Jamie J Fader,Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth

Abstract

Jamie J Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2013; 256 pp. (including index): 978081356074, $75.00 (cloth), $27.95 (pbk)

Jamie J Fader's Falling Back is a three year ethnographic study of young black and Latino males making the transition from a juvenile training school in rural Pennsylvania back to inner-city Philadelphia. The book's title – Falling Back – has two meanings – ‘going straight’ and staying out of trouble, and also ‘“falling back” into their old patterns of criminal activity’ (p. 4). The study examines how the youths experienced and interpreted their incarceration, how the institutional treatment did or did not prepare them to go straight after release, how they transitioned back to their communities and from adolescents to young adults, and what factors contributed to post-release success.

The book is organized in eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the youths whose lives Fader follows on re-entry and the context to which they return. Philadelphia is a hyper-segregated city (Massey and Denton, 1993), and these youths live in the de-industrialized urban core marked by failing schools, racial-ethnic tensions, high crime rates, aggressive policing, and a lack of jobs (Feld, 1999). Inner-city youths adapt to this dangerous environment by adopting the ‘code of the street’ to survive (Anderson, 2000). Chapter 2 examines the treatment program at Mountain Ridge Academy (MRA) to correct youths' ‘criminal thinking errors’ – embodied in their adherence to the ‘code of the street’. The ‘criminal personality theory’ assumes that youths freely and rationally choose to engage in crime. As part of Goffman's ‘status degradation ceremony’, rural white correctional officers stigmatize youths’ urban black identity and assault their street culture – their walk, language, mode of dress, and so on. ‘Blackness is criminalized and therapeutic parlance is used to disguise the racialized nature of the program of change’ (p. 14). I frame this review with a word about my own perspective. My career in juvenile justice began more than 40 years ago studying the youth training schools in Massachusetts before Jerome Miller closed them (Miller, 1998). Although the MRA program used a somewhat different ‘treatment’ vocabulary, Fader's descriptions were highly reminiscent of the training schools of the early 1970s that emphasized institutional adjustment, ignored structural causes of offending, and failed to prepare youth for the criminogenic environments to which they would return (Feld, 1977). As Fader observes, ‘The disconnect between what youths experience inside reform schools and the settings in which they must put their new skills and achievements into practice contributes to a high rate of failure on the outside’ (p. 19). As youths recognize and correct their ‘thinking errors’, they progress through a series of levels with increasing privileges – an institutional adjustment strategy that I observed four decades ago (Feld, 1977) and with antecedents in the Houses of Refuge in the mid-19th century. Chapter 3 relies on interviews with youths to assess their struggle to retain their cultural identity while adjusting to the institution's requirements to secure release. The young men's ‘mastery of the street code and the pride generated by enduring poverty and violence-stricken neighborhoods’ (p. 56) created a double-bind because street code behavior evidenced ‘criminal thinking errors’, whereas institutional release required adopting behavior that would be dangerous or demeaning in an urban setting. Fader's descriptions of youths’ strategy of ‘fake it to make it’ reminded me of the youths I observed rehearsing their performance with each other before appearing before the parole release board (Feld, 1977). Chapter 4 describes youths’ adjustments and adaptations during the immediate post-release return to their communities. Although youths returned home with expectations for success, they ‘encountered a stunning disjuncture between plans and reality’ (p. 83). Within three years of the 15 youths’ release, one was dead, half had been reincarcerated, several more were on the run, and only two (14 per cent) had avoided rearrest (p. 97). Part of the transition to adulthood is economic self-sufficiency and Chapter 5 examines youths’ experiences in the job market. Youth from hyper-segregated neighborhoods feel vulnerable in ‘white’ spaces where most of the jobs are and sometimes fortify themselves by getting high and searching for work with groups of peers – both counterproductive strategies. Fader summarizes and then documents the myriad barriers to youth employment:

