Everyday Desistance

In Everyday Desistance, Laura Abrams and Diane J. Terry examine the lives of young people who spent considerable time in and out of correctional institutions as adolescents. These formerly incarcerated youth often struggle with the onset of adult responsibilities at a much earlier age than their more privileged counterparts. In the context of urban Los Angeles, with a large-scale gang culture and diminished employment prospects, further involvement in crime appears almost inevitable. Yet, as Abrams and Terry point out, these formerly imprisoned youth are often quite resilient and can be successful at creating lives for themselves after months or even years of living in institutions run by the juvenile justice system. This book narrates the day-to-day experiences of these young men and women, focusing on their attempts to surmount the challenges of adulthood, resisting a return to criminal activity, and formulating long-term goals for a secure adult future.

This book gives voice to justice-involved Canadian youth and young adults by sharing their views on their journey towards desistance from crime and social and community (re)integration. Building on interviews with 140 justice-involved youth and young adults (aged 16 to 35), the book explores the challenges they faced while they were under the control of the justice system, the ways in which they navigated the obstacles they came up against, and the support they needed to overcome them. What and who they consider to be facilitators in their journeys is presented. The book also examines experiences of assisted desistance in different settings, such as incarceration, addiction services, and community supervision. What distinguishes this book is its focus on how justice-involved youth and young adults perceive their own experiences of desistance from crime and social and community (re)integration. An accessible and compelling read, Understanding Desistance from Crime and Social and Community (Re)Integration will be of interest to those engaged with desistance studies, rehabilitation, re-entry, juvenile and adult justice, and recovery from addiction.

Although early-life adversity can undermine healthy development, an evolutionary-developmental perspective implies that children growing up in harsh environments will develop intact, or even enhanced, skills for solving problems in high‐adversity contexts (i.e., 'hidden talents'). This Element situates the hidden talents model within a larger interdisciplinary framework. Summarizing theory and research on hidden talents, it proposes that stress-adapted skills represent a form of adaptive intelligence enabling individuals to function within the constraints of harsh environments. It discusses potential applications of this perspective to multiple sectors concerned with youth from harsh environments, including education, social services, and juvenile justice, and compares the hidden talents model with contemporary developmental resilience models. The hidden talents approach, it concludes, offers exciting directions for research on childhood adversity, with translational implications for leveraging stress-adapted skills to more effectively tailor education, jobs, and interventions to fit the needs of individuals from a diverse range of life circumstances.

This handbook brings together the knowledge on juvenile imprisonment to develop a global, synthesized view of the impact of imprisonment on children and young people. There are a growing number of scholars around the world who have conducted in-depth, qualitative research inside of youth prisons, and about young people incarcerated in adult prisons, and yet this research has never been synthesized or compiled. This book is organized around several core themes including: conditions of confinement, relationships in confinement, gender/sexuality and identity, perspectives on juvenile facility staff, reentry from youth prisons, young people’s experiences in adult prisons, and new models and perspectives on juvenile imprisonment. This handbook seeks to educate students, scholars, and policymakers about the role of incarceration in young people’s lives, from an empirically-informed, critical, and global perspective.

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes climate change from a criminological perspective. Four state-corporate crimes are examined: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission related to the mitigation of emissions; socially organized denial; and climate crimes of empire. The final chapter reviews policies to achieve climate justice.

Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.

Cultures of Resistance brings new insight to a key question: do government efforts to repress social movements effectively repress dissent, or do they spur mobilization? Through analyses of activists' experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers processes that shape how individuals understand the risks of participating in collective action. Reynolds-Stenson demonstrates how individual rationality is collectively constructed.

Frank Tannenbaum Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology​ Faculty Senate Award for Research from Loyola University New Orleans​ Out of the Red is one man’s pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices combined to deliver an unfortunate fate. After a childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. The Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.