Mercer L. Sullivan

Youth Perspectives on the Experience of Reentry

This article outlines the reentry process of youth who are released from secure confinement experience and describes some contextual factors affecting that experience. Using interviews with young people released from prison, several dimensions are discussed including prior criminal involvement and lifestyles, education, mental health, continuity and change in social relationships, and reentry into different kinds of communities. Specific descriptions of several youth, some with extensive criminal records and some without, are used to highlight the conclusion that traditional methods of determining the success of youth reentry are limited and may obscure important variation in whether and how certain factors, such as criminal records, lead to certain outcomes, such as crime. A discussion of workable approaches to youth reentry is offered, highlighting the need for increased community involvement and aftercare.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Study “Gangs” Does Reification Obscure Youth Violence?

The extensive study of youth gangs over the years has tended to become a field of studies unto itself. Yet, scholars have failed to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of what youth gangs are....The extensive study of youth gangs over the years has tended to become a field of studies unto itself. Yet, scholars have failed to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of what youth gangs are. Further, collective illegal behavior by youths is not always identified with gangs. One result of this definitional ambiguity is the discrepancy between the reported proliferation of youth gangs in the 1990s and the sharp decline in reported youth violence during the latter part of the same decade. This article proposes a heuristic typology of forms of association and applies that typology to comparative ethnographic data from different areas of New York City. The results suggest that ongoing patterns of collective violent behavior rooted in local social ecology can be relabeled as gang behavior under certain conditions of youth culture and popular moral panic. A broader focus on youth violence and youthful collective behavior is urged.

Social Support, Motivation, and the Process of Juvenile Reentry: An Exploratory Analysis of Desistance

Many scholarly works and studies have explored the experience of reentry and desistance for adult offenders, but fewer studies have focused on these processes among juvenile offenders. Using qualitative case studies of juveniles released from secure confinement, this study explores the desistance process during juvenile reentry by examining how social support is used during the process. The authors propose that motivation, derived from both agentic resolve and reinforcement from social support networks, is necessary for successful desistance.

Evaluability Assessment in Juvenile Justice: A Case Example

An evaluability assessment of three programs of the Juvenile Justice Commission of the State of New Jersey was undertaken. Operation Hook-Up, the Hudson County YAP Challenge Program, and the Monmouth County Bullying Prevention Project were assessed. This included interviewing program personnel, site visits, reviewing the record-keeping systems, and meeting with the staff of the Juvenile Justice Commission and of the programs. This assessment enabled the researchers to acquire firsthand knowledge of the programs that led to the development of tailored evaluation designs for two programs. This article describes the programs, the assessment, and the bases for our recommendations.

Keeping Them Off the Corner How Probation Officers Steer Offenders Away From Crime Opportunities

We present a typology of tactics used by probation officers to steer probationers away from day-to-day crime opportunities based on 40 qualitative officer interviews. Concerns about probationers’ unstructured activities, time at crime-prone locations, and “at-risk” social interactions led officers to reduce probationers’ unstructured time, set limits to locations and persons with whom they associated, and coach them to side-step such opportunities. In support of these tactics, they collaborated with community handlers, worked to enhance probationers’ motivation and deter them from risky activities, leveraged probation conditions, and encouraged alternative activities.

Ethnographic Research on Criminal Careers Needs, Contributions, and Prospects

Pioneering research on “criminal careers” changed the course of criminology, reviving, and invigorating preexisting strands of inquiry while opening the door for the emergence of the developmental and life-course perspective that has become one of the dominant paradigms in recent criminological research. A persistent concern in this tradition has been the search for mechanisms connecting one stage of life to another. While qualitative methods are ideally suited for discovering and describing these mechanisms, there is far more published research based on quantitative longitudinal data. Calls for more qualitative work have become routine. This article first briefly describes the history of qualitative research on criminal careers and then discusses how a focus on changes in individual offending patterns over time emerged during the inductive theory-building process that produced the book Getting Paid, which began life as a comparative community study. Subsequent qualitative work is then discussed, with a focus on studies of desistance from crime. The conclusions address the problems and prospects for integrating qualitative and quantitative research, within or across projects, in ways that better connect social processes to life-course outcomes. Seeing how lives are embedded in community context is crucial to this endeavor.

Review essay / Is the language of the gun French?

Bernard Harcourt, Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, xiii + 278 pp.