liz Ryan, Nancy Smith, Wilfredo Sta. Ana, Josie Whittlesey, and Jason Ziedenberg. To the wonderful women who paved the path for research in this field: Laura Abrams, Jamie Fader, Michelle Inderbitzin, and Anne Nurse. For the wonderful faith, patience, and support of Peter Mickulas at Rutgers University Press, my anonymous peer reviewers, and Brandon Proia for his able editing assistance. Erica Mateo provided invaluable research assistance in the institutions and beyond and is an incomparable and brilliant thinker. I owe Martin Stolar my sanity and my hope. I am grateful to the Gates Cambridge Trust and to the Open Society Foundations Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship program for so generously supporting this work. Thank you also to the members of the Yale Law School Justice Collaboratory. I have been so incredibly fortunate to have colleagues at SUNY New Paltz who are unparalleled in their ability to provide support, mentorship, humor, and friendship. Thank you all so immensely for making my new home so great and for creating the conditions for me to thrive. For my incredible students: you have taught me that we must listen deeply to you, witness you, and be compassionate to you because you are the people who will do the work that we require. To my brothers and sisters from other mothers: David, Desiree, Renee, Quinnie, and Brian. I love you and do my most vigorous work in the world

Acknowledgments

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because of you. To all the other wonderful friends, for keeping me on my toes and making me laugh: Nico, Will, Alli, Cy, Ve, Nic, Lindsay, Meredith, Ari, Michael, Jennifer, Thomas, Brooke, Jess, Bear, Sonia, Gabe, Kyle, Marc, Rob W., Andrew, Cormac, Wafle, Rob G., and Anna. To my family for providing me with love and unparalleled support in this now twenty-­year journey; to Sam, for giving me a copy of The Corner in 1997 and to recognizing the work. And to S, for love.

Note s

I nt roduc t i on 1. All of the names I use in this book are pseudonyms. To further protect the confidentiality of my participants, I have also changed some details of the participants’ lives that would not affect the significance of the analysis, such as where they are from or the length of their sentences. 2. L. Schott and C. Cho, “General Assistance Programs: Safety Net Weakening Despite Increased Need,” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2011). 3. Ibid. 4. H. L. Schaefer and Kathryn Edin, “Rising Extreme Poverty in the United States and the Response of Federal Means-­Tested Transfer Programs,” in National Poverty Center Working Paper Series (National Poverty Center, 2013). 5. Andy Furlong and Fred Cartmel, Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2007); Jennifer Silva, Coming Up Short: Working-­ Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6. Catherine Rampell, “Teenage Jobless Rate Reaches Record High,” New York Times, September 4, 2009. Andrew Sum et al., “The Continued Collapse of the Nation’s Teen Job Market and the Dismal Outlook for the 2008 Summer Labor Market for Teens: Does Anybody Care?” (Boston: Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, 2008). 7. L. Treschan and C. Molnar, “Out of Focus: A Snapshot of Public Funding to Reconnect Youth to Education and Employment” (New York: Community Service Society, 2008). 8. J. Soss, R. Fording, and S. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). 9. Michelle Inderbitzen, “Lessons from a Juvenile Training School: Survival and Growth,” Journal of Adolescent Research 21, no. 1 (2006); “Inside a Maximum Security Training School,” Punishment and Society 9, no. 3 (2007); Anne Nurse, Locked Up, Locked Out: Young Men in the Juvenile Justice System (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010); Laura Abrams and Ben Anderson-­Nathe, Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 10. Rebecca Colman et al., “Long-­Term Conseqences of Delinquency: Child Maltreatment and Crime in Early Adulthood” (Rensselear, NY: New York State Office of Children and Family Services 2009). 11. D. Tanenhaus, “The Evolution of Juvenile Courts in the Early Twentieth Century: Beyond the Myth of Immaculate Construction,” in M. Rosenheim, F. Zimring, D. Tanenhaus, & B. Dohrn (eds.), A Century of Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); A. Platt, The Child Savers:The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969/1977); G. Ward,The Black Child-­Savers:

183

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Notes to Pages 6–14

Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); M. Chavez-­Garcia, “Intelligence Testing at Whittier School, 1890–­1920,” Pacific Historical Review, 72, no. 2 (2007) . 12. W. Chafe, The Achievement of American Liberalism:The New Deal and Its Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 13. Nell Bernstein, Burning Down the House:The End of Juvenile Prison (New York: New Press, 2014). 14. Jeffrey Butts, “Critical Diversion,” Criminology & Public Policy 15, no. 3 (2016). 15. See also D. Maynard, “Person-­Descriptions in Plea Bargaining,” Semiotica 42, no. 2/4 (1982). 16. In his book about black and Latino boys living in Oakland, California, Rios points to the need to write scholarly texts that do not simply perpetuate ideas about “the urban poor as creatures in need of pity and external salvation.” V. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: NYU Press, 2011). 17. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18. Foucault and some of his followers claim that notions of “life” and “self ” are enmeshed in relationships of power. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Volume 3 (London: Penguin Books, 1986); Michel Foucault,“The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds.), The Final Foucault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1 (2006). They term this phenomenon “biopower,” which relates to the attempts of those in power to “intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence” (Rabinow and Rose, pp. 196–­7). Foucault argued that the very fact that we believe we are autonomous agents is a product of discourse and power. Power, he argues, produces subjectivities. 19. D. Garland, Governmentality and the Problem of Crime: Foucault, Criminology, Sociology. Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997); N. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989). 20. P. Gray, “The Politics of Risk and Young Offenders’ Experiences of Social Exclusion and Restorative Justice,” British Journal of Criminology 45 (2005); H. Kemshall, “Risks, Rights and Justice: Understanding and Responding to Youth Risk,” Youth Justice 8, no. 1 (2008); J. Muncie, “Governing Young People: Coherence and Contradiction in Contemporary Youth Justice,” Critical Social Policy 26, no. 4 (2006; Lynne Haney, Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 21. R. Myers, “The Biographical and Psychic Consequences of ‘Welfare Inaction’ for Young Women in Trouble with the Law,” Youth Justice 13, no. 3 (2013): 218–­233; J. Phoenix and L. Kelly, “‘You Have to Do It for Yourself ’: Responsibilization in Youth Justice and Young People’s Situated Knowledge of Youth Justice Practices,” British Journal of Criminology 53 (2013).

C hap te r 1.  R e p roducing Re forms 1. This quote comes from documents obtained from the New York State Archives. W. Johnson. “The Training School in Transition: A New Search for Values,” presented at the Third Annual Conference of New York State Training Schools, September 21, 1964, p. 6. 2. Justin Murphy, “Incarcerated Kids Tend High Tech Garden,” Democrat and Chronicle, February 25, 2014. 3. I’m not the first person to be struck by the repetitive character of reforms. See, for example, A. Liazos, “Class Oppression: The Functions of Juvenile Justice,” The



Notes to Pages 14–17

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Insurgent Sociologist 1 (Fall 1974); Thomas Bernard, The Cycle of Juvenile Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); D. J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980). 4. See, e.g., J. Pickett and T. Chiricos, “Controlling Other People’s Children: Racialized Views of Delinquency and Whites’ Punitive Attitudes toward Juvenile Offenders,” Criminology 50, no. 3 (2012). 5. J. M. Hawes, Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); S. L. Singer, Recriminalizing Delinquency: Violent Crime and Juvenile Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6. Robert S. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815–­1857 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969). 7. Barry Feld, Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51. 8. Ibid. Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 33. 9. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 5; Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 48. 10. Ibid. 11. G. de Beaumont and A. de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1833/1964). Hawes, Children in Urban Society; Pickett, House of Refuge; Edmund F. McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform: Two Decades of Policy and Procedural Change (Albany: State University of New York, 1988). 12. S. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825–­1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). Rothman, Conscience and Convenience. 13. Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 14. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent; Liazos, “Class Oppression.” 15. Anthony Platt, The Child Savers:The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969/1977). 16. McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform; Pickett, House of Refuge. 17. Pickett, House of Refuge; Platt, The Child Savers. 18. Platt, The Child Savers. 19. New York State L. 1902, Ch. 527, An act authorizing the selection of lands for the new site of the state industrial school; New York State L. 1904, Ch. 718, An act authorizing the selection of lands as a site for the New york state training school for boys, and establishing the said school. 20. R. Immarigeon, “The New York State Training School for Girls: An Annotated Bibliography of Annual Reports, 1904–­1928” (Hudson, NY: Prison Public Memory Project, 2013), 2. 21. Geoff Ward, The Black Child-­Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). 22. G. Markowitz and D. Rosner, Children, Race and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s Northside Center (London: University of Virginia Press, 1996). Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). 23. New York’s House of Refuge had a “colored” section. M. Soler, D. Schoenberg, and M. Schindler, “Juvenile Justice: Lessons for a New Era,” Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy XVI, Symposium Issue (2009), 529. 24. Justine Wise Polier, Juvenile Justice in Double Jeopardy: The Distanced Community and Vengeful Retribution (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989). 25. Ibid; Markowitz and Rosner, Children, Race and Power.

186

Notes to Pages 17–19

26. Scholars have pointed to the connections between the practices of slavery, in which families were forcibly torn apart and children taken away from their parents, and child welfare interventions, which are disproportionately experienced by families of color; see Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 2002). They have also demonstrated the ways in which child welfare interventions are subjectively experienced in similarly punitive and repressive ways as those practices established during slavery. 27. Furlong and Cartmel, Young People and Social Change: New Perspectives (New York: Open University Press, 1997). 28. Elizabeth S. Scott and T. Grisso, “The Evolution of Adolescence: A Developmental Perspective on Juvenile Justice Reform,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88, no. 1 (1998): 691. 29. Jason Barnosky, “The Violent Years: Responses to Juvenile Crime in the 1950s,” Polity 38, no. 3 (2006). Joseph H. Kane, Director, Annex of Boys’ Training Schools, Goshen, New York, “Social Welfare Institutions Serving Delinquent Children,” Presented at the New York State Council of Probation Administrators, Poughkeepsie, NY, April 22, 1964; The Training School System of the New York State Department of Social Welfare as an Organization, Andrew Kreiger, Graduate School of Public Affairs, Theories of Administrative Organization, Prof. Norris Schaefer, Fall 1965. 30. The Training School System of the New York State Department of Social Welfare as an Organization, Andrew Kreiger, Graduate School of Public Affairs, Theories of Administrative Organization, Prof. Norris Schaefer, Fall 1965. 31. Johnson, “The Training School in Transition.” Today New York’s reliance on joint state and local responsibility for the payment of institutional care created a financial panic in Albany in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, ushering in major reforms geared toward reducing the financial burden on the state. 32. Johnson, “The Training School in Transition,” 3. 33. Ibid. 34. Milton Luger, “Innovations in the Treatment of Juvenile Offenders,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 381, no. 1 (1969); McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform. 35. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 268. 36. Johnson, “The Training School in Transition,” 6. 37. Lesley Oelsner, “Juvenile Justice: A City Crisis.” New York Times, April 4, 1973. 38. Erroll Louis. “Broken Juvenile Justice System Wastes Millions of Dollars and Fails Our Kids.” Daily News, February 10 2008. 39. See, e.g., Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, One Thousand Juvenile Delinquents: Their Treatment by Court and Clinic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 286–­7. 40. Howard Polsky, Cottage Six: The Social System of Delinquent Boys in Residential Treatment (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1962); McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform. 41. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in 1967 issued a report titled “Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime,” which included deinstitutionalization as among its recommendations. Liazos, “Class Oppression.” 42. Alfred Kahn, “When Children Must Be Committed: Proposals for a Diversified System of Facilities,” (New York: Citizen’s Committee for Children, 1960). 43. Citizen’s Committee for Children report, 1969. 44. Alexandra Cox, “Fresh Air Funds and Functional Families: The Enduring Politics of Race, Family and Place in Juvenile Justice Reform,” Theoretical Criminology 19, no. 4 (2015): 554–­70.



Notes to Pages 19–22

187

45. E. Schur, Radical Non-­Intervention (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1973). 46. McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform. 47. Ibid; personal communication, Leonard Dunston, former commissioner of the state’s system. 48. A. Novick, “Diversification and Integration of Rehabilitation Services for the Juvenile Delinquent,” paper presented at the National Institute on Crime and Delinquency, Sessions of the National Association of Training Schools and Juvenile Agencies, Miami Beach, Florida, June 10, 1963, p. 2. 49. Ibid, 6–­7. 50. David Garland, The Culture of Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Feld, Bad Kids. 51. Andrew von Hirsch and L. Maher, “Should Penal Rehabilitationism Be Revived?,” in Andrew von Hirsch and Andrew Ashworth (eds.), Principled Sentencing: Readings on Theory and Policy (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004). 52. William McCord and José Sanchez, “The Treatment of Deviant Children: A Twenty-­Five Year Follow-­up Study,” Crime and Delinquency 29, no. 2 (1983); Andrew Rutherford, Growing Out of Crime (Middlesex: Penguin, 1986). 53. McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform, 115. 54. Feld, Bad Kids; K. Majd and Patricia Puritz,“The Cost of Justice: How Low-­Income Youth Continue to Pay the Price of Failing Indigent Defense Systems,” Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy XVI, Symposium Issue (2009). 55. Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder. 56. Naomi Murakawa powerfully argues that liberal reforms in criminal justice systems have actually “reinforce[d] and raise[d] African American vulnerability to premature death” by focusing on system functioning rather than racial justice. N. Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 154. 57. Jerome Miller, Last One Over the Wall (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). 58. Testimony of Peter Edelman, Director, New York State Division of Youth, before Committee on Child Care, New York State Assembly, January 16, 1976. Personal communication, Peter Edelman. 59. This pushback also existed in Massachusetts during their deinstitutionalization and reform process, and was likely known by New York administrators, some of whom had come from Massachusetts Miller, Last One Over the Wall. 60. Singer, Recriminalizing Delinquency, 184. 61. Personal communication, Peter Edelman. It should be noted that none of the facility-­based reforms that Edelman enacted were undone during the period of legislative change. 62. McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform; Vanessa Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Singer, Recriminalizing Delinquency. 63. Singer, Recriminalizing Delinquency; E. J. Dionne, “Only Politicians Have Found Easy Answers to Youth Crime,” New York Times, July 9, 1978. Fox Butterfield, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 64. In New York, the Family Court has jurisdiction over delinquency and child welfare cares, as well as family dispute matters, such as divorce. To read an account of Bosket’s life that contextualizes the violence in which Bosket participated, see Fox Butterfield’s (1996) All God’s Children. 65. McGarrell, Juvenile Correctional Reform. 66. “Crimes, Punishment,” New York Times, December 19, 1978. J. Treaster, “State Delinquent Center: No Punishment or Reform,” New York Times, March 2, 1976.

