Alexandra Cox

Doing the programme or doing me? The pains of youth imprisonment:

This article draws on research about young peoples responses to being governed in secure residential facilities. It focuses on young peoples expressions of agency as they ‘do programme’ in these facilities. It points to the ways that young peoples language of choice and responsibility reflects their performances of ‘programme’ as they manage complicated emotions about change and growth. It is argued that there are various ‘splits’ that exist between official notions of programme compliance and those embodied and understood by young people. The article illuminates some of the more invisible pains experienced by young people in custody by revealing the intractability of the discourses of self-control in these young peoples lives.

New visions of social control? Young people's perceptions of community penalties

This article engages with youth perspectives on community penalties, examining the significance of their sense of voicelessness and the indeterminacy of these interventions. The article examines young peoples understandings of social inequality and racism, looking beyond issues of procedural fairness, legitimacy, and compliance to questions about young peoples ability to accommodate and challenge injustices and ultimately escape the net of punishment they find themselves in.

Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People

Trapped in a Vice explores the consequences of a juvenile justice system that is aimed at promoting change in the lives of young people, yet ultimately relies upon tools and strategies that enmesh them in a system that they struggle to move beyond. The system, rather than the crimes themselves, is the vice. Trapped in a Vice explores the lives of the young people and adults in the criminal justice system, revealing the ways that they struggle to manage the expectations of that system; these stories from the ground level of the justice system demonstrate the complex exchange of policy and practice.

Fresh air funds and functional families: The enduring politics of race, family and place in juvenile justice reform

This article examines the enduring ways that racial politics are masked by discourses of place and family in the history of juvenile justice in the USA. The tropes of place and family have been invoked since the inception of the USA’s juvenile justice system and have influenced the processes of policing, removal, and return, even as the latest incarnation of reforms focus on building juvenile justice facilities and alternatives to incarceration within urban areas. By pointing to recent manifestations of this rhetoric in New York, the article identifies the thread that links these claims together: the desire by social control agents for submission by the primarily impoverished and young people of color who defy legal authority.

Juvenile Facility Staff Contestations of Change

This article explores juvenile facility frontline staff members’ contestations of change of custodial practices aimed at reducing restraints, introducing trauma-informed practices, and downsizing juvenile facilities. Drawing from qualitative research about frontline staff members in a US state undergoing reform, the article points to the ways that the reforms challenge staff members’ investments in behavioral control practices as a vehicle for achieving order and control in their everyday lives as workers. It also points to shifts in the broader political economy on punishment at the local, facility level, and the subsequent impact on staff member perceptions of order, control and criminality.

Juvenile Corrections in the Era of Reform: A Meta-Synthesis of Qualitative Studies

In this article, the authors synthesize knowledge from select qualitative studies examining rehabilitation-oriented juvenile residential corrections and aftercare programs. Using meta-synthesis methodology, the authors extracted and coded content from 10 research studies conducted by five authors across criminology, sociology, and social welfare disciplines. The total number of published works based on those studies analyzed was 18. Collectively, these studies offer insight into three major components of the juvenile correctional experience: therapeutic treatment and evidence-based practices, the shaping of identities and masculinities, and preparation for reentry. This analysis is particularly important as the United States is currently in an era of reform during which policymakers are increasingly espousing the benefits of rehabilitation for youth offenders over punishment. These studies took place before, during, and after this era of reform, and yet, the findings are surprisingly consistent over time, raising key questions about the effectiveness of the reform strategies.