Abstract
The United States has reached an unprecedented level of social inequality as decades of neoliberal policies have eroded the social safety net and its citizens struggle to recover from the economic shock of the recent recession. Thus, there is perhaps no more apt time to critically examine the American Dream as a cultural theme that shapes the lives and narratives of young people, the project of Michaela Soyer’s new book, A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America. In it, she draws on over 300 interviews with 24 young men of color in the juvenile justice systems in Chicago and Boston. By following system-involved youth prospectively as they move through these systems, Soyer shows the reader how the institutional discourse of the modern juvenile justice system encourages youth to embrace the individualistic tropes of the American Dream, while failing to provide consistent support to help youth achieve it.
In contrast to previous ethnographic studies of the institutional logics and daily practices of the juvenile justice system that employ a program or policy perspective, Soyer views it as one setting (among many, ostensibly) whereby the marginalization of youth of color is reinforced and disguised through institutional efforts to prop up the Horatio Alger myth. Soyer’s interest in the subject is as a social theorist, as one can see through her references to Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social reproduction and Foucault’s notion of agentic struggle. Her application of these theories to the problem of reentry and recidivism of incarcerated youth leads to the book’s most significant contribution, which is the development of a complex portrait of agency as played out in young men’s narratives of change produced by the system and desistance from offending.
One of the most profound findings of Soyer’s book is how desperately these young people want to make a change in their lives—so desperately, they are ready to identify even a short stint in detention as what Giordano and colleagues (2002) would call a “hook for change”. Here, Soyer advances the concept of imagined desistance, which, spurred by a period of incarceration, “encapsulated their confidence in an American meritocracy and their own ability to turn their lives around” (p. 8). Of course, this sets them up for failure when the institutional experience does nothing to address their many structural limitations and cannot offer them a “nondeviant identity built on positive experiences of an alternative self” (p. 8).
Soyer shows how service delivery in the juvenile justice systems in Boston and Chicago led to different strategies for desistance. Boston’s tightly coupled organization leaves youth with few opportunities to express and practice autonomy. When they do, it often translates to violation, rather than desistance. When Boston youth engage in desistance, however, it is often automatic desistance, or obedience to the authority and discipline imposed by the system. Possibly the most heartbreaking finding in the book is that some youth welcome system control in the form of electronic monitoring. Not trusting themselves with freedom, they use ankle bracelets as a way of avoiding negative peer influence and restricting their activities. They cannot imagine staying out of trouble without such formal measures in place and are more comfortable being controlled than being free. One can hardly imagine a less fruitful developmental pathway to healthy adulthood.
In Chicago, a more loosely organized set of services leads some youth to develop creative desistance, which “goes beyond the exercise of self-control in the face of power structures […] means connection rather than disconnection from the social environment, and […] is the expression of human autonomy” (p. 105). Respondents in Soyer’s study employing creative desistance often engaged in what DeLuca et al. (2016: 8) call identity projects, “a consuming, defining passion”, such as art, music, or sports. It should be noted that Chicago’s system agents did not consciously engage in autonomy-building but were merely overwhelmed by the sheer number of families in the system and multitudinous needs. In the case of Damon, for example, we see the limits of creative desistance in the face of severe or sudden structural barriers, such as homelessness.
Soyer begins her book by arguing that “managing the youths’ need to make autonomous decisions is one of the most important challenges facing contemporary juvenile justice in the United States” (p. 9). Yet, the policy maker or practitioner who turns to this book for insight might be disappointed in the author’s limited treatment of solutions. Soyer instead presents two contradictory versions of the juvenile justice system. One allows youth to slip through the cracks, yet in its negligence, encourages autonomy and creative desistance. The other tightly supervises, providing instrumental support such as housing and food, while training young people to be subjects of the state. We also get a sense from some of the case studies that local non-profit agencies are an important part of the story, yet a systematic assessment of their role is absent. Soyer calls for—as have many before her—a balance between support and control and better relationships with juvenile justice workers. The reader is left without any models for systems that have successfully accomplished this balance or ideas for how to proceed. This is especially disappointing, given the amenability of the juvenile justice system—compared to its adult counterpart—to reform in the last 15 years.
As this was a theoretical project from the start, however, we might expect a more coherent conceptual model of why young people are so likely to fail after involvement in the system. When respondents appear to suddenly depart from a trajectory toward desistance, explanations are often thin and dissatisfying. At various points, offending is characterized as “habit”, the result of routine activities, excitement and status-driven, the result of the labeling, aging out of crime, being “drawn to the streets”, lacking self-control, or the result of mental health problems. To take desistance seriously, there needs to be a coherent theory about what causes crime: is it the product of rational choice and therefore deterrable; is it normal and expected for teenagers; or is it the result of some pathology and therefore treatable? Furthermore, the dichotomy between structure and agency leaves out culture, including the role of masculinity construction in desistance, recidivism, and the production of the American Dream.
Yet the connection of the American Dream mythology to institutions of change is a worthy contribution, and Soyer’s critical gaze as a result of having grown up in Germany is unique. Although the book may not provide us with many answers, it does leave us with important questions, such as, how much agency should we encourage young people in the juvenile justice system to embrace? How do we strike a balance between encouragement to achieve their dreams and realistic aspirations, given their limited human, social, and cultural capital? How much agency and empowerment is the right amount to help them overcome structural obstacles without leading them to internalize every failure? These are important questions with which all individuals involved in youth-serving institutions and agencies should wrestle.