Abstract
A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America begins with a compelling puzzle. Despite growing inequality, nearly “two-thirds of Americans believe that it is possible to be born poor, work hard, and end up rich” (p. 2). At the same time, a disproportionately large fraction of young men of color are involved in the juvenile justice system, a “bureaucratic system that operates according to an instrumental-rational logic” (p. 3). In A Dream Denied, Michaela Soyer investigates “how the narrative of the ‘American Dream’” (p. 2) operates in the lives of 23 young men involved in the juvenile justice systems of Boston and Chicago. How does the “American Dream,” or the idea that “hard work begets success” (p. 2), frame expectations and opportunities? How do young men in the juvenile justice system understand and enact their lives in such a highly institutionalized setting? How do juvenile justice workers employ myths of meritocracy to cope with “their own failure to make a difference” (p. 10)?
Throughout A Dream Denied, Soyer engages important and timely questions that bridge contemporary social issues and long-standing theoretical ideas. In Chapter One, Soyer questions how young men, entrapped in a highly bureaucratic organization like the juvenile justice system, express agency. In Chapter Two, she considers how different institutional structures of the juvenile justice systems of Chicago and Boston may shape punishment and rehabilitation. Chapters Three, Four, Five, and Six provide valuable empirical evidence to illustrate different ways in which young men, their caregivers, and juvenile justice workers understand and enact their lives, relationships, and responsibilities. When and under what circumstances is desistance from crime—or contact with the criminal justice system—aspirational or achievable? Who is responsible for a young man’s successes (or failures) in desisting from crime or eluding getting caught? How can we reconcile the objectives of a juvenile justice system that aims to both punish and rehabilitate young men who may be both victims and perpetrators of crime?
Soyer uses data gathered through interviews and observations to examine how young men embody and engage the American Dream in their interactions with and beyond the juvenile justice system. The imagery is a powerful frame throughout the book. She describes, in detail, the lives of the young men she encounters who face a wide range of challenges: young men who have never been taught to read or write; young men who consistently face housing insecurity and instability; young men who are routinely exposed to crime, violence, victimization, and trauma (sometimes of their own making). Thus it may be no surprise that for some of the young men she interviews, “juvenile justice workers are often the only people providing a modicum of help” (p. 46).
Soyer is careful to point out that the juvenile justice systems in both Chicago and Boston are not entirely benign caregivers for the youth in their custody. Relationships between teenagers involved in the juvenile justice system and caseworkers, social workers, and other juvenile justice workers are complex, often conflictual, and rarely long-lasting. In Chapter Five, she concludes: “The relationships between juvenile justice professionals and teenagers . . . re-created the structural and racial inequalities in which the youths had been socialized from birth” (p. 89).
Much of the book is devoted to considering how young men conceptualize and enact desistance and recidivism after having contact with the juvenile justice system. Although many young men aspire to desist from crime and extract themselves from the criminal justice system, the odds are stacked against them, and finding a path free from any criminal justice contact is fraught with challenges and detours. Soyer recounts instances of young men making the transition to adulthood marked, perhaps most notably, by the move from the juvenile system to the adult criminal justice system.
Soyer does a nice job articulating some of the nuanced opportunities and constraints faced by the young men she comes to know throughout her four-year study, but she gives short shrift to the structural barriers faced by them—and millions of other young people—living in the richest nation in the world. The criminal justice system is a dominant social institution in the lives of African American and Latino men, their families, and their communities. Although the national crime rate has been on the decline for decades, prisons and jails are still at capacity in many jurisdictions. And other forms of criminal justice contact and supervision are routine in the lives of many young disadvantaged people of color. Soyer devotes little attention to how race, class, and geographic inequalities in surveillance, policing, and prosecution fuel inequalities in criminal justice contact and disproportionately disadvantage young men of color. Failing schools, few job opportunities, and a remarkably sparse social safety net all contribute to the dominance of the justice system in the lives of young men living in America’s most disadvantaged communities.
Soyer is remarkably self-reflective in the core chapters of the book as well as in the methodological appendix. Her own narrative, woven throughout the book, clearly shapes her research questions and experiences. It also enables her to levy a damning critique of a system where children are told stories of rehabilitation, redemption, and hard-won success and many come to believethem although they have few opportunities—and many obstacles—to achieving them. There is a subtle brilliance about A Dream Denied that makes me look forward to Soyer’s next book.