188

Notes to Pages 22–26

67. Singer, Recriminalizing Delinquency; Butterfield, All God’s Children; Dionne, “Only Politicians Have Found Easy Answers to Youth Crime.” Barker (The Politics of Imprisonment) argues that although the Juvenile Offender law was indeed a harsh development, there were diversion programs for lower level, nonviolent offenders, as well as noncustodial sanctions (albeit in the adult court context) also passed at this time. She found that New York generally has low levels of imprisonment but harsh approaches to more “dangerous” offenders. 68. Personal communication, Leonard Dunston, former commissioner of the Division for Youth, and Pat Sullivan, former director of the Brookwood secure facility. 69. Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 70. Ibid., 42–­3. 71. This model was first used at one facility in the 1980s, introduced by former commissioner Leonard Dunston (personal communication, Leonard Dunston). See also Bruce Frederick, “Factors Contributing to Recidivism among Youth Placed with the New York State Division for Youth,” (Albany: Office of Justice Systems Analysis, New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, 1999). 72. The only other record I have found of a previous statewide campaign to raise the age of criminal responsibility occurred in the 1930s, and law enforcement widely opposed this effort at the time. See Rothman, Conscience and Convenience. 73. C. Feldman, “State Facilities Use of Force Is Scrutinized after a Death,” New York Times, March 4 2007; M. Anich and J. Subik, “Groups Call for Tryon Investigation,” Leader-­Herald 2006. A staff member at the same facility also died around that time after young people threw a chair at him, although his exact cause of death was not attributed to the chair incident but to a heart attack. 74. Dana Kaplan, “Challenging Incarceration in the Empire State: Community Resistance in Urban, Rural and Suburban New York to Carceral Geographies” (master’s thesis, CUNY, 2012). 75. Mie Lewis, “Custody and Control: Conditions of Confinement in New York’s Juvenile Prisons for Girls” (New York: Human Rights Watch American Civil Liberties Union, 2006), www​.aclu​.org​/other​/custody​-­­and​-­­control​-­­conditions​-­­confinement​ -­­new​-­­yorks​-­­juvenile​-­­prisons​-­­g irls. 76. See, e.g., Citizen’s Committee for Children, “Inside Out:Youth Experiences inside New York’s Juvenile Placement System” (New York: Citizen’s Committee for Children of New York, 2009), www​.cccnewyork​.org​/data​-­­and​-­­reports​/publications​ /ccc​-­­report​-­­inside​-­­out​-­­youth​-­­experiences​-­­inside​-­­new​-­­yorks​-­­juvenile​-­­placement​ -­­system). 77. Loretta King, “Investigation of the Lansing Residential Center, Louis Gossett, Jr. Residential Center, Tryon Residential Center, and Tryon Girls Center” (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2009). 78. For context about Bloomberg’s focus on reforms leading up to Close to Home, see A. Cannon, R. Aborn, and John Bennett, “Guide to Juvenile Justice in New York City” (New York: Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, 2010); S. Goldsmith, “Bloomberg Wants Control of City’s Expensive, Ineffectual Juvenile Justice System,” New York Daily News, December 21, 2010. 79. V. Schiraldi, “Testimony to the New York City Council Committees on Juvenile Justice and General Welfare” (testimony at New York City Council Meeting, New York City, January 26, 2011). 80. Colman, Rebecca, Do Han Kim, Susan Mitchell-­Herzfeld, and Therese A. Shady. “Long-­Term Consequences of Delinquency: Child Maltreatment and Crime in Early Adulthood.” Rensselear, NY: New York State Office of Children and Family Services, 2009, 7. 81. This includes young people charged as Juvenile Offenders (JOs), Juvenile Delinquents (JDs), and Persons in Need of Supervision (PINS). Frederick, “Factors



Notes to Pages 26–28

189

Contributing to Recidivism among Youth Placed with the New York State Division for Youth.” The same is true for young people across the United States: the sociologist Bruce Western has noted that imprisonment has become a “modal life event” for young African American men with little education; B. Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 82. Liazos, “Class Oppression: The Functions of Juvenile Justice.” 83. S. Hockenberry, Melissa Sickmund, and A. Sladky, “Juvenile Residential Facility Census, 2008: Selected Findings” (Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2011). 84. National Juvenile Justice Network and Texas Public Policy Foundation, “The Comeback States: Reducing Youth Incarceration in the United States” (Washington, DC: National Juvenile Justice Network, 2013). 85. S. Bloom, “The Sanctuary Model of Organizational Change for Children’s Residential Treatment,” Therapeutic Community: The International Journal for Therapeutic and Supportive Organizations 26, no. 1 (2005). 86. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 265–­6. 87. M. Anich, “Tryon Employees Receive Pink Slips,” Leader-­Herald, June 4, 2009; Kerry McAvoy, “Union Blasts State over Tryon Cuts,” Leader Herald, November 15 2008. S. Ference, “OCFS Wants to Close Underutilized Youth Facilities,” News 10 Now, March 27, 2008. 88. An investigation about the number of worker’s compensation claims related to assaults in the facilities since the reforms were initiated in 2007 was also published; see Lancman (2010) as well as a report on an alleged incident of staff malfeasance involving a social event at a residential facility (New York State Commission of Correction, 2010). Both of these reports garnered a significant amount of media attention. Lancman, Rory. “Employee Safety in the NYS Juvenile Justice System.” Albany: New York State Assembly Member Rory Lancman’s office, 2010. New York State Commission of Correction. “In the Matter of a Resident Social Event at the Goshen Secure Center.” Albany: New York State Commission of Correction, 2010. 89. R. Mangus, “Senator Maziarz Calls Meetings with Nys OCFS ‘Very Disappointing’,” (2009); R. Karlin, “Youth Facility Staff Fear for Their Safety,” Times Union 2008. R. Mangus, “Influence & Publicity Concern for NYS OCFS Commissioner Carrion” (2009); “NYS OCFS: “A Culture of Brutality” at Tryon” (2009). 90. David King, “‘Culture of Violence’ Plagues New York’s Juvenile Prisons,” Gotham Gazette, January 11, 2010; “Juvenile Injustice,” New York Times, January 5, 2010. 91. Juvenile Justice Advisory Group Meeting, September 30, 2009. 92. American Bar Association, “Adolescence, Brain Development and Legal Culpability” (Washington, DC: American Bar Association, 2004); Coalition for Juvenile Justice, “What Are the Implications of Adolescent Brain Development for Juvenile Justice” (Washington, DC: Coalition for Juvenile Justice, 2006). 93. There is some ambiguity about the way that this term is used and what it refers to. Generally speaking, the “evidence-­based” practices that have been introduced are those that have been used to some effect in other jurisdictions, such as Multisystemic Family Therapy and Functional Family Therapy. Edward Borges, “Statement from New York State Office of Children and Family Services Commissioner Gladys Carrión” (Office of Children and Family Services, August 24, 2009). 94. Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, “Charting a New Course: A Blueprint for Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State” (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2009), 40. 95. He Len Chung, Michelle Little, and Laurence Steinberg, “The Transition to Adulthood for Adolescents in the Juvenile Justice System: A Developmental Perspective,” in D. Wayne Osgood et al. (eds.), On Your Own without a Net: The Transition to Adulthood for Vulnerable Populations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

190

Notes to Pages 28–29

96. David P. Farrington, “Childhood Risk Factors and Risk Focused Prevention,” in Mike Maguire, R. Morgan, and Robert Reiner (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); J. David Hawkins, Todd Herren Kohl, David P. Farrington, et al., “Predictors of Youth Violence,” Juvenile Justice Bulletin (U.S. Department of Justice, April 2000), www​.crim​.cam​.ac​.uk​/people​/academic​ _research​/david​_farrington​/predviol​.pdf. Researchers have also identified “protective” factors that have been said to play a role in “mitigating the effects of risk exposure”; ibid, 7. 97. Farrington, “Developmental Criminology and Risk-­Focused Prevention,” 664. 98. Hawkins et al., “Predictors of Youth Violence.” 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. Another area of “risk” for young people is the “risk” of violence that they face in their everyday lives. Rates of violence against young people are extremely high in the United States (Howard N. Snyder and Melissa Sickmund, “Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report” [Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juveinle Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2006]), and the lives of young people in New York City and other urban areas are often infused with the presence of violence, at the hands of families and strangers (Margaret Hughes, “Turning Points in the Lives of Young Inner-­City Men Forgoing Destructive Criminal Behaviors: A Qualitative Study,” Social Work Research 22 [1998]). The “fear of crime” that is so often spoken about in the popular media doesn’t often address the “fear of crime” in the very neighborhoods that provoke that fear. 101. Robert Ross, E. Fabiano, and C. Ewles, “Reasoning and Rehabilitation,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 32, no. 1 (1988). Tony Ward and Claire Nee, “Surfaces and Depths: Evaluating the Theoretical Assumptions of Cognitive Skills Programmes,” Psychology, Crime & Law 15, no. 2–­3 (2009). 102. K. Haines and S. Case, “The Rhetoric and Reality of the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’ Approach to Preventing and Reducing Youth Offending,” Youth Justice 8, no. 1 (2008). 103. John Muncie, Youth and Crime (London: Sage, 2004), 25. 104. Haines and Case, “The Rhetoric and Reality of the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’,” 11. 105. David P. Farrington, “Understanding and Preventing Youth Crime” (Layerthorpe: Joseph Rowntree Roundation, 1996). Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, “No More Children Left behind Bars: A Briefing on Youth Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention” (Boston: Harvard Law School, 2008); Edward P. Mulvey, Laurence Steinberg, Jeffrey Fagan, et al., “Theory and Research on Desistance from Antisocial Activity among Serious Adolescent Offenders,” Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 2, no. 3 (2004): 213. 106. Deborah Greene, “Functional Family Therapy (FFT) in New York State” (Albany: New York State Office of Mental Health, 2003); Thomas L. Sexton and James F. Alexander, “Functional Family Therapy” (Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2000); C. Borduin B. J. Mann, L. T. Cone, et al., “Multisystemic Treatment of Serious Juvenile Offenders: Long-­Term Prevention of Criminality and Violence,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 63, no. 4 (1995). 107. Derrick Armstrong, “A Risky Business? Research, Policy, Governmentality and Youth Offending,” Youth Justice 4, no. 2 (2004); K. Haines and S. Case, “The Rhetoric and Reality of the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’.” 108. K. Haines and S. Case, “The Rhetoric and Reality of the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’.” 109. Furlong and Cartmel, Young People and Social Change, 105.



Notes to Pages 29–33

191

110. Murakawa, The First Civil Right, 212; E. Bonilla-­Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 111. Peter Kelly, “The Dangerousness of Youth-­at-­Risk: The Possibilities of Surveillance and Intervention in Uncertain Times,” Journal of Adolescence 23 (2000): 469. 112. Bernard E. Harcourt, “Risk As a Proxy for Race: The Dangers of Risk Assessment,” Criminology and Public Policy, Forthcoming 27 no. 4 (2015). See also Monahan, John, and Jennifer L. Skeem. “Risk Assessment in Criminal Sentencing.” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 12 (2016). 113. J. Fratello, Annie Salsich, and S. Mogulescu, “Juvenile Detention Reform in New York City: Measuring Risk through Research” (New York:Vera Institute of Justice, 2011). 114. Eli Hager, “Our Prisons in Black and White,” The Marshall Project, November 18, 2015. 115. K. Hannah-­Moffat, “Criminogenic Needs and the Transformative Risk Subject: Hybridizations of Risk/Need in Penality,” Punishment and Society 7, no. 1 (2005): 31. 116. A. E. Bottoms, “An Introduction to ‘The Coming Crisis’,” in A. E. Bottoms and R. H. Preston (eds.), The Coming Crisis (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1980), 7. 117. See also the history of liberal public interest organizations in the 1980s and 1990s, which spoke primarily about quality-­of-­life issues as opposed to redistribution with respect to poverty issues. J. Soss, R. C. Fording, and F. S. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 118. A. Schlesinger, “Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans,” in The Politics of Hope, ed. A. Schlesinger (Boston: Riverside Press, 1956): 91. 119. William Chafe, The Achievement of American Liberalism:The New Deal and Its Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 120. Barker, The Politics of Imprisonment, 45. 121. Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 122. Geoffrey Scarre, “Children and Paternalism,” Philosophy 55 (1980): 123–­4. 123. John Muncie, “Youth Justice: Globalization and Multi-­Modal Governance,” in Tim Newburn and Richard Sparks (eds.), Criminal Justice and Political Cultures: National and International Dimensions of Crime Control (Cullumpton, England: Willan, 2004); Vikki Bell, “Governing Childhood: Neo-­Liberalism and the Law,” Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993).

