Compassionate Confinement
Compassionate Confinement
A Year in the Life of Unit C
Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015 Society for Social Work and Research Outstanding Social Work Book Award
To date, knowledge of the everyday world of the juvenile correction institution has been extremely sparse. Compassionate Confinement brings to light the challenges and complexities inherent in the U.S. system of juvenile corrections. Building on over a year of field work at a boys’ residential facility, Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe provide a context for contemporary institutions and highlight some of the system’s most troubling tensions.
This ethnographic text utilizes narratives, observations, and case examples to illustrate the strain between treatment and correctional paradigms and the mixed messages regarding gender identity and masculinity that the youths are expected to navigate. Within this context, the authors use the boys’ stories to show various and unexpected pathways toward behavior change. While some residents clearly seized opportunities for self-transformation, others manipulated their way toward release, and faced substantial challenges when they returned home.
Compassionate Confinement concludes with recommendations for rehabilitating this notoriously troubled system in light of the experiences of its most vulnerable stakeholders.
This is an incisive contribution to complicating juvenile crime, incarceration, and rehabilitation discussion. The authors locate several teenagers, inside and outside the juvenile facilities where they are confined, and show how they adapt one setting to the other with a hybrid of promising and troubling results.
This study takes us inside the lives of troubled youth that the juvenile court was designed to rescue; it is a must-read for those seeking a humane and effective juvenile corrections system.
LAURA S. ABRAMS is an associate professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and has written over forty scholarly articles and book chapters concerning youth identity, juvenile corrections, and reentry.
BEN ANDERSON-NATHE is an associate professor and program director of Child and Family Studies at Portland State University. He is the author of Youth Workers, Stuckness, and the Myth of Supercompetence and coeditor of Child & Youth Services.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. History and Current Tensions in Juvenile Corrections
2. The Setting
3. Mixed Messages: “Therapy Speak” in a Correctional Milieu
4. “Take It Like a Man”: Masculinities, Treatment, and Crime
5. “Jumping through Hoops”: Identity, Self-Preservation, and Change
6. On the Outs
7. Rehabilitating Rehabilitation: What We Learned from Unit C
Appendix
References
Index
Everyday Desistance
The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth
By Laura S. Abrams and Diane Terry; Foreword by Michelle Inderbitzin
