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.
At a time when America's court system increasingly tries juvenile offenders as adults, Michael Corriero draws directly from his experience as the founding judge of a special juvenile court to propose a new approach to dealing with youthful offenders.
Since 1992, Judge Corriero has presided over the Manhattan Youth Part, a New York City court specifically designed to discipline teenage offenders. Its guiding principles, clearly laid out in this book, are that children are developmentally different from adults and that a judge can be a formidable force in shaping the lives of children who appear in court.
Judging Children as Children makes a compelling argument for a better system of justice that recognizes the mental, emotional, and physical abilities of young people and provides them with an opportunity to be rehabilitated as productive members of society instead of being locked up in prisons.
Completing Elmer H. Johnson’s impressive three-volume examination of corrections in Japan, Linking Community and Corrections in Japan (written with the assistance of Carol H. Johnson) focuses on the Rehabilitation Bureau’s responsibilities regarding probation, parole, and aftercare as well as the Correction Bureau’s role in Japan’s version of community-oriented corrections. Johnson first outlines the tasks of the Rehabilitation Bureau, then turns to historical and contemporary views of community and corrections. In discussions of the probation and parole system for both adults and juveniles, he describes in detail the Japanese version of supervision and the return of prisoners to the community. One strength of this study is Johnson’s impartiality. As an investigator, he functions as a "friend of the court," an adviser who is free to conduct an objective pursuit of the fundamental strengths and shortcomings of the Japanese prison system. He also follows the Foucauldian dictum: "With the prisons there would be no sense of limiting oneself to discourses about prisons; just as important are the discourses which arise within the prison, the decisions and regulations which are among its constituent elements, its means of functioning, along with its strategies."
What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.
The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.
In Youth, Crime, and Justice, Clayton A. Hartjen provides a broad overview of juvenile delinquency: how it manifests itself around the world and how societies respond to misconduct among their children. Taking a global, rather than country-specific approach, chapters focus on topics that range from juvenile laws and the correction of child offenders to the abuse, exploitation, and victimization of young people. Hartjen includes specific examples from the United States, Australia, Spain, Switzerland, New Zealand, Japan, India, Egypt, and elsewhere as he sorts through the various definitions of “delinquent” and explores the differences in behavior that contribute to these classifications. Most importantly, his in-depth and comparative look at judicial systems worldwide raises questions about how young offenders should be “corrected” and how much fault can be laid on misbehaving youths acting out against the very societies that produced them.
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