C hap te r 2 .  U ngove rnability and Worth 1. In the last quarter of 2008, when I met Michael, close to 50 percent of the more than 540,000 total police stops in New York City were of young people aged fourteen to twenty-­four (Source: NYCLU Stop and Frisk data). In a recent study by the Vera Institute of Justice, of thirteen-­to twenty-­one-­year-­olds in New York City, 44 percent of study participants reported being stopped by the police nine or more times. J. Fratello, A. Rengifo, and Jennifer Trone, “Coming of Age with Stop and Frisk: Experiences, Self-­Perceptions, and Public Safety Implications” (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2013).Yet this kind of behavioral profiling arguably starts at a much younger age: in a recently released study from the U.S. Department of Education, researchers found that the vast majority of preschoolers who are suspended from school are African American. Cory Turner, “Why Preschool Suspensions Still Happen (and How to Stop Them)” [radio broadcast], All Things Considered, June 20, 2016. Available at www​.npr​.org​/sections​/ed​/2016​/06​/20​/482472535​/why​ -­­preschool​-­­suspensions​-­­still​-­­happen​-­­and​-­­how​-­­to​-­­stop​-­­them.

192

Notes to Pages 34–36

2. G. Bridges and S. Steen, “Racial Disparities in Official Assessments of Juvenile Offenders: Attributional Stereotypes as Mediating Mechanisms,” American Sociological Review 63 (1998); Loic Wacquant, “Race as Civic Felony,” International Social Science Journal 57, no. 183 (2005). 3. Children’s Defense Fund,“America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline” (2007); E. Mukherjee, “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-­Policing of New York City Public Schools,” (New York: New York Civil Liberties Union, 2007); P. J. Hirschfield, “Preparing for Prison?: The Criminalization of School Discipline in the USA,” Theoretical Criminology 12 (2008). A recent national survey of young people in custody found that 61 percent of the youth surveyed said that they were suspended or expelled in the year before entering custody. Andrea J. Sedlak and Karla S. McPherson, “Youth’s Needs and Services: Findings from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement,” OJJDP Juvenile Justice Bulletin, April (2010). 4. Advancement Project, “Test, Punish, and Push Out: How “Zero Tolerance’ and High-­Stakes Testing Funnel Youth into the School-­to-­Prison Pipeline” (2010). 5. Some have characterized this moment of high employment in manufacturing as an ideal for black people involved in this kind of work, yet those individuals still faced significant employment discrimination and degrading work conditions. See Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (2005). 6. Lucia Trimbur, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); L. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 7. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!, 57. 8. Kim McGillicuddy, “Cityview: NYC’s Young and Restless,” City Limits, May 1, 1997. 9. D. Herszenhorn, “Basic Skills Forcing Cuts in Art Classes,” New York Times, July 23, 2003; Office of the Comptroller City of New York, “State of the Arts: A Plan to Boost Arts Education in New York City Schools” (2014). 10. Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (London: Free Press, 1966); J. Bernburg and M. D. Krohn, “Labeling, Life Chances, and Adult Crime: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Official Intervention in Adolescence on Crime in Early Adulthood,” Criminology 41, no. 4 (2003). 11. My perspective contrasts somewhat with that of Victor Rios in his ethnography about young people growing up in Oakland, California, and facing criminalization. Rios argues that there is a kind of “labeling hype” that occurs with young people who are first criminalized; he says that once young people are initially criminalized, they get “caught in a spiral of punitive responses” that places them “at risk for being granted additional, more serious labels.” This, he argues, results in the boys’ decisions to engage in deviance. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 45. 12. J. Q. Wilson and G. L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1982); James Austin and Michael Jacobson, “How New York City Reduced Mass Incarceration: A Model for Change?” (New York: Vera Institute of Justice & Brennan Center for Justice, 2013). 13. Bonilla-­Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 14. Austin and Jacobson, “How New York City Reduced Mass Incarceration.” 15. Francis X. Clines, “Ex-­Inmates Urge Return to Areas of Crime to Help,” The New York Times 1992; Juan Rivera, “A Non-­Traditional Approach to a Curriculum for Prisoners in New York State,” Journal of Prisoners on Prisons 4, no. 1 (1992).



Notes to Pages 37–43

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16. See also Todd Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17. D. Frank and M. Augustyn, “Growth, Development, and Behavior in Early Childhood Following Prenatal Cocaine Exposure: A Systematic Review,” JAMA 285, no. 12 (2001); United States Department of Justice, “Defending Childhood: Protect Heal Thrive.” In a twenty-­four-­year study, Hallam Hurt from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that poverty is more influential on child outcomes than prenatal cocaine exposure. Hallam Hurt, “Poverty Is Worse for Children Than Gestational Cocaine Exposure,” Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity (May 19, 2014). 18. Even though there is little evidence to suggest that deterrence-­based ‘messaging’ policies like this one actually work or even get transmitted to the individuals most affected by these laws, it was clear in the New York city legal community that everyone arrested with a gun would be sentenced to a minimum of two years in state prison. 19. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), citing legal scholar Kathryn Russell. 20. In 2008, 11 percent of youth in Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) custody were white (white youth comprised 17 percent of my sample); “Youth in Care: 2008 Annual Report” (Rensselaer, NY: Office of Children and Family Services, 2009). 21. Soss, Fording, and Schram, Disciplining the Poor; Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19, no. 2 (1994). 22. See also Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! 23. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has compared the contemporary child welfare system to that of the impact of slave masters forcefully separating family members from each other. Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. 24. Genevieve told me this was her charge. It is possible that she had different charges than this. 25. This conception of young people may have also evolved through the shifting legal terrain of the juvenile courts in the past forty years, in which judges in juvenile and criminal courts rely more fully on formal reasoning and decision-­making (based on the offense), as opposed to substantive decision-­making (based on extra-­legal, consequentialist concerns). Alexes Harris, “Diverting and Abdicating Judicial Discretion: Cultural, Political, and Procedural Dynamics in California Juvenile Justice,” Law & Society Review 41, no. 2 (2007). 26. In his article about the origins of moral panics, Jock Young describes Alfred Cohen’s concept of “moral indignation,” which is defined as “concerned with punitiveness (whether in terms of penal law or informal fury) about the behavior of groups who do not directly harm one’s interest” (9). Jock Young, “Moral Panic: Its Origins in Resistance, Ressentiment and the Translation of Fantasy into Reality,” British Journal of Criminology 49 (2009). 27. Zygmunt Bauman, “Social Uses of Law and Order,” in David Garland and Richard Sparks (eds.), Criminology and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 28. These detention risk assessment instruments are now used across New York State. They were rolling out across the state during my fieldwork period. They have been promoted as a tool in reducing the numbers of young people in detention. Yet although their use has resulted in the reduction of young people in detention, the numbers of black youth in detention has risen in jurisdictions where these risk assessments are used. As some have argued, risk is an easy proxy for race: Harcourt, “Risk as a Proxy for Race.”

194

Notes to Pages 43–50

29 Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985). 30 Erin Murphy, “Paradigms of Restraint,” Duke Law Journal 57 (2008). 31. Aaron Kupchik, “Youthfulness, Responsibility and Punishment,” Punishment and Society 6, no. 2 (2004). 32. Michael A. Corriero, “Youth Parts: Constructive Response to the Challenge of Youth Crime,” New York Law Journal (1990). Wheeler et al. discovered in their research in the juvenile courts that a judge’s ostensibly paternalistic outlook and his or her knowledge of the research literature on juvenile delinquency did not necessarily lead to a more lenient approach to sentencing. Stanton Wheeler et al., “Agents of Delinquency Control,” in Stanton Wheeler (ed.), Controlling Delinquents (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968). 33. Young adults have long been constructed as existing in the stage of “becoming.” Nick Lee, Childhood and Society: Growing Up in an Age of Uncertainty (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 2001). 34. Vera Institute of Justice, “2nd Subcommittee Meeting: Re-­Entry and Community-­ Based Alternatives to Residential Placement Subcommittee Members” (New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2009); Ruben Austria, “Investing in Community-­Based Alternatives to Incarceration for Court-­Involved Youth in New York” (New York: Community Connections for Youth, 2008). Cannon, Aborn, and Bennett, “Guide to Juvenile Justice in New York City.” 35. M. Gerwitz, “Annual Report on the Adult Court Case Processing of Juvenile Offenders in New York City, January through December 2008” (New York City Criminal Justice Agency, 2009). 36. When I meet new clients, I often tell them that my job is to tell a story about them that goes beyond the papers—­the criminal complaint and indictment—­that represent them in court. It recognizes the ways that individuals experience the feeling of being reduced and judged by teachers, police officers, judges, lawyers, and probation officers. 37. Public Safety Commission on Youth, and Justice, “Final Report of the Governor’s Commission on Youth, Public Safety and Justice: Recommendations for Juvenile Justice Reform in New York State,” (2015). 38. Jonathan Simon has argued that drug testing has become one way of governing individuals in the context of the War on Drugs and the War on Crime. Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 39. Leslie Paik, Discretionary Justice: Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 40. Board of Correction, New York City Board of Correction Meeting (January 8, 2009). 41. Graham Rayman, “Rikers Island Fight Club: The Knockout Punch,” Village Voice (April 15, 2009); G. Rayman, “Rikers Violence: Out of Control,” Village Voice (May 9, 2012); John Eligon, “Correction Officers Accused of Letting Inmates Run Rikers Island Jail,” New York Times (January 22, 2009). 42. Geoffrey Gray, “The Lords of Rikers,” New York Magazine (January 30, 2011). 43. In the interview excerpts, I am represented by the letter “A.” 44. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); J. Fagan and D. Wilkinson, “Guns, Youth Violence, and Social Identity in Inner Cities,” Crime and Justice 24 (1998). 45. Board of Correction Meeting Minutes, January 8, 2009. 46. E.Yaroshevsky, “Rethinking Rikers: Moving from a Correctional to a Therapeutic Model for Youth,” (New York: Cardozo Law, 2014).



Notes to Pages 50–56

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47. Michael, like many other young people in New York City who were detained at Rikers Island, had family members who were guards, which meant that they were able to be on a unit which was considered to be safer than others. Jamal had a family member who worked there who gave him some tips for survival and provided him with some protection. 48. Individuals incarcerated in state juvenile facilities and prisons and local jails have the opportunity to take the exam for this diploma but not to earn enough credits to have an actual high school diploma. For some, like Michael, there is a stigma attached to having this form of qualification instead of a “real” high school diploma. 49. See also C. Cesaroni and Shahid Alvi, “Masculinity and Resistance in Adolescent Carceral Settings,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 52, no. 3 (2010). Y. Jewkes, “Men behind Bars: ‘Doing’ Masculinity as an Adaptation to Imprisonment,” Men and Masculinities 8, no. 1 (2005); Robert L. Clark, “Punks, Snitches, and Real Men: Negotiations of Masculinity and Rehabilitation among Prison Inmates,” Theory in Action 3, no. 3 (2010). 50. See also N. Scheper-­Hughes, “Dangerous and Endangered Youth: Social Structures and Determinants of Violence,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1036 (2004). Scheper-­Hughes argues that interpersonal violence is often a symptom of structural and symbolic violence. 51. D. Huizinga and Kimberly Henry, “The Effect of Arrest and Justice System Sanctions on Subsequent Behavior: Findings from Longitudinal and Other Studies,” in A. M. Liberman (ed.), The Long View of Crime: A Synthesis of Longitudinal Research (New York: Springer, 2008). 52. Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation, and Social Life in an English Prison; Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961). 53. Monica Barry, Youth Offending in Transition: The Search for Social Recognition (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2006). 54. Anderson describes the quest for “juice” on inner-­city streets by young men as a means of gaining a share of respect and a maintenance of honor; it is often gained by showing that one is not “someone to be ‘messed with’ or dissed.” Anderson, Code of the Street, p. 73. The application of “street” terms to the institutional context is an interesting example of the ways that these terms take on complex new meaning in residential life. 55. OCFS, “2008 Annual Report: Youth Placed in Custody” (Rensselaer, NY: Office of Children and Family Services, Division of Juvenile Justice and Opportunities for Youth, 2008). . OCFS, “Resident Manual: Secure Facilities” (Rensselaer, NY: New York State Office of Children and Family Services, 2008). 56. According to the Prison Public Memory Project, at the Hudson Girls’ Facility in Hudson, NY, girls were once expected to wear different-­colored hair ribbons that indicated their achievement of various behavioral change expectations. 57. New York State Office of Children and Family Services, “Resident Manual: Secure Facilities.” 58. During my fieldwork, several young people, including Bell and Newz, were arrested after committing offenses in the facilities. Facility staff had the discretion about whether to call the police during an incident, and the discretion to facilitate an arrest was highly politicized and varied by facility. For example, after Eddie assaulted a staff member, he received an administrative transfer to an adult prison, but he was not arrested. 59. Citizen’s Committee for Children, “Inside Out: Youth Experiences inside New York’s Juvenile Placement System.”

