Book review: Alexandra Cox, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People
| Author | Andrea Leverentz |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619860939 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 569
governments in general and criminal justice systems in particular are weaker (see
Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011). But, stronger states like the UK, should not feel in any
way immune in the long term.
To conclude, this collection continues to raise questions about, and reinforce the
importance of, scrutinizing the role of private companies in criminal justice provision.
The Private Sector and Criminal Justice is, therefore, to be welcomed as a timely contri-
bution to ongoing debates in this field.
Reference
Abrahamsen R and Williams MC (2011) Security beyond the State: Private Security in International
Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alexandra Cox, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People, Rutgers
University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2017; 218 pp.: 9780813570464, US$28.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Andrea Leverentz, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA
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 peo-
ple 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.
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