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Chapter 13 “You can take me outta the ’hood, but you can’t take the ’hood outta me”: Youth Incarceration and Reentry Jamie J. Fader Each year, over 100,000 young offenders are incarcerated in facilities designed to reform them and end their criminal careers (Sickmund, Sladky, and Kang 2004). These institutions employ a wide variety of strategies to “rehabilitate” their young targets, but all are based on the common assumption that children and youth are especially malleable and can be transformed through resocialization. Despite widespread belief among policymakers that any treatment is better than none, substantial empirical evidence suggests that many, or even most, forms of intervention have little measurable effect. Worse yet, they may have unintended negative consequences, particularly for the disadvantaged (McCord 2003; Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, and Finckenauer 2000; Sampson and Laub 1997). The experiences of young people in the juvenile justice system vary widely. Even among those who are placed in a single facility under similar conditions, outcomes are disparate: some are rearrested soon after release; some continue to offend but are not brought to the attention of authorities; some appear to have made a complete turnaround as a result of their time away from home; and some seem simply to have outgrown offending. Many staff people say that they are unable to predict who will succeed and who will fail after returning home based on their behavior inside the institution. Poverty, lack of opportunities, and other community-level or societal factors seem as important in shaping outcomes as individuals’ responses to treatment programs. Among young black men who occupy a marginal position in mainstream social institutions such as schools and workplaces, formerly incarcerated youth may desist from criminal behavior—ceasing criminal activities or substantially reducing their frequency and severity—but continue to struggle 13Anderson_Ch13 198-217.qxd 2/20/08 12:24 PM Page 198 on a daily basis with maintaining a safe place to live, finding stable employment , and pursuing an education and job training. When using a broad definition of reintegration, distinguishing between “success” and “failure” becomes increasingly problematic. Recently, research on youths returning from juvenile facilities has identified structural barriers to successful reintegration and offered suggestions for providing developmentally appropriate transitional services to adolescents (Altschuler and Brash 2004; Snyder 2004). The small but growing literature on the topic of reentry for incarcerated youth tends to treat community reintegration as independent from youths’ institutional experience, however. Furthermore, just as community reentry studies have neglected programmatic experiences, program evaluations have generally failed to consider the cultural context in which young people must put these interventions to work. Applying both an institutional and a cultural lens to the study of reentry allows for a critical examination of the underlying assumptions behind efforts to rehabilitate young offenders. This perspective invokes a debate that exists both in the scholarly literature and in the practice of juvenile corrections about the nature and source of change. Specifically , is a cognitive transformation a necessary or sufficient condition for desistance to occur, as Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph (2002) suggest? Or, as Laub and Sampson (2001, 2003) argue, does desistance, which they define as the process that leads a person to cease offending, occur “by default”? If change is more than skin deep, how must urban youth meet the performative requirements set by facilities which demand behavioral evidence of a cognitive transformation? By attending to the contextual dynamics of reentry, looking backward at the institutional experience and forward to the cultural exigencies of the street, we can begin to meet Maruna’s call to explore how and why desistance occurs—or fails to occur (2001, 27). Scholarly analyses of desistance have presented somewhat paradoxical findings regarding the role of incarceration in “going straight.” Aggregate analyses suggest that incarceration is linked to unstable employment , higher rates of re-offending, and increasing social inequality, particularly among black males (Laub and Sampson 2003; Sampson and Laub 1997; Western, Kling, and Weiman 2001; Holzer, Raphael, and Stoll 2004). Research that examines the effects of incarceration at the individual level has more mixed results. For some individuals, incarceration provides a “time out” to think about their behavior and their plans for the future (Anderson 2001; Edin, Nelson, and Paranal 2004). Some young men even identify incarceration, particularly in conjunction with experiences such as being in the military or fatherhood, as a turning point in their criminal careers (Laub and Sampson 2003). For others, Youth Incarceration and Reentry 199 13Anderson_Ch13 198-217.qxd 2/20/08 12:24...

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