196

Notes to Pages 57–65

60. See, e.g., b. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). 61. See, e.g., Nikki Jones, Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 62. J. A. Holstein and J. F. Gubrium, The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 63. Gilly Sharpe, “The Trouble with Girls Today: Professional Perspectives on Young Women’s Offending,” Youth Justice 9, no. 3 (2009). Meda Chesney-­Lind, “Challenging Girls’ Invisibility in Juvenile Court,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 564, no. 1 (1999). 64. Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 65. Delores Jones-­Brown, Jaspreet Gill, and Jennifer Trone, Stop, Question and Frisk Policing Practices in New York City: A Primer (New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2010). 66. Rod Brunson and Jody Miller, “Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States,” British Journal of Criminology 46, no. 4 (2006); Rod Brunson, ““Police Don’t Like Black People”: African-­American Young Men’s Accumulated Police Experiences,” Criminology and Public Policy 6, no. 1 (2007).

C hap te r 3.  R ac ializ e d Re pre ssion 1. For many years, New York’s public high schools refused to recognize the credits that young people obtained in custody, saying that the schools that existed in custodial institutions were not officially accredited by the state’s Department of Education. This meant that many young people who were in custody were ­funneled into General Equivalency Diploma programs or “alternative,” non–­ degree-­ g ranting high schools. In early 2011, the Eastern District Court approved a settlement between a group of advocates and the state’s Department of Education that mandated that New York’s schools accept these students into their schools, and an office was created to facilitate this entry process. However, for students and families lacking the social capital or information necessary to locate the number for this office, this process did not work as smoothly as anticipated for many. 2. There is a New York law that prevents unlawful assembly on a sidewalk (New York Pub. L. 240.10). 3. New York State Division of Parole, 2009 data. 4. Carter House is a pseudonym for the drug treatment program. 5. Becky Tatum, “The Colonial Model As a Theoretical Explanation of Crime and Delinquency,” in African American Perspectives On: Crime, Causation, Criminal Justice Administration, and Crime Prevention (Woburn, MA: Butterworth-­Heinemann, 1994). 6. Celeste Watkins-­Hayes, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 7. Human Rights Watch, “No Second Chance: People with Criminal Records Denied Access to Public Housing” (Human Rights Watch, 2004). 8. R. Apel and G. Sweeten, “The Impact of Incarceration on Employment during the Transition to Adulthood,” Social Problems 57, no. 3 (2010); D. Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 9. New York State prevents private and public employers from discriminating against individuals with a criminal conviction, unless the job has a direct relationship to the crime of conviction (Legal Action Center, n.d.). However, in practice, many employers will not employ individuals if they know that they have a criminal conviction (see also Pager, Marked). Legal Action Center. “Overview of State Laws That Ban



Notes to Pages 65–71

197

Discrimination by Employers.” http://www.lac.org/toolkits/standards/Fourteen _State_Laws.pdf. 10. Young people faced higher rates of unemployment than adults after the world financial collapse. Catherine Rampell, “Teenage Jobless Rate Reaches Record High.” New York Times, September 5, 2009; Andrew Sum, Daniel McLaughlin, Ishwar Khatiwada, and Sheila Palma, “The Continued Collapse of the Nation’s Teen Job Market and the Dismal Outlook for the 2008 Summer Labor Market for Teens: Does Anybody Care?” (Boston: Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, 2008). Yet job training and employment opportunities are scarce. For example, only 7 percent of the 200,000 “disconnected” sixteen-­to twenty-­four-­year-­olds in New York City were served by existing educational and job training programs, and there are an estimated 12,000 program slots available to serve this group (see L. Treschan and C. Molnar, “Out of Focus: A Snapshot of Public Funding to Reconnect Youth to Education and Employment.” New York: Community Service Society, 2008.) 11. It is illegal for employers to ask whether someone has been arrested in New York and elsewhere (although employers can ask applicants if they have ever been convicted of a crime). However, in practice this happens frequently, and many individuals are often unaware of their legal right to refuse the question or express doubts that a potential employer will judge them fairly if they refuse to answer the question. 12. Center for Community Alternatives, “Boxed Out: Criminal History Screening and College Application Attrition” (Syracuse, NY: Center for Community Alternatives, 2015). 13. This change happened after years of organizing efforts by a number of statewide groups, including Education from the Inside Out and the Center for Community Alternatives. I served on a SUNY-­appointed central committee that spent more than a year investigating the issue before we put forward a proposal to the Board of Trustees to eliminate the felony conviction box. 14. Alexes Harris, Heather Evans, and Katherine Beckett,“Drawing Blood from Stones: Legal Debt and Social Inequality in the Contemporary United States,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 6 (2010). A. Rosenthal and M. Weissman, “Sentencing for Dollars: The Financial Consequences of a Criminal Conviction” (Syracuse, NY: Center for Community Alternatives, 2007). 15. Christopher Uggen, Jeff Manza, and Melissa Thompson, “Citizenship, Democracy, and the Civic Reintegration of Criminal Offenders,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605, no. 1 (2006); Margaret Love, Jenny Roberts, and Cecelia Klingele, Collateral Consequences of Criminal Convictions: Law, Policy and Practice (Washington, DC: Thomson West, 2013). 16. P. Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1977/1988), 94–­9. 17. J. MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-­Income Neighborhood, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995/2009), 4. 18. Silva, Coming Up Short. 19. See also Keith Hawkins, “Order, Rationality and Silence: Some Reflections on Criminal Justice Decision-­Making,” in L. Gelsthorpe and Nicola Padfield (eds.), Exercising Discretion: Decision-­ Making in the Criminal Justice System and Beyond (Cullompton, England: Willan, 2003). 20. F. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 21. “Snitching” has been defined as the practice by which people who offend “give information to the police in exchange for material reward or reduced punishment”; R. Rosenfeld, B. Jacobs, and R. Wright, “Snitching and the Code of the Street,” British Journal of Criminology 43, no. 2 (2003). 22. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this version of “railroad” to mean “To send to prison, convict, or punish (a person) with summary speed, esp. on false evidence

198

Notes to Pages 71–78

or without a fair trial.” The OED traces its use back to the late nineteenth century, when it was used to describe the sentence of the Irish boxer Joe Coburn after shooting a police officer. 23. It was unclear where Billy received this number from or whether it was in fact accurate. 24. Nancy Lopez, Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys (New York: Routledge, 2003). 25. Liazos, “Class Oppression: The Functions of Juvenile Justice.” 26. In a recent report by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, the agencies identified some serious limitations to the provision of educational instruction in secure juvenile facilities that reflect this study’s findings. U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice, “Guiding Principles for Providing High-­ Quality in Juvenile Justice Secure Care Settings” (2014). 27. Herzfeld describes the way that the phrase “the system” is used to “reify bureaucracy” and how it “becomes an impersonal force on which all manner of individual and collective misfortunes may be blamed”; Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference (New York: Berg, 1992), 144–­5. 28. “The system” is akin to the ways in which researchers have described the experiences of welfare recipients and the weight the law exerts over their lives: “the law surrounds them as rules, as threats, and as commands; it is there as police officers, caseworkers, lawyers, and fraud control investigators; it is there in constructing their status as dependents of the state”; John Gilliom, Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 11. See also Austin Sarat, “‘. . . The Law Is All Over’: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 2 (1990). 29. Colman et al., “Long-­Term Consequences of Delinquency”; Malika Saada Saar et al., “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story” (Washington, DC: Center for Poverty and Inequality, 2015). 30. Sedlak and McPherson, “Youth’s Needs and Services.” 31. Teresa O’Neill, “Girls in Trouble in the Welfare and Criminal Justice System,” in Gwynedd Lloyd (ed.), ‘Problem’ Girls: Understanding and Supporting Troubled and Troublesome Girls and Young Women (London: Routledge Falmer, 2005). 32. Ibid; M. Baines and C. Adler, “When She Was Bad She Was Horrid,” in M. Baines and C. Adler (eds.), . . . And When She Was Bad? Working with Young Women in Juvenile Justice and Related Areas (Hobart, Australia: National Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, 1996). Sharpe; “The Trouble with Girls Today: Professional Perspectives on Young Women’s Offending.” 33. Sedlak and McPherson, “Youth’s Needs and Services.” 34. Children’s Rights, “The Long Road Home: A Study of Children Stranded in New York City Foster Care” (2009). 35. T. Thornberry, T. Ireland, and C. Smith, “The Importance of Timing: The Varying Impact of Childhood and Adolescent Maltreatment on Multiple Problem Outcomes,” Development and Psychopathology 13, no. 04 (2001); Melissa Jonson-­Reid and Richard P. Barth, “From Placement to Prison: The Path to Adolescent Incarceration from Child Welfare Supervised Foster or Group Care,” Children and Youth Services Review 22, no. 7 (2000). C. Cruickshank and Monica Barry, “Nothing Has Convinced Me to Stop” (Glasgow: Who Cares? Scotland, 2008); G. R. Cusick, Mark E. Courtney, Judy Havlicek, and Nathan Hess, “Crime during the Transition to Adulthood: How Youth Fare as They Leave Out-­of-­Home Care” (grant report, U.S Department of Justice) (2010). 36. A recent report by the African American Policy Forum at Columbia University pointed to the ways that young girls of color are disproportionately disciplined and suspended in public schools. Federal data confirms this. Kimberlé Williams



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Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected” (African American Policy Form, 2015). 37. Ms. Roberts’s reference to “upstate” is about the juvenile facility. “Upstate” is often shorthand for prisons and other custodial institutions. 38. See also Monica Barry, “The Mentor/Monitor Debate in Criminal Justice: ‘What Works’ for Offenders,” British Journal of Social Work 30 (2000). 39. John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson, “Understanding Desistance from Crime,” in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 40. Laurence Steinberg and Elizabeth Cauffman, “Maturity of Judgment in Adolescence: Psychosocial Factors in Adolescent Decision Making,” Law and Human Behavior 20, no. 3 (1996). 41. Those whose cases had finished continued to stay on some form of court supervision, such as parole, probation, or conditional release. The participant who had finished her case was Nina, who I have known for five years, since she was first arrested. She was recently released early from her five-­year probation term, a very unusual practice. 42. This is not unique to New York, nor to the United States. See Smith for a brief discussion of an analogous situation of “over-­intervention” in England and Wales, which is partly confused by the long-­standing confusion of justice and welfare considerations. D. Smith, “Out of Care 30 Years On,” Criminology & Criminal Justice 10, no. 2 (2010): 119–­35. 43. See also I. Durnescu, “Pains of Probation: Effective Practice and Human Rights,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology (2010); J. Petersilia, “When Probation Becomes More Dreaded Than Prison,” Federal Probation 54, no. 1 (1990); Léon Digard, “When Legitimacy Is Denied: Offender Perceptions of the Prison Recall System,” Probation Journal 57, no. 1 (2010). 44. Earlier in the year, before her program involvement and when we spoke about her marijuana use, she did not use those terms. 45. Elizabeth Such and R. Walker, “Young Citizens or Policy Objects? Children in the ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ Debate,” Journal of Social Policy 34, no. 1 (2005): 52. 46. D. McBarnet, “When Compliance Is Not the Solution but the Problem: From Changes in Law to Changes in Attitude,” in Taxing Democracy: Understanding Tax Avoidance and Evasion, ed.V. Braithwaite (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003). 47. Cathy Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27. 48. Ibid, 40. 49. See also S. Farrall, A. E. Bottoms, and Joanna Shapland, “Social Structures and Desistance from Crime,” European Journal of Criminology 7, no. 6 (2010). 50. See also Rose Peralta to Children’s Rights Litigation, July 16, 2013, http://​apps​ .americanbar​.org​/litigation​/committees​/childrights​/content​/articles​/spring2013–­ 0413-­say-­what-­translating-­courtroom-­colloquies-­for-­youth.html. 51. A young person’s ability to speak in court is also bounded by the need for their attorneys to protect them (as they would with adults) from exposing information which may be detrimental to their legal case. From a criminal defense perspective, there is thus an often problematic way that the voices of young people who have been in the criminal justice system are used in reform strategies, as these voices can often later be used against them in job searches, applications to college, and even in later criminal justice matters. 52. John Thibaut and Laurens Walker, Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis (Hillsdale, New Jersey1975); M. R. Fondacaro et al., “Identity Orientation, Voice, and Judgments of Procedural Justice During Late Adolescence,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 35, no. 6 (2006).