Statistical discrimination; a lack of human capital, including ‘hard’ skills such as computer literacy and ‘soft,’ or ‘people’ skills; a spatial mismatch between job seekers and available jobs; employee drug testing; and criminal background checks all combine to systematically disadvantage urban job seekers. (p. 108)

By contrast, youths reared in the ‘code of the street’ garner greater respect and income from drug dealing or ‘hustling’ than from sporadic, low paying legitimate work. Assuming the responsibilities of a parent is another marker of adulthood and Chapter 6 describes the young men's experiences as fathers. Six of the teenagers had fathered children prior to their incarceration and another six impregnated women after their release. As in Wilson's (1987) description of the ‘truly disadvantaged’ and the ‘marriageable pool’, Fader reports that ‘the young men's marginal position in the labor market, coupled with their ambivalence about romantic commitments with their babies’ mothers, undermined their ability to form stable families' (p. 128). The young men's infidelity, lack of resources, unstable employment, criminal records, and ever-present danger of return to prison made their female partners reluctant to depend on them. Chapter 7 describes the two young men who successfully became stable, law-abiding adults and the factors that distinguished them from the vast majority who failed. Both youths had strong social bonds, avoided the ‘street culture’ that could pull them under, adopted a job-quest strategy that enabled them to overcome the myriad obstacles, and created law-abiding identities. Chapter 8 describes the experience of five young men returning to Mountain Ridge a year after release for a ‘graduation ceremony’. At the ceremony, the young men presented fictional versions of ‘doing good’ despite their precarious grip on success, and affirmed for staff the value of their efforts. Fader concludes the book with a heartbreaking observation made by a young man who spoke to her class who ‘doesn't see any possibility of holding down a steady job with a living wage, providing regular financial support to his family, or being able to survive without resorting to the occasional hustle’ (p. 208).

That observation speaks to the larger structural features young black men confront in hyper-segregated neighborhoods, who are reared in the culture of the street, drop out of failed schools, and lack access to labor markets. The MRA program attributed their criminal behavior to their own bad choices, and conveyed the message that they were criminals and would remain that way. Those negative messages reinforce those that young black men receive from other social institutions – schools, employers, the media, police, and white citizens – and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy of negative outcomes. Treating delinquency as the result of ‘bad choices’ rather than as the outcome of structural conditions – endemic unemployment, aggressive policing, hyper-segregation, and cultural isolation, and lack of social capital and connections to the mainstream – constitutes another version of ‘blaming the victim’. Fader ends with a series of sensible policy prescriptions – avoid incarcerating youth to the greatest extent possible, provide small therapeutic facilities close to their communities, create a variety of community supports and graduation incentive programs for at-risk youths, and the like: ‘A century ago Progressive reformers had to choose between initiating social structural reforms that would ameliorate inequality and criminogenic forces or ministering to the individuals damaged by those adverse social conditions’ (Feld, 1999: 296). We still face the same choice between rehabilitating ‘damaged’ individuals through the juvenile justice system or initiating fundamental social structural changes. Fader's research reconfirms that the ‘the juvenile justice system is ill equipped to restructure the labor market to create better jobs, allow young people the financial freedom to invest in higher education, dismantle racial discrimination or residential segregation, or fix families struggling with poverty or addition’ (p. 101), and instead recasts youths’ criminality as a matter of individual deficits and poor decision making.

Falling Back makes a unique contribution to sociological understandings of the transitions to adulthood, urban inequality, prisoner reentry, and desistance from offending. It is well written and free of jargon. Fader relies on extensive interviews, field notes, participant observation, youths’ journals, and their recorded self-reflections to create a compelling narrative that brings life to the book and lets her subjects speak for themselves. She tells their stories with a sensitivity that highlights the desperate plight of black males in the urban underclass. The book will be helpful for undergraduate and graduate students of juvenile justice as well as academics, policy makers, politicians, and people committed to providing a more promising future for young people.

Jamie J Fader,Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth

Abstract

Jamie J Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2013; 256 pp. (including index): 978081356074, $75.00 (cloth), $27.95 (pbk)

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