Abstract
Laura S Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe, Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2012; 188 pp. (including index): 9780813554129, $62.10 (cloth), $23.95 (pbk)
I was delighted to be asked to review Compassionate Confinement by Laura Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe. I had already read several publications that originated from their ethnographic project (Abrams and Aguilar, 2005; Abrams and Hyun, 2009; Abrams et al., 2005, 2008) and was eager to see how they summarily analyzed and presented their research in this work. The book provides a rich, contextualized view of the everyday treatment of many youthful offenders in the justice system: extended confinement provided in concert with compassionate care.
Quality evidence of what works to reduce recidivism among adjudicated adolescents is limited. Family treatment and cognitive-behavioral approaches have been the most extensively researched and, with limited data about real-world implementation of these treatment strategies within juvenile correctional settings, they show the most promise. A meta-analysis of varied treatments for youth suggests that it is not the intervention itself but the quality of program provider, treatment fidelity, and risk level of offender that predicts desistance from crime (Latimer, 2001; Lipsey, 2009). As Abrams and Anderson-Nathe so aptly describe, administrators, staff members, and even youth themselves also wonder whether positive treatment effects are possible. The authors explore whether recidivism can be reduced when young men are remanded to a residential treatment program, one fraught with common treatment challenges, only to be returned to the same family, peer group, school, and neighborhood systems from which they came. The answer is yes, perhaps.
The authors spent 16 months in the field collecting data about one residential treatment program. They observed the staff–resident interactions and monitored the youths' treatment progress, the latter primarily through intensive interviews with 12 of the residents. As readers we meet the youth and follow their progress from entry into the facility to exit from the program as they return to the community. Some of the young men are resistant to treatment and some fully embrace the opportunity to turn their lives around. All, in the period after release from the program, find it extraordinarily challenging to stay out of trouble.
For those readers who work with at risk youth, the depiction of the young men and the observations made about each will ring true to life. The authors' portrayal of the difficulty of providing a therapeutic environment, forming trusting relationships, and, at the same time, running a highly structured, supervisory program, will be familiar to those who work in the system. The title of the text highlights this challenging balancing act. Staff members of residential programs for youthful offenders are expected to provide both compassionate care and ever-present correction and control.
Readers interested in the history, current status of, and potential for rehabilitation in the juvenile justice system will find a thorough synopsis of these issues in the first chapter (‘History and current tensions in juvenile corrections’) and the last (‘Rehabilitating rehabilitation’). Researchers, educators, and practitioners will gain insight into the treatment challenges related to talk versus milieu therapy (Chapter 3), institutional and interpersonal misogyny and hegemonic masculinity (Chapter 4), and resistance to change discourses (Chapter 5) in juvenile corrections. Those interested in reentry policies and practices will find Chapter 6 particularly helpful. I recommend the text for students of research methods, who would most benefit from the appendix in which the study methodology is thoroughly illustrated.
It is the data-based chapters that provide the most insight into the experiences associated with compassionate confinement of youth. In Chapter 3, the authors highlight their observations of the conflicting messages adult staff persons send to the young people in their care. The residents are required to progress through a level system, as is the case in many institutional programs for teens. One requirement of progression is documenting, in essay and public confession, the family problems, peer involvement, distorted thinking, and/or emotional difficulties that have led to the youth's criminal behavior. For some residents, the cathartic process of sharing painful events was helpful; for others, it was clearly a requirement they found inappropriate to their situation or too difficult to process with other residents and staff members. In Chapter 5, the authors describe a common response to the demand for revelation and intimate disclosure; some of the study participants admitted to fabricating personal or family problems in order to tell a story the staff might find to be worthy and indicative of the sharing they required.
I found the data presented in Chapter 4 to be the most significant contribution to the literature about youthful offenders' rehabilitation. The hierarchy exhibited by youth and, in many ways, reinforced by staff, based on dominant views of masculinity such as athletic talent, sexual prowess, or aggressiveness, and the misogynistic views the young men possessed were all indicative of the hegemonic masculine attitudes, values, and practices that influenced youth offending as well as youth participation in treatment. These restrictive views of masculinity arose from (and promoted) sexism and homophobia. An important consideration that I have found in my own research is the association between hyper-masculine thoughts and behaviors and adolescent parenting. A couple of the youth in this study were teen fathers and fatherhood seemed to be both an added stressor that negatively impacted the return to the community and a potential motivator for change.
The final chapter in which the authors describe their research findings, Chapter 6, highlights the challenges of reentry. We learn that the youth most resistant to change as well those who embraced the opportunity for change were not rearrested during the study period. Three of the five residents who were ambivalent about participation in treatment returned to lives of crime and were either unable to be located or were rearrested and again incarcerated. At the end of the 16-month research project, the authors were cautiously hopeful about those youth who had remained in the community. The reader grows to care about the study participants and is rooting for their success as well. The best qualitative inquiry offers engaging narratives, rich observations, and descriptive depictions of human experiences as seen through multiple interpretive lenses. Abrams and Anderson-Nathe's work nicely describes one such rigorous study.