200

Notes to Pages 91–97

53. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 54. Harris, “Diverting and Abdicating Judicial Discretion.” 55. Majd and Puritz, “The Cost of Justice”; K. Henning, “Loyalty, Paternalism, and Rights”; Notre Dame Law Review 81 (2005). 56. Majd and Puritz, “The Cost of Justice.” 57. Henning, “Loyalty, Paternalism, and Rights.” 58. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Graham Rayman, “Rikers Violence: Out of Control,” The Village Voice May 9, 2012; Fagan and Wilkinson, “Guns, Youth Violence, and Social Identity in Inner Cities.” 59. Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner, Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); John. L. Jackson, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008). 60. Fine and Turner, Whispers on the Color Line; Jackson, Racial Paranoia. 61. Jones-­Brown, Gill, and Trone, “Stop, Question and Frisk Policing Practices in New York City.” 62. Brunson and Miller, “Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States”; Brunson, “‘Police Don’t Like Black People’.” 63. Richard L. Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2002). 64. Majd and Puritz, “The Cost of Justice”; Henning, “Loyalty, Paternalism, and Rights.” The debate around best versus expressed interests is long and complicated and has included considerations about the relevant role of parents in the legal defense of their children. This has also raised interesting questions about whether the attorney is involved in protecting the child from the state or from his or her parents (Henning, 2005: 253–­4). 65. Such and Walker, “Young Citizens or Policy Objects?” 51. 66. G. M. Sykes and David Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency,” American Sociological Review 22, no. 6 (1957); Shadd Maruna and Heith Copes, “Excuses, Excuses: What Have We Learned from Five Decades of Neutralization Research,” in Michael Tonry (ed.), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 67. A. Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75 (2001): 115. 68. Ibid, 115–­18. 69. Yolander G. Hurst and James Frank, “How Kids View Cops: The Nature of Juvenile Attitudes toward the Police,” Journal of Criminal Justice 28 (2000); Brunson and Miller, “Young Black Men and Urban Policing in the United States”; Brunson, “‘Police Don’t Like Black People’.” 70. J. Fagan and T. Tyler, “Legal Socialization of Children and Adolescents,” Social Justice Research 18, no. 3 (2005). 71. Peggy S. Sullivan, Roger G. Dunham, and Geoffrey P. Alpert, “Attitude Structures of Different Ethnic and Age Groups Concerning Police,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 78, no. 1 (1987); Tom R. Tyler, “What Is Procedural Justice: Criteria Used by Citizens to Assess the Fairness of Legal Procedures,” Law and Society Review 22, no. 1 (1988); Laura J. Gold, John M. Darley, James L. Hilton, and Mark P. Zanna, “Children’s Perceptions of Procedural Justice,” Child Development 55, no. 5 (1984). 72. Gold et al., “Children’s Perceptions of Procedural Justice.” 73. T. R. Tyler and E. A. Lind, “Procedural Justice,” in J. Sanders and V. L. Hamilton (eds.), Handbook of Justice Research in Law (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001); E. A. Lind and T. R. Tyler The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (New York: Plenum Press, 1988). 74. Tyler and Lind, “Procedural Justice,” 75.



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C hap te r 4 .  The Re sponsibility Trap 1. Paul Castellani, From Snake Pits to Cash Cows: Politics and Public Institutions in New York (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 2. Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America. Rebecca Hill, “‘The Common Enemy Is the Boss and the Inmate’: Police and Prison Guard Unions in New York in the 1970s–­1980s,” Labor: Studies in Working-­Class History of the Americas 8, no. 3 (2011). 3. Personal communication, Leonard Dunston. 4. New York State Division for Youth, “Youth in Care: Annual Reports 1989 and 1990” (Rensselaer, NY: New York State Division for Youth, 1991). 5. “2012 Annual Report,” (Rensselaer, NY: New York State Office of Children and Family Services, Division of Juvenile Justice and Opportunities for Youth, 2012). 6. David Garland, “The Limits of the Sovereign State,” The British Journal of Criminology 36, no. 4 (1996); Pat O’Malley, “Risk, Power and Crime Prevention,” Economy and Society 21, no. 3 (1992). Nikolas Rose, “Government and Control,” British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000); John Muncie, “Governing Young People: Coherence and Contradiction in Contemporary Youth Justice,” Critical Social Policy 26, no. 4 (2006). 7. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 8. Soss, Fording, and Schram, Disciplining the Poor. 9. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Random House, 1971/1993). 10. Jo Phoenix, “Beyond Risk Assessment: The Return of Repressive Welfarism?” in Fergus McNeill and Monica Barry (eds.), Youth Offending and Youth Justice (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). 11. Dorothy Roberts, “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,” The Yale Law Journal 105, no. 6 (1996). Jacquelin Scarborough, “Welfare Mothers’ Reflections on Personal Responsibility,” Journal of Social Issues 57, no. 2 (2001). 12. Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. 13. See Liazos, “Class Oppression: The Functions of Juvenile Justice”; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor. Liazos, writing about juvenile justice interventions in the 1970s, said, “All of the programs through the years have aimed at control and discipline of the poorer classes; they have tried to resocialize the boys and girls of the poor, working class, and minority groups so they would accept the place capitalism (in its various forms) chose for them” (1974, 2). In New York State, more than 51 percent of line staff members are African American. African Americans represent 30.9 percent of the total Office of Children and Family Services workforce, indicating that they represent a greater proportion of the frontline staff. African Americans also represent a significantly higher proportion of the corrections officer workforce than whites in the United States, as well as the less prestigious justice jobs in general (see Geoff Ward, “Race and the Justice Workforce: A System Perspective,” in R. Peterson, L. Krivo, and J. Hagan (eds.), The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 78. On the basis of my interviews with leading figures in the voluntary sector, there is also strong evidence to support the idea that the frontline workers inside of privately run and publicly contracted private agencies are also overwhelmingly people of color (perhaps even more so than in the public sector). 14. See, for example, A. E. Bottoms, “Theoretical Reflections on the Evaluation of a Penal Policy Initiative,” in Lucia Zedner and Andrew Ashworth (eds.), The Criminological Foundations of Penal Policy: Essays in Honour of Roger Hood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Mary Bosworth and Alison Liebling, “Incentives in Prison

202

Notes to Pages 102–105

Regimes: A Review of the Literature” (Cambridge: Institute of Criminology, 1995); Laura Abrams, Kyoungho Kim, and Ben Anderson-­Nathe, “Paradoxes of Treatment in Juvenile Corrections,” Child & Youth Care Forum 34, no. 1 (2005). 15. This list is drawn from the classical typologies of juvenile correctional organizations that Street et al. (1966) created. David Street, Robert D. Vinter, and Charles Perrow, Organization for Treatment: A Comparative Study of Institutions for Delinquents (New York: The Free Press, 1966). 16. I obtained this information from facility staff members. 17. Abrams, Kim, and Anderson-­ Nathe, “Paradoxes of Treatment in Juvenile Corrections.” 18. P. Tompkins-­Rosenblatt and K. VanderVen, “Perspectives on Point and Level Systems in Residential Care: A Responsive Dialogue,” Residential Treatment for Children & Youth 22, no. 3 (2005). A. Kazdin, “The Token Economy: A Decade Later,” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 15, no. 3 (1982). 19. New York State Office of Children and Family Services, “Resident Manual: Secure Facilities.” 20. “Youth Development System: Staff Manual” (Rensselaer, NY: New York State Office of Children and Family Services, 1997). These directions are taken from a resident manual from a secure center. 21. “Resident Manual: Secure Facilities,” 36. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid, 37. 24. Merry Ann Morash, “Cognitive Developmental Theory,” Criminology 19, no. 3 (1981). 25. James, Jenks, and Prout, Theorizing Childhood. 26. Liazos, “Class Oppression.” 27. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1955), xiii. 28. Cathy Urwin, “Developmental Psychology and Psychoanalysis: Splitting the Difference,” in M. Richards and P. Light (eds.), Children of Social Worlds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). 29. Lawrence Kohlberg, “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive Developmental Approach,” in Thomas Lichona (ed.), Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976); Richard A. Shweder, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Joan G. Miller, “Culture and Moral Development,” in Jerome Kagan (ed.), The Emergence of Morality in Young Children (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 30. “Culture and Moral Development,” 2–­7. 31. Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects:Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Alan France, “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Youth and Their Risk-­Taking,” Journal of Youth Studies 3, no. 3 (2000). 32. S. Duguid, Can Prisons Work? The Prisoner as Object and Subject in Modern Corrections (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 83. Ward and Nee, “Surfaces and Depths: Evaluating the Theoretical Assumptions of Cognitive Skills Programmes.” According to Duguid, a historian of the cognitive behavioral movement in prisons, “few in corrections had any illusions or, indeed, desires for their charges to reach the final, principled stages of development, stages in which decisions about actions in the world are based on the individual’s understanding of the principles behind the rules” (2000: 186). 33. June L. Tapp and Lawrence Kohlberg, “Developing Senses of Law and Legal Justice,” Journal of Social Issues 27, no. 2 (1971); Morash, “Cognitive Developmental Theory.” Kohlberg’s stages of moral development are pre-­conventional, conventional, and post-­conventional.



Notes to Pages 105–114

203

34. M. R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). It is worth noting, however, that Gottfredson and Hirschi argue that social institutions cannot usually make up for the deficiencies caused in the home. The influence of this model of “individual positivism” arguably coincided with the decline of sociologies of deviance and the rise in influence of more conservative criminological theories on policy and public discourse (Jock Young, “Cannibalism and Bulimia: Patterns of Social Control in Late Modernity,” Theoretical Criminology 3, no. 4 (1999): 384–­407; Garland, David. The Culture of Control [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]). The influence of this theory could also be connected to strategies aimed at engendering self-­responsibility in welfare recipients. 35. See, e.g., A. Reiss, “Delinquency As the Failure of Personal and Social Controls,” American Sociological Review 16, no. 2 (1951). 36. Duguid, Can Prisons Work? 37. Loic Wacquant, “The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ethnography 3, no. 4 (2002). 38. Morash, “Cognitive Developmental Theory.” 39. M. Lipsey and David Wilson, “Effective Intervention for Serious Juvenile Offenders,” in Rolf Loeber and David P. Farrington (eds.), Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders: Risk Factors and Successful Interventions (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); D. A. Andrews et al., “Does Correctional Treatment Work? A Clinically Relevant and Psychologically Informed Meta-­Analysis,” Criminology 28 (1990); Mark W. Lipsey, Gabrielle L. Chapman, and Nana A. Landenberger, “Cognitive-­Behavioral Programs for Offenders,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 578, no. 1 (2001); Anna J. Bogestad, Ryan J. Kettler, and Michael P. Hagan, “Evaluation of a Cognitive Intervention Program for Juvenile Offenders,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 54, no. 4 (2010). 40. Duguid, Can Prisons Work?; Ross, Fabiano, and Ewles, “Reasoning and Rehabilitation.” 41. Platt, The Child Savers. 42. C. Banks, Alaska Native Juveniles in Detention: A Qualitative Study of Treatment and Resistance (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 43. Ward and Nee, “Surfaces and Depths: Evaluating the Theoretical Assumptions of Cognitive Skills Programmes,” 169. 44. M. Deitch and M. Mushlin, “Opening Up a Closed World: A Sourcebook on Prison Oversight,” Pace Law Review 30, no. 5 (2010). 45. G. Paniza, “Examining Spending at the Office of Children and Family Services” (Albany: Independent Democratic Conference, 2011). 46. Haines and Case, “The Rhetoric and Reality of the ‘Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm’ Approach to Preventing and Reducing Youth Offending”; France, “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Youth and Their Risk-­Taking”; Beth Blue Swadener and Sally Lubeck, “The Social Construction of Children and Families “at Risk”: An Introduction,” in Beth Blue Swadener and Sally Lubeck (eds.), Children and Families “at Promise”: Deconstructing the Discourse of Risk, (Albany: State University of New York, 1995); Paniza, “Examining Spending at the Office of Children and Family Services.” 47. D. A. Andrews, J. Bonta, and J. Stephen Wormith, “The Recent Past and Near Future of Risk and/or Need Assessment,” Crime and Delinquency 52, no. 1 (2006). New York State Office of Children and Family Services, “Prescriptive Programming Intake Home Visit and Youth Risk Assessment Manual,” (Rensselaer: New York State Office of Children and Family Services, 1998). 48. Abrams notes that most programs for juvenile offenders “blend” their approaches to treatment, involving a range of strategies that range from punitive to therapeutic;

204

Notes to Pages 114–120

Laura Abrams, “Listening to Juvenile Offenders: Can Residential Treatment Prevent Recidivism,” Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 23, no. 1 (2006). 49. Personal communication, Leonard Dunston. 50. Eric Trupin et al., “Effectiveness of a Dialectical Behavior Therapy Program for Incarcerated Female Juvenile Offenders,” Child and Adolescent Mental Health 7, no. 3 (2002): 122. Trupin was hired by OCFS to act as a consultant in the implementation of evidence-­based practices. 51. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul:The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989). 52. A. Elliot, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).Viego argues that in ego psychology “adaptation and autonomy become the measure of mental health”; Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 8. 53. Edward Glover, “Delinquency Work in Britain: A Survey of Current Trends,” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 46, no. 2 (1955); August Aichhorn, Wayward Youth (New York: Meridian, 1925/1955). 54. Maruna and Copes, “Excuses, Excuses,” 2; Sykes and Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization.” 55. It has been argued that more current readings of neutralization theory interpret such thoughts and processes to be made deliberately and consciously. Maruna and Copes, “Excuses, Excuses.” 56. Sykes and Matza, “Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency.” Maruna and Copes, “Excuses, Excuses.” 57. Banks, Alaska Native Juveniles in Detention: A Qualitative Study of Treatment and Resistance. 58. David Matza, Delinquency and Drift (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964). See also Maruna and Copes, “Excuses, Excuses”; J. McKendy, “‘I’m Very Careful About That’: Narrative and Agency of Men in Prison,” Discourse & Society 17, no. 4 (2006). 59. Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation, and Social Life in an English Prison. 60. The notion of “personal responsibility” is said to be consistent with the “ethos of individual autonomy” associated with philosophies of advanced liberalism and how they relate to inducements to self-­government. Rose, “Government and Control.” 61. B. Thomas-­Peter, “The Modern Context of Psychology in Corrections: Influences, Limitations and Values of ‘What Works’,” in Graham Towl (ed.), Psychological Research in Prisons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Crewe, The Prisoner Society; Kathryn J. Fox, “Reproducing Criminal Types: Cognitive Treatment for Violent Offenders in Prison,” The Sociological Quarterly 40, no. 3 (1999). 62. Shadd Maruna and Ruth Mann, “A Fundamental Attribution Error? Rethinking Cognitive Distortions,” Legal and Criminological Psychology 11 (2006). 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Shadd Maruna, Making Good: How Ex-­Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001). 66. Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, “Charting a New Course: A Blueprint for Transforming Juvenile Justice in New York State,” 91. 67. M. Masi and D. Boyd, “Behavior Support and Management: Coordinated Standards for Children’s Systems of Care” (Rensselaer, NY: Council on Children and Families, 2007). 68. A. Reich, Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives in and out of Juvenile Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 128. Steckley and Kendrick have pointed to the complexities of staff and adolescent understandings of the uses and necessity of restraints in an English residential care context which are partly related to prevailing concerns about childhood vulnerabilities and demands for safety in



