Abstract
In Trapped in a Vice, Alexandra Cox shifts some of the common questions about juvenile justice and reform. She ends her first chapter, a history of the juvenile justice system in New York, by asking: What if those seemingly pressing questions—the tilt toward punishment or reform, large or small, community or institution—are irrelevant? What if the very questions themselves, or the binaries they represent, obscure a project of governing young people that needs to be fundamentally challenged? What if these persistent and pressing questions have actually promoted the perennial state of reform we are in? (p. 32)
These typical questions, Cox argues, are myopic and a distraction from the broader issues of governmentality that deem these youth irredeemable. She reminds us that what many reform-oriented people are calling for now is very similar to what reform-oriented people were calling for at key points in the past. What we need, she argues, is not to answer the question of what we should do to improve the system, but rather to ask “[w]hy do we keep on doing this the wrong way?” (p. 160). Cox’s reframing reminds the reader of the history and helps us to avoid the easier questions and conclusions.
To understand the experiences of young people in the juvenile justice system, Cox conducts interviews and observation among youth, their families, and workers at several residential juvenile facilities in New York and in the communities in which the young people live when not confined. The young people in Cox’s study grew up in the time of the War on Drugs, broken window policing, and welfare reform. Rather than explicitly racist, the policies were ostensibly race-neutral, and youth criminalization was linked to the “ability to demonstrate deference and self-control” (p. 36). While some of the youth did commit “bad” acts, their experiences in “the system” construct the youth as unworthy of support, ungovernable, and irredeemable. The effect is that both formal restrictions and informal responses cause young people to lower their expectations for their futures. They experience a lack of recognition about their potential for change, which make them more ambivalent about their ability to change.
There are somewhat surprising similarities between the views of the staff and the youth. Both engage, sometimes with a high level of self-awareness, in performing compliance. The staff were strategic and utilitarian in their interactions with the youth and with the rules of their own programs. Staff want the youth to comply and to be deferential to adults. They believe this will help the youth be successful, though compliance is more important than internalizing any lessons they learn. In fact, the staff think that at least some of their programming is “ridiculous” (p. 114) or “the next bullshit” (p. 115) and that “faking it” is an acceptable form of compliance. Some of this perspective reflects a constantly evolving set of best practices that staff are expected to implement, leading to confusion about which was which and a lack of understanding of what the model was or why they were expected to implement it. Staff also criticized the programming for being inappropriate for a secure correctional setting, highlighting the tension between care and control that we see in much of the penal system.
Youth, too, learn to perform in institutional settings, coming to understand the need for different performances for different ends in different institutions. For example, young people “become bad” at Rikers Island because it is expected. This performance is shaped by the structure of the institution and is a mode of survival for them. They act out for “juice” with staff, which is essentially a need for attention. For young people, “doing good” is not as simple as complying, but a way to adjust to the pains of imprisonment. One young man, Newz, said “see, sometimes you gotta fake the funk, you know what I’m sayin’? And, it happened.” Newz saw his behavior as somewhere between a performance and “real”, but he did believe it would help him succeed when he was released. Even official programming stages reflect the performativity of it; the honors stage, marked with green shoelaces, was labeled as a “Competent and Committed Performer” (p. 137). In contrast, youth who were seen as “institutionalized” were resistant, not “doing the program”, and dependent on confinement, reflecting simultaneously both resistance and submission. Those who openly resisted felt not doing so was succumbing to a racist, oppressive power structure.
Cox highlights the juvenile justice system as deeply embedded in the larger social structure. Formally, the Office of Children and Family Services in New York is a state agency responsible for both the child welfare system and residential juvenile facilities. Many of the youth in custody had previously received child welfare services. Not surprisingly, young people see the “system” as more far reaching than just the juvenile and criminal justice systems. For them, it represents all government agencies that were involved in their lives. For many of the young people, the crimes they committed were not as significant in their lives as the experiences before they were arrested; many of the young people were alienated and full of despair before they entered those facilities. Yet, the intervention into their lives suggested that their crimes were symbolic of broader flaws in their character, versus the systems that have failed them up until that point of arrest.
The New York juvenile justice system is complex, and it is difficult to make sense of the different institutions to which the youth may be sent. As a former caseworker and mitigation specialist for a public defender’s office, Cox has a deep familiarity with New York’s juvenile justice system. For readers who are less familiar, it is hard to keep track of the various institutions, categorizations, and how they fit together. This is illustrative in that it highlights the complexity of the juvenile and criminal justice systems, where youth might be sent to Rikers Island (a jail with adults), youth detention, or private residential juvenile facilities, each with their own cultures and consequences. While the youth learned the norms of their respective institutions, many did not fully understand their legal status or their rights. For example, a youthful offender designation meant that one misdemeanor and one felony could be dropped from their record, in recognition of youths’ lower culpability. Many did not understand this status, and believed that they had to report all court involvement and arrests. System actors added to this confusion. Still, as a reader, I wished for a chart or table to clarify both the different categorizations of youth and the different types of institutions to which they might be sent and why.
Trapped in a Vice is likely to be of interest to a number of audiences. Students and scholars of juvenile justice, the sociology of punishment, youth, and inequality will appreciate the deeply human stories of the youth trapped in this system. While Cox is highly critical of the system, she avoids easy categorizations, presenting all participants as multidimensional and often well intentioned. In this respect, many workers in criminal and juvenile justice systems would likely see themselves reflected in this work and appreciate the analysis. Policy makers would benefit from seeing the historical patterns of reform attempts, and to listen to Cox’s call for radical nonintervention, an idea proposed over 45 years ago by Edwin Schur.