In the context of talk about changing their lives, incarcerated young men and their supervisors talk about faith as a force for positive change. Given the historical and contemporary significance of religion as a locus of organizing and collective struggle, I argue that faith represents a potential asset in efforts to assist incarcerated young offenders pursue education, legal work, and sobriety or diminished substance (ab-)use. I draw on growing consensus among scholars of youth development that religious affiliation, and spirituality more generally, are protective and can promote other positive developmental outcomes. I also draw on discursive studies of substance abuse treatment and religious conversion to highlight the ways in which faith talk by and for youth offers avenues for institutionally sanctioned agency and recognized genres of biographical reconstruction. I conclude by suggesting that critically exploring matters of faith and belief in public institutions might usefully inform curricular and programmatic interventions to assist young people avoid recidivism, school failure and substance abuse, and perhaps, find or imagine satisfying and meaningful adult lives.
Most students released from detention never return to school. This study uses youth participatory action research and Social Justice Youth Development Theory to explore the experiences of those who do. Findings demonstrate that formerly incarcerated students want to return to school but face institutionalized resistance that amounts to racialized exclusion, violence, and state-sanctioned neglect at Chicago's school/prison nexus. We offer recommendations on how to “reverse” the school-to-prison pipeline by shifting educational and youth policies from surveillance and control to care, harm reduction, and greater youth and community oversight; shifts already arising out of student and educator activism, including through YPAR.
Transition to adulthood is increasingly complex, extended, and challenging. Working-class Brown and Black young men face very difficult transitions, as they are overrepresented in the justice system, poverty, foster care, special education, and among victims of violence. What effects do these developments have on young people's places in free democratic society and on the contours and possibilities of youth citizenship? Specifically, how do incarcerated young men view the breadth and limits of democratic citizenship? This article analyzes voices of 25 incarcerated youth and those working with them-recorded through interviews, autobiography, and taped youth club meetings. Findings reveal that incarcerated young men experience expanding responsibilities, notably, criminal penalties; contracting rights and protections; and institutions and systems oriented to their expected failure. Voices presented critique the role of the democratic state (via the justice, educational, and other youth-serving systems) in protecting democracy for marginalized youth and other incumbent citizens.
This article explores how incarcerated young men talked about the future. I use theories of cultural capital and methods informed by critical discourse analysis to analyze interviews with 15 young men and a series of essays about the future written by 10 different young men. It suggests new directions for analysis and programmatic use of future talk by and for incarcerated or similarly marginalized young people, specifically moving beyond wellestablished binaries of "making it" or "not making it," which characterize research into marginalized young people's aspirations, to focus instead on quieter but readily apparent future talk about "giving back" and "help[ing] others."
A persistent problem in educational policy and research concerns how social (dis)advantage is reproduced in free societies built on ideologies of equality, opportunity, and social mobility. In this article, the author examines narratives by and for incarcerated young men about how they "got caught up" in illegal activity and eventually incarcerated. Young men and adults supervising them are found to contest choice and culpability in terms of generational and spatial legacies of possibility and social (dis-) advantage. This work is significant for what it suggests about juvenile culpability-specifically, how young people and those around them contest "choice(s)" and, subsequently "blame," in narratives about childhood and young adulthood. The author argues that historical and geographic contexts frame universes of choices and developmental pathways that are always already present in young people's lives. In doing so, the author challenges reductive and privatized framings of youth development to suggest a more balanced and comprehensive approach to working with and educating young offenders.
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