Notes to Pages 122–134

205

institutional care. L. Steckley and A. Kendrick, “Physical Restraint in Residential Childcare: The Experiences of Young People and Residential Workers,” Childhood 15, no. 4 (2008). 69. Kobi Kambon, “The Africentric Paradigm and African-­American Psychological Liberation,” in D. Azibo (ed.), African Psychology in Historical Perspective and Related Commentary (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996). 70. Ward and Nee, “Surfaces and Depths: Evaluating the Theoretical Assumptions of Cognitive Skills Programmes,” 172. 71. Bruce Frederick et al., “Validity of Commonly-­Cited Risk and Protective Factors for Assessing Release Readiness among Incarcerated Delinquents,” presented at the American Society of Criminology Annual Conference (Chicago, 2002). 72. Concerns were recently raised by various state and federal watchdog organizations that the use of “scoring” related too closely to a residents’ ability to be released and to the quality of treatment, and that young people with mental health problems may struggle in this system. King, “Investigation of the Lansing Residential Center, Louis Gossett, Jr. Residential Center, Tryon Residential Center, and Tryon Girls Center”; Citizen’s Committee for Children, “Inside Out”; Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice, “Charting a New Course.” Thus, readiness for release, rather than being based on a points system, is now decided by a young person’s community-­based workers, who work with them throughout their time in the system, as well as with input from the young person and their family. Citizen’s Committee for Children, “Inside Out,” 42. An evaluation of a Multi-­systemic Therapy program in use for young people released from facilities in their communities was conducted by OCFS and researchers found that the model did not work well with the OCFS population. Susan Mitchell-­Herzfeld et al., “Effects of Multisystemic Therapy (MST) on Recidivism among Juvenile Delinquents in New York State” (Rensselaer, NY: Office of Children and Family Services, 2008). At the time of the research, the agency was in the process of introducing a new family-­focused model that is an attempt to remedy some of the limitations of the program identified through the evaluation. 73. Garland, The Culture of Control, 130.

C hap te r 5.  C hange from the Inside 1. See, e.g., Bernstein, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Richard Mendel, “Maltreatment of Youth in U.S. Juvenile Correctional Facilities: An Update” (Baltimore, MD: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2015). Steve Liss, Marian Wright Edelman, and Cecilia Balli, No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 2. Jo Phoenix, “Against Youth Justice and Youth Governance, for Youth Penality,” British Journal of Criminology (2015): 13. 3. I have assigned the female gender pronoun to Olivia. Although a discussion later in the chapter will reveal the fluidity of her conceptions of gender identity, her decision to use a feminine-­identified name informed my choice for this chapter. 4. G. M. Sykes, The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum-­Security Prison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958/2007); J. Irwin, The Felon (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970); James Jacobs, Stateville: The Penitentiary in Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Goffman, Asylums. 5. See also Anna Gradin Franzén, “Responsibilization and Discipline: Subject Positioning at a Youth Detention Home,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 44, no. 3 (2014). 6. In a therapeutic community-­oriented drug-­treatment program studied by Paik, residents similarly used the term “doing the program” to describe what she terms

206

Notes to Pages 134–141

“efforts at institutional self-­construction” Leslie Paik, “Are You Truly a Recovering Dope Fiend? Local Interpretive Practices at a Therapeutic Community Drug Treatment Program,” Symbolic Interaction 29, no. 2 (2006): 216. 7. “Two” refers to the points-­based incentives and earned privileges system. 8. I worked with Newz’s attorney on the case that led him to confinement. While working on the case, I had interviewed him at length about his past and had access to this history through records and interviews with family members. My knowledge of Newz’s past inevitably influenced my analysis of his interpretations of change. 9. The detention facilities, like the one that Billy was in, send regular reports about young people’s behavior to the judge. 10. There were large numbers of outside visitors to the residential facilities during the field-­work period, including a state legislator, the president of John Jay College, judges, and advocates, in part because the scrutiny that the Office of Children and Family Services was facing in the public media and because the field-­work process coincided with an investigation of the system by a statewide task force on juvenile justice. 11. The state has the authority to transfer a resident to the Department of Corrections as soon as they turn eighteen years old. Eddie’s behavior could in part be related to Erving Goffman’s notion of “playing it cool,” by supporting the “counter-­mores” with his fellow residents and “conceal[ing] from them how tractably he acts when alone with the staff.” Goffman, Asylums, 64–­5. This is also related to Feld’s notion of “doing time” or simply waiting until one’s time is up; Barry Feld, Neutralizing Inmate Violence: Juvenile Offenders in Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977). “Playing it cool,” in other words, is a form of “falling back,” by making one’s institutional life easier and trying to escape some of the harms that come from both fully engaging in the potential dangers of resistance and those of complete assimilation. 12. Other researchers have found that young people engage in this practice of “fake it to make it” inside custody. See, for example: Abrams, Kim, and Anderson-­Nathe, “Paradoxes of Treatment in Juvenile Corrections”; Abrams, “Listening to Juvenile Offenders”; Laura Abrams and Jemel Aguilar, “Negative Trends, Possible Selves, and Behavior Change: A Qualitative Study of Juvenile Offenders in Residential Treatment,” Qualitative Social Work 4, no. 2 (2005); Michelle Inderbitzen, “Guardians of the State’s Problem Children,” The Prison Journal 86, no. 4 (2006); J. Fader, Falling Back (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 13. Andrew Day et al., “The Process of Change in Offender Rehabilitation Programs,” Psychology, Crime & Law 12, no. 5 (2006). 14. In her study of a drug treatment program, Paik found that the official sanctioning of a form of “faking it” “hinders the ability to determine if a peer is faking the new self in an effort to adopt it. In short, because ‘act as if ’ is an official part of the self-­ construction process, members believe that it is necessary to peel away the layers of pretending to assess how a client is really doing in the self-­construction process.” Paik, “Are You Truly a Recovering Dope Fiend?” 215. 15. Abrams, Kim, and Anderson-­ Nathe, “Paradoxes of Treatment in Juvenile Corrections.” 16. J. Mullins, “Spirituality and the Twelve Steps,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 7, no. 2 (2010); Fox, “Reproducing Criminal Types: Cognitive Treatment for Violent Offenders in Prison.” 17. T. Mathiesen, The Defences of the Weak: A Sociological Study of a Norwegian Correctional Institution (London: Tavistock, 1965); Ben Crewe, “Power, Adaptation and Resistance in a Late-­Modern Men’s Prison,” British Journal of Criminology 47, no. 2 (2007); Bosworth and Liebling, “Incentives in Prison Regimes”; C. Bartollas, “Survival Problems of Adolescent Prisoners,” in Robert Johnson and Hans Toch (eds.), The Pains of Imprisonment (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).



Notes to Pages 141–153

207

18. Crewe, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation, and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 207. 19. See Shadd Maruna et al., “Pygmalion in the Reintegration Process: Desistance from Crime through the Looking Glass,” Psychology, Crime & Law 10, no. 3 (2004). 20. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), xv; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 153. 21. See also Crewe, “Power, Adaptation and Resistance in a Late-­ Modern Men’s Prison.” 22. Ibid., 257. 23. This idea of falling back is slightly different from that described by Jamie Fader in her book Falling Back. There, the expression is used to explain the avoidance of reoffending. 24. See also Alice Goffman, “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009). 25. Bartollas similarly describes young people in training schools who “play it cool” by “simply ‘doing time’,” . . . by keeping “his emotions under control and to do whatever was necessary to shorten the institutional stay.” Bartollas, “Survival Problems of Adolescent Prisoners,” 176. 26. Although see the work of David Domenici and the Center for Educational Excellence in Alternative Settings. 27. See also Willis, Learning to Labour. 28. Jim Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1990). 29. This was what staff told me; I did not independently confirm this observation with the facility administrators. 30. See, e.g. Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (New York Vintage Books, 1994). 31. See, e.g., McKendy, “‘I’m Very Careful about That’.” 32. Aftercare workers are assigned to all young people adjudicated as juvenile delinquents. The workers meet with the young person before they are released from custody and serve a supervisory role once they are released from custody. 33. Criminologists who study crime and the emotions have argued that we have often neglected to understand psychosocial dimensions of engagement with crime, and to acknowledge that crime allows individuals, especially teenagers, to engage in a quest for excitement and kicks. See, e.g., Jeff Ferrell, Keith Hayward, and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008); David Gadd and T. Jefferson, Psychosocial Criminology (London: Sage, 2007); Katz, Seductions of Crime. 34. A.E. Bottoms and Joanna Shapland, “Steps Towards Desistance among Male Young Adult Recidivists,” in Escape Routes: Contemporary Perspectives on Life after Punishment, ed. Shadd Maruna and M. Hough (London: Routledge, 2010). Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith, “Synchronic Self-­Control Is Always Non-­Actional,” Analysis 57, no. 2 (1997). Jeanette Kennett, Agency and Responsibility: A Common-­Sense Moral Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 35. Billy was arrested at least four times and stopped at least twenty times during the course of the fieldwork period. He was identified by the police as a gang member, and he said he could not travel more than one city block with his friends without being stopped by the police. Thus, one part of his desire to return to detention was about avoiding the constant indignities of being stopped by the police. 36. Adam Reich, in his book about a juvenile facility in Rhode Island, made a similar finding. Reich, Hidden Truth, 134. 37. See also Colman et al., “Long-­Term Conseqences of Delinquency”; D. Shelton, “Health Status of Young Offenders and Their Families,” Journal of Nursing Scholarship,

208

Notes to Pages 158–168

Second Quarter (2000). A number of staff members also spoke to me about their exposure to physical forms of discipline in their childhood, often implying that these forms of discipline had helped them to become more self-­disciplined. 38. According to the New York State Division of Parole, José was discharged from Parole in February 2011.There is no record of him having any violations. However, I have not spoken to him since March 2009 and thus do not know if he has been rearrested. 39. Bonilla-­Silva, Racism without Racists, 37. 40. Bonilla-­Silva, Racism without Racists; Becky Tatum, “Toward a Neocolonial Model of Adolescent Crime and Violence,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 16, no. 2 (2000). 41. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice, 1825–­1920.

C onc lu s i on 1. Schur, Radical Non-­Intervention. 2. James Kilgore, “Repackaging Mass Incarceration,” in Counterpunch (2014); Judah Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Groth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion (New York: NYU Press, 2015). 3. See also the work of Ben Crewe, who calls the treatment and punitive approaches in British prisons neo-­paternalist. Ben Crewe, The Prisoner Society.

Meth odolog i cal Appe ndix 1. As far as I know, the only other researcher who has conducted extensive qualitative research inside New York’s system was Rose Giallombardo. See, e.g., Rose Giallombardo, The Social World of Imprisoned Girls: A Comparative Study of Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents (Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1981). 2. L.Wacquant,The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Ethnography, 3, no. 4 (2002): 371–­97. Wacquant neglects to recognize the rich history of ethnographic research on women’s prisons, however. 3. None of these spaces are entirely free of the presence of government, as was demonstrated during the course of the research when I learned that young people’s social networking experiences (e.g., Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook) were being monitored by the police and was admissible in court. 4. Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002). 5. A. E. Bottoms, “The Relationship between Theory and Empirical Observations in Criminology,” in Doing Research on Crime and Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). M. Hollis, The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6. M. Burawoy, “Introduction,” in M. Burawoy et al. (eds.), Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Alison Liebling, “Whose Side Are We On? Theory, Practice and Allegiances in Prisons Research,” British Journal of Criminology 41 (2001): 475. 7. Chris Jenks, “Zeitgeist Research on Childhood,” in Pia Christensen and Allison James (eds.), Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices (London: Routledge Falmer, 2000). 8. J. F. Gubrium and J. A. Holstein, Institutional Selves:Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 16. 9. Crewe, “Power, Adaptation and Resistance in a Late-­ Modern Men’s Prison,” 259. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Crewe, “Power,



Notes to Pages 168–175

209

Adaptation and Resistance in a Late-­Modern Men’s Prison,” 259. Although the residential facilities and detention centers that I conducted research in are not technically considered to be “prisons,” the literature on ethnographic methods in prisons has some relevance here in considering the complexity of analyzing secure institutional life. 10. I. Jarvie, “The Problem of Ethical Integrity in Participant Observation,” in R. Burgess (ed.), Field Research: A Sourcebook and Field Manual (London: Routledge, 1982). 11. J. A. Holstein and J. F. Gubrium, “Phenomenology, Ethnomethodology and Interpretive Practice,” in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 264. 12. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Pierre Bourdieu, “Symbolic Power,” in D. Gleeson (ed.), Identity and Structure: Issues in the Sociology of Education (Driffield: Nafferton Books, 1977). 13. Hochschild, A. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” The American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 557. 14. Young people are also sent to these facilities if they have been adjudicated with serious felonies as juvenile delinquents or if they have received serious disciplinary charges while they were in custody in a lower-­level facility. 15. Before selecting my research site, I spoke with Mark Steward, who helped to establish a national “model” in juvenile justice practices, based in Missouri. Solomon Moore, “Missouri System Treats Juvenile Offenders with a Lighter Hand,” New York Times, March 26, 2009. Steward consults with state governments on their juvenile prison systems, and he had been hired by the commissioner of OCFS, Gladys Carrión, to examine New York’s system. Steward told me that McClary was a facility that most resembled the “Missouri Model.” 16. Gewirtz, M. “Annual Report on the Adult Court Case Processing of Juvenile Offenders in New York City, January through December 2009.” New York: Criminal Justice Agency, 2010. 17. Cannon, A., R. Aborn, and John Bennett. “Guide to Juvenile Justice in New York City.” New York: Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, 2010. 18. Priscilla Alderson, “Ethics,” in Sandy Fraser et al. (eds.), Doing Research with Children and Young People (London: Sage, 2004), 98. 19. W. Hollway and T. Jefferson, Doing Qualitative Research Differently (London: Sage, 2000), 99. 20. Michelle Fine et al., “Youth Research/Participatory Methods for Reform,” in D. Theissen and A. Cook-­Sather (eds.), International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). 21. Maggie O’Neill and R. Harindranath, “Theorising Narratives of Exile and Belonging: The Importance of Biography and Ethno-­Mimesis in “Understanding” Asylum,” Qualitative Sociology Review II, no. 1 (2006): 44. 22. See also N. Scheper-­Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (1995). 23. McCarry, “Conducting Social Research with Young People: Ethical Considerations.” A. McRobbie, “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action,” Feminist Review 12 (1982). L. Gelsthorpe and Gilly Sharpe, “Criminological Research: Typologies Versus Hierarchies,” Criminal Justice Matters 62, no. Winter 2005/06 (2005). 24. Pierre Bourdieu, “Understanding,” Theory, Culture & Society 13, no. 2 (1996): 22. 25. Hawkins, “Order, Rationality and Silence.” 26. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview: A Guide for Therapists and Other Interviewers, by the Founder of the Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (New York: W. W.  Norton & Company, 1970/1954).

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Notes to Pages 175–177

27. Ibid, 122. 28. In addition to assisting a participant with his math homework, I traveled with a participant to her interview for a place in an alternative-­to-­incarceration program, introduced a participant to a friend who was an architect and took us on a tour of her firm, I worked with a participant to find a basketball league to play with, and I took others to visit animal shelters. 29. Becker, “Whose Side Are We On?,” 242. 30. See also Anna Souhami, Transforming Youth Justice: Occupational Identity and Cultural Change (Cullumpton, England: Willan, 2007). 31. Simon Clarke, “Thinking Psychosocially about Difference: Ethnicity, Community and Emotion,” in Shelley Day Sclater et al. (eds.), Emotion: New Psychosocial Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 112. 32. I. Craib, “The Unhealthy Underside of Narratives,” in C. Horrocks et al. (eds.), Narrative, Memory and Health (Huddersfield, England: University of Huddersfield Press, 2003). 33. Ibid, 7.

Inde x

Aaron, 73 adolescence, 41; difference between “adolescents” and “criminals,” 58; and the process of change between early and late adolescence, 81; and risk anxiety, 17 Adolescent Portable Therapy, 114 adult justice system, juveniles in, 7–8, 14–15 African Americans, 6, 36, 94, 117, 187n56; child welfare and custodial institutions for in New York City, 17; discrimination of in employment, 192n5; disproportionate amount of African American girls suspended from public schools, 198–99n36; employment of in the juvenile justice and criminal justice systems, 101, 201n13; harassment of by police in New York City, 58; high rates of incarceration among young black males, 38 Aggression Replacement Therapy (ART), 114 Aggression Replacement Training program, 22, 114 Aichhorn, August, 116, 127 Aid to Families With Dependent Children, 4 Alderson, Priscilla, 173 Angela, 61, 63, 91 Annie E. Casey Foundation, 30 Asian Americans, 12 Austin McCormick Secure Center, burning of, 21 “badness” (decision to become a “bad ass” [BA]), 49, 51, 53–54; as a lack of

deference, 59; sociological reasons for “being bad,” 57–58 Barker,Vanessa, 31 Barry, Monica, 54 Barton, 111–12, 114, 118, 121; par­ ticipation of in work group discussions, 122–23; views of on racism, 117 Bauman, Zygmunt, 42 behavioral change system, 102–8, 110, 165; stages of, 102–4. See also cognitive behavior therapies Bell, 54–55, 195n58, 202n20; experiences of at the Marshall juvenile facility, 55–56; physicality and defiant behavior of, 56–57; placement of on “Egregious Behavior Protocol,” 56; placement of in a “secure” unit, 55; the residential staff ’s opinion of, 57; the two Bell’s (“Compliant Bell” and “Noncompliant Bell”), 56 Betts, Reginald Dwayne, 1 Billy, 46–47, 69, 71, 88, 91, 96; on being “institutionalized,” 138; classification of as “Emotionally Disturbed,” 52; complexity of, 52; life of after being released from treatment, 152; multiple arrests of, 207–8n35; opinion of serving detention, 52; prosecutor’s stereotyping of, 51 biopower, 184n18 Black Muslims, 17 Bloomberg, Michael, 25, 35 Bosket, Willie, 21–22, 187n64; the ­“Willie Bosket law,” 24 Bourdieu, Pierre, 174 Brace, Charles Loring, 15–16

211

212

Index

Brooks, David, 98–99, 101–2, 106, 125; on being villainized by the media, 121–22; on “criminal thinkers,” 115; goals of in leading his juvenile facility unit, 111; on maintaining control of young offenders in his juvenile facility, 112–13; opinion of the ART model, 114; participation of in work group discussions, 122–23; sharing of books with juvenile offenders, 124; skepticism of concerning the behavioral change system, 108; strong belief of in education for young offenders, 104, 124; views of on racism, 117–18 Brown, Elaine, 22 Burress, Plaxico, 38

“crack babies,” 37 Craib, Ian, 177 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 39 Crewe, Ben, 168 crime, psychosocial dimensions of, 207n33 criminal convictions: effects of on young people, 66, 67; in New York, 66–67 criminal justice system, 187n56; and the role of “criminalblackman,” 38; treatment of women of color in, 38–39 criminal responsibility, age of, 23, 188n72 Cuomo, Andrew, 23, 45, 98

Carey, Hugh, 21 Carrión, Gladys, 24–25, 27, 28, 108, 152 children: criminalization of, 161–62, 192n11; early childhood intervention programs, 29; “other people’s children,” 14; and risk anxiety, 17 Children’s Aid Society, 16 children’s rights movement, 20 child welfare services: among young women, 75–77; segregation in, 17, 186n26 Christina, 150 Citizen’s Committee for Children, 19 Clarke, Simon, 177 Clinton, Bill, 64 “Close to Home” initiative, 26 cognitive behavior therapies, 105–7, 126, 163–64, 202–3n33; and “Behavior Improvement Plans,” 106; evaluation of in the juvenile justice context, 106; primary aim of, 106; and the Resident Behavior Assessment form, 107 “cognitive developmental” theory, 105 Cohen, Alfred, 193n26 Cohen, Cathy, 88–89 cottage-­based residential treatment systems, 16

Damien, 129–30, 142, 144 deinstitutionalization, 186n41, 187n59; and the “nothing works” movement, 20 Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), 27, 114; expansion of in juvenile justice facilities, 115 discrimination, in hiring practices, 65, 192n5, 196n9, 197n11 Division for Youth (DFY) program, 19 Dominicans, 36 Dunston, Leonard, 98, 114 Eddie, 73, 74, 150; as institutionalized, 140; as a leader, 140, 146; on the tensions inherent in institutionalization, 140–41; transfer of to an adult prison, 139–40, 195n58, 206n11 Edelman, Peter, 21, 187n61; opponents of, 21; policies of, 21 ego psychology, 116 Elena, 139; on the exercise of responsibility for one’s treatment program, 148–49; loneliness of, 149; and the need to “do program,” 149–50 Ellen, 150 Ellis, Eddie, 98–99 Erikson, Erik, 116

Index

Fabiano, E., 29 Facebook, 150; monitoring of young people on by prosecutors and police, 47 Fagan, Jeffrey, 97 “fake it ’til you make it” performance of treatment, 141–42, 206n12, 206n14 Farrington, David, on the definition of risk factors, 28–29 foster care/foster parents, 4, 8, 39–40, 55, 75, 77, 79 Foucault, Michel, 184n18; on “governmentality,” 11; on individual self-­ control, 10–11 Freud, Anna, 116 Functional Family Therapy, 29 Garland, David, 126 Gault, Gerald, 20 General Equivalency Diploma (GED), 3, 8, 62, 66, 73, 74, 85, 195n48 Genevieve, 40–41, 42, 77, 193n41; placement of in the Egregious Behavior Protocol, 41 George, 91 Gina, 147 Giuliani, Rudolph, 35, 36 global economy, transformations in, 100, 101 Glover, Edward, 116 Gottfredson, Michael, 105, 203n35 Green Haven Prison, 36 Guided Group Interaction program, 22 Hannah-­Moffat, Kelly, 30 Harlem, 36 Harris, Alexes, 91 Higher Education Act (1996), 66 Hirschi, Travis, 105, 203n35 Hollway, W., 173 Honneth, Axel, 96 Hooper juvenile facility, 23–24, 25, 46, 90, 117, 139, 147; capacity of, 170; control of residents at, 170;

213

disproportionate number of white youths in the mental health unit of, 39; inmate frustration with searches of the facility, 127; Modified Services Program of, 170; observation of classroom sessions in, 73–74; ­security at, 170; vocational training at, 72 Horn, Martin, 49–50, 51 Houses of Refuge, 14, 15, 16 housing. See public housing projects Hudson Girls’ Facility, 195n56 Hurt, Hallam, 193 incarceration: alternatives to, 43–44; alternatives to in New York City, 44; correctional model of, 2; and new technology, 43; as a “rite of ­passage,” 52 indeterminacy, of court cases, 81–89; and the length of court interventions, 81–82 Individualized Education Programs, 33–34 “individual positivism,” 203n35 Industry Residential Center, 13–14 In re Gault (1967), 20 Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency in England, 116 institutionalization, 21, 137–38; as a “labeling” force, 19; tensions inherent in, 140–41 Izzy, 71, 89, 90, 95, 150, 175–76 Jacob, 3, 4, 7, 10–11, 24, 73, 150, 153, 162; desire of to attend college, 65; as a model resident, 25; signs of effective redemption in, 10 Jamal, 150; desire of to attend college, 65; at Rikers Island, 195n47 Jefferson, T., 173 Johnson, Willard, 13, 14, 18 José, 138, 153–54, 157–58, 208n38; on the importance of the process of change, 143

214

Index

juvenile justice residential facilities, 16, 52–53, 158–59, 161–62, 165, 206n10, 209n14; allegations of abuse in, 25; arrests within, 55, 195n58; assessment and record keeping in, 53; closures of in New York State, 26; and the concept of control, 113; contradictions within, 150; criticism of the ineffectiveness of, 18–19; Department of Justice report concerning juvenile facilities in New York, 25; and gaining “juice” (power) with the staff of, 54, 57, 195n54; lack of vocational training facilities in, 73; in the 1950s, 20; proposed positive changes to, 165–66; staff violence and hostility in, 48, 110–11, 153–54; use of physical restraints in, 119–20, 152–53, 205n69 juvenile justice system, 8–9, 12, 75, 164; actions of adult system actors in, 41–42; current system of, 6–7; cynicism and juveniles charged as adults, 46, 52; effect of immigration on, 15; external oversight of, 108, 110; origins of, 6; racial segregation in, 20; rapid change in, 5; studies concerning, 5–6; young women in, 57, 75–78. See also juvenile justice system, contemporary overview of; New York, juvenile justice system; Washington, D.C., juvenile justice system juvenile justice system, contemporary overview of, 23–32; and the “Close to Home” initiative, 26; and the introduction of risk assessment instruments, 28–29; reform agendas concerning facilities in Missouri, 27; reform agendas concerning facilities in New York, 24–26 Juvenile Offender Law (1978), 21–22, 31, 46, 188n67 juvenile offenders: ability of to “age out” of crime, 81; belief of that any intervention in their lives will lead to confinement, 94; career aspirations of, 68;

confronting low expectations of change in, 69–75; as criminalized children, 162–63; desires of to work or go to school, 67–68; distrust of attorneys by, 94–95; education of, 104–5, 198n26 (see also vocational skills training); feelings of guilt and regret of, 133; mental illness diagnoses of, 92, 123–24, 146, 173; need of for respect, 96–97; need of to be “seen” and “heard,” 54; paranoia of concerning the court process, 91–92; and “playing it cool,” 206n11, 207n25; “railroading” of by police, 71, 197–98n22; role of parents in the legal defense of their children, 200n64; use of physical restraints on, 119–20, 152–53; vulnerability and anxiety of, 58. See also “badness” (decision to become a “bad ass” [BA]); juvenile offenders, change in from the inside; juvenile offenders, treatment of juvenile offenders, change in from the inside, 127–29, 162; and the contours of change, 156–59; and “doing program,” 133–34, 206n6; and entering a juvenile facility, 132–42; and life before confinement, 129–32; struggle with the demonstration of change, 154–56 juvenile offenders, treatment of: aftercare workers assigned to offenders upon release from correctional facilities, 151, 207n32; effectiveness of, 126, 205n73; and “fake it ’til you make it” performance of treatment, 141–42, 206n12, 206n14; and the “falling back” engagement with treatment, 142–46, 207n23; individualized progress in treatment, 148–50; obstacles to “falling back,” 146–47 juvenile reform, approaches to, 41, 163–64, 204n49; boot camp programs, 23; and the “community” as better than “custody” concept, 19, 20, 21; development of interventions based on the risk

Index

of reoffending, 113–14; developmental approaches, 41, 193n25; juvenile court reforms, 91–92; political solutions, 164; psychoanalytic approaches, 115–16, 178; “radical noninterventionism,” 19, 160; sociological approaches, 20; and the “trauma-­informed” program of organizational change, 27. See also cognitive behavior therapies Katz, Jack, 57–58 Kelley, Robin D. G., 35 Kelly, Peter, 30 Khalil, 35–36, 140 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 105 Latinas/Latinos, 12; harassment of by police in New York City, 58 Liazos, Alexander, 26 Luis, 82 MacLeod, Allistar, 68 Malcolm, 47, 90; frustration with the indeterminacy of the court system, 87–88 Mann, Ruth, 118 Marcus, 35, 53, 91, 171; arrests of, 61–62; confinement of at Rikers Island, 63; decision of to run away from home, 62–63; drug testing of, 62 marijuana, 62, 82, 85–86, 122, 127, 152 Marshall juvenile facility, 40–41, 55, 57, 72–73, 148, 169–70; closure of, 161; interaction of young women and staff at, 77 Maruna, Shadd, 118 masculinity, hegemonic, 51 Massachusetts, 187n59; closure of large juvenile training schools in, 21 Matza, David, 116 Maya, 77–78, 82, 84–85, 138–39, 150; disappearance of, 80–81, 156; “Emotional Disturbance” classification of, 80; expectations of, 78–79; experiences of in court, 78; in foster care, 79

215

McClary juvenile facility, 72, 76, 89, 147, 150, 151; capacity of, 170; LGBT nondiscrimination policy at, 170 “messaging,” deterrence-­based, 38, 193n18 Michael, 33, 34–35, 44, 71, 92, 93, 163; arrests of, 37; “badness” of (decision to become a “bad ass” [BA]), 49, 51; desperation of to get a job, 65; effect of living in a crime-­r idden neighborhood on, 36–37; experience of in the criminal justice system, 37–38; personality of, 34, 37; at Rikers Island, 48–50, 195n47; in the role of “criminalblackman,” 38; successful changes made by, 59–60 Miller, Jerome, 21 Missouri Model, 27 “moral indignation,” concept of, 42, 193n26 Moral Reasoning, 114 Moral Reconation Therapy, 114 Multisystemic Family Therapy, 29, 114 Mumford, on the use of physical restraints, 120–21 Muncie, John, 29 Murakawa, Naomi, 187n56 Myers, Walter Dean, 124 MySpace, 150 Native Americans, 12, 93 neoliberalism, 99–101; neoliberal paternalism, 5, 31–32, 96 “neutralizations” (neutralization-­halting practices), 116, 204n56 New York, juvenile justice system in, 5, 6, 7, 25–26, 100; closing of juvenile facilities in, 26; creation of juvenile facilities in, 17–18; expansion of juvenile facilities in, 18; number of young people in the care of, 18; origins of, 13; payment for institutional care, 186n31; shaping of by liberal elites, 30–32; surge in youth crime and arrests during the 1990s, 22–23

216

Index

New York City, 94; cuts to afterschool programs in, 35; public high schools in, 61, 196n1; public housing projects of, 64; sharp reduction of crime in (1990s), 36–37 New York City House of Refuge, 15 New York City Legal Aid Society, 19 New York City Police Department (NYPD), 36; Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program of, 47 New York City Youth Bureau, 35 New York Civil Liberties Union, 24 New York Daily News, 18 New York Model, 27 New York State, criminal justice expenditures in, 26 New York State Department of Corrections, 61 New York State Department of Social Welfare, 17 New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), 26, 76, 78, 82, 101, 102, 105, 124, 167, 169; assessment of treatment interventions in, 119; evaluation by of a Multi-­systemic Therapy program, 205n73; recidivism rates for young people in the custody of, 26, 188–89n81; Sanctuary Model of, 119 New York State Training School for Girls, 16, 19–20 New York Times, 18 Newz, 70, 93, 150, 157, 195n58, 202n20, 206n8; on becoming a “Mr. Robot,” 136; on the frequency of his thinking errors, 118–19; as “institutionalized,” 137–38; leadership of, 146; survival skills of, 137; on the tensions inherent in institutionalization, 140–41 Nina, 8–9, 10, 179, 199n41 No Child Left Behind program, 35 Novick, Abraham, 19–20 Oak Hill, 26 Olivia, 145–46; coping strategies of for depression, 142–43; disappearance of,

156; entrance of into a juvenile facility, 132–33; life of before confinement, 129–32; relationships of, 143–44 “other people’s children,” 14 Panama, 73, 90, 139 Pataki, George, 22, 24, 99 paternalism, 94; liberal-­paternalist interventionism in children’s lives, 31–32, 96; neoliberal paternalism, 5 Pell Grants, 73 penalties/punitive ideologies, 10 Piaget, Jean, 104–5 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 17 “poster children,” 7–8; as a liberal fantasy, 8 poverty, 4, 37, 193n17; among whites from rural areas, 39; criminal conviction, poverty, and marginality, 64–68; extreme poverty, 4; urban poor, 184n16 powerlessness/voicelessness, experiences of in the court system, 89–96, 199n51 profiling, by police of young people, 33, 191n1 protective custody (PC), 48 psychoanalysis, 178; theories of concerning the mother-­child relationship, 115–16 public housing projects, 64; barriers to accessing public housing, 67 Puerto Ricans, 36 “pushouts,” 34 racism, 12, 117–18 radicalism, liberal, 29–30; failure of, 30 Ramirez, 121 recidivism, rates of for young people, 26, 188–89n81 redeemability/redemption, 10, 11 reformatories, 15–16 reformers, 14–16, 19, 23, 26, 167; appeal of the Missouri Model to New York reformers, 27; focus of on solutions to the problem of youth discipline, 30;

Index

liberal reformers, 28, 160–61, 163; and the use of rural area facilities in upstate New York, 16 research methodology, 167–68; community sampling process of, 171–73; ethical reflections, 173; ethnographic and phenomenological approaches, 168–69, 208n2, 209n9; identity and reflexivity issues, 176–77; and knowledge of the criminal justice system, 175–76; and the prevention of exploitation in the research process, 173–75; sampling strategies used in, 171; site selection choices, 169–71, 209n15; use of a psychosocial approach in, 177–78 responsibility, 97–102; individual responsibility, 9, 100, 117, 204n61; individual responsibility for those under control of the state, 10 responsibilization practices, 118–24; and neoliberalism, 99–100; and the people-­ practice relationship, 124–26 Rikers Island, 1–2, 48–49; paradox of, 2; percentage of blacks and Latino/a in (90%), 50; practice in of deputizing young people in order to manage their peers, 48 Rios,Victor, 184n16, 192n11 risk assessments, 28–30, 190n101; detention risk assessment instruments, 43, 193n28; “evidence-­based practices” for, 29, 31, 126, 189n94. See also children, early childhood intervention programs Risk Factor Prevention Paradigm, 29 Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), 49; reputation of, 48; violence at, 48 Robinson, Christopher, 48 Rockefeller, Nelson, 98 Rose, 91 Rose M. Singer Center, 48 Ross, Robert, 29 Sam, 75, 77, 93, 150, 153 Sanctuary Model, 27 Schiraldi,Vincent, 26

217

schools: cuts to afterschool programs in New York City, 35; monitoring of school attendance, 47; the “school to prison” pipeline, 34, 192n3; suspensions from school, 34, 78, 198–99n36 self-­control/self-­discipline/self-­ governance, 12, 150–54; “diachronic” self-­control, 152; individual self-­ control, 10–11; and the need for structure within treatment facilities, 152–53; self-­control theory, 105. See also Skippy, mastering of self-­control by Shyla, 66–67, 71, 81, 90; admittance of into Youthful Offender treatment, 64–65, 65–66; banning of from public housing projects, 64; frustration of with her inability to change, 86–87; marijuana use of, 86; and the possibility of “relapse,” 85–86; sentencing of, 85 Silva, Jennifer, 68 Skippy, 75–76, 81, 156; mastering of self-­ control by, 150, 151–52; at McClary residential treatment facility, 150–51 Slam, 44–45, 46, 70, 107–8, 147; aspirations of, 72; categorization of as “noncompliant,” 45; frustration of, 69; placement of in a juvenile facility, 44, 48; psychiatric evaluation of, 45, 48 slavery, comparisons of with child welfare interventions, 186n26 Smith, David, 21 Smitty, 46 “social invisibility,” 96 socialization, 58, 105, 125, 154 social neglect, of young people, 2–3, 4 social networking, 208n3 “social validity,” 96 Spitzer, Eliot, 24 Spofford, 26 Steward, Mark, 209n15 Structured Learning Techniques (SLT), 114 Summer Youth Employment Program, 35

218

Index

SUNY Board of Trustees, 66 “system,” the, 198nn27–28; fluidity between systems, 75–76; and people-­ changing institutions, 75–81; as a “set up” for failure in life, 93, 94 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, 4 Terrell, 89–90, 95 thinking errors, 115; “thinking errors” curricula, 116, 118 Thompson, Darryl, 24 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 15 Tony, 46, 65, 93, 153; anxiety of concerning the future, 155 Tory, 53, 67, 82, 155–56; decision of to “do good” and be “a man,” 134–35; on the inability to have a choice in court and life decisions being made for him by others, 95–96; struggle of in complying with treatment, 135–36 Twitter, and the monitoring of young people by prosecutors and police, 47 Tyler, Tom, 97 Tyron juvenile facility, deaths at, 24, 188n73 unemployment, of young people, 5; in New York City, 5, 197n10 ungovernability/the “ungovernable,” 12, 33, 34, 39, 128–29, 161–63; governing the “ungovernable,” 7, 9, 59–60

United States, popularity of individual responsibility in, 9 U.S. Department of Justice, 25, 161, 169 Vera Institute of Justice, 30 Victoria, 91, 144–45 vocational skills training, 72–73 War on Drugs, 36 Washington, D.C., juvenile justice system in, 7; transformation of, 26 Western House of Refuge, 14–15 Willis, Paul, 68 worth/worthiness, 9, 33, 39; adult assessments concerning the worth and virtue of teenagers, 35–36; among teenage girls, 39–40; community-­ based assessment of worth, 46–48; correlation between unworthiness and a transformation in one’s self-­ identification, 51; and expressions of “badness,” 49, 51, 53–54; inside the court system, 42–46, 194n32; inside jail and residential facilities, 48–58; and the need among young people to be seen and heard, 54 Young, Jock, 193n26 Youth Division Aides (YDAs), 74, 98, 117, 147 Youthful Offender treatment program, 64–65, 65–66; adjudication of, 68

About th e Auth or

Alexandra Cox is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Essex in England and was previously an assistant professor of sociology at SUNY New Paltz. She was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow, and a Research Scholar in Law at Yale University Law School’s Justice Collaboratory. She has also worked as a sentencing mitigation specialist in New York State and at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and Drug Policy Alliance. She has served on the boards of the New York State Defenders Association and Drama Club (which provides theater programming for teenagers in prison).

Available titles in the Critical Issues in Crime and Society series: Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe, Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C Laura S. Abrams and Diane J. Terry, Everyday Desistance: The Transition to Adulthood among Formerly Incarcerated Youth Tammy L. Anderson, ed., Neither Villain nor Victim: Empowerment and Agency among Women Substance Abusers Miriam Boeri, Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women Scott A. Bonn, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds., Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, Johannes Huessy, The Methamphetamine Industry in America: Transnational Cartels and Local Entrepreneurs Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic, Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements Alexandra Cox, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz, Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson, Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict Jamie J. Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth Luis A. Fernandez, Policing Dissent: Social Control and the Anti-Globalization Movement Mike King, When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland Timothy R. Lauger, Real Gangstas: Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment Margaret Leigey, The Forgotten Men: Serving a Life without Parole Sentence Andrea Leverentz, The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance Clara S. Lewis, Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes Michael J. Lynch, Big Prisons, Big Dreams: Crime and the Failure of America’s Penal System Liam Martin, The Social Logic of Recidivism: Cultural Capital from Prisons to the Streets Allison McKim, Addicted to Rehab: Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer, eds., State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government

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