Conditions of a successful status graduation ceremony: Formerly incarcerated urban youth and their tenuous grip on success
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Published date | 01 January 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474510385636 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
13(1) 29–46
! The Author(s) 2011
Conditions of a
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successful status
DOI: 10.1177/1462474510385636
pun.sagepub.com
graduation ceremony:1
Formerly incarcerated
urban youth and their
tenuous grip on success
Jamie J Fader
University at Albany, USA
Abstract
This article offers an ethnographic examination of a graduation ceremony from ‘Santana
School’, a reform school targeting youthful drug offenders. After returning to the facility
with five former residents, I contend that ceremony was a rare opportunity for these
young men to reclaim the carceral experience on their own terms. Wearing their own
clothing, using their own language, and playing their own music, they affirmed both their
personal choices and the legitimacy of their cultural identities as Black men and its
compatibility with success. Returning to the place where they had been held against
their will offered them the chance to actively shape the staff’s collective memories of
them and who they could become, as well as transforming their own narratives of the
place and their time there. However, unlike most status passages, Santana’s graduation
ceremony failed to confer the concrete privileges of a truly new status. I analyze the
meaning of the experience for the young men in my study in light of Maruna’s call in this
issue for the provision of redemption rituals which could strip the stigma from incar-
ceration and restore the offender’s status in the community.
Keywords
incarceration, reform school, status passages, stigma
Corresponding author:
Jamie J. Fader, University at Albany School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York, 135 Western
Avenue, 219 Draper Hall, Albany, New York, 12222, USA
Email: jfader@albany.edu
30
Punishment & Society 13(1)
Introduction
Over the last decade, an impressive literature has developed around the intercon-
nected issues of prisoner reentry and the collateral consequences of incarceration
(Lynch and Sabol, 2001; Petersilia, 2003; Travis, 2005). With over 700,000 adult
prisoners returning to their communities each year, it seems prudent to understand
the conditions under which they are more likely to succeed. Less attention has been
paid, however, to the psychosocial effects of incarceration and the affective journey
of those moving from confined to free statuses (Jones and Schmid, 2000; Maruna,
this issue). This ‘moral career’, or changing self-concept of the prisoner, may also
have important ramifications for outcomes upon release. Research in this area
shows that how former prisoners (and ex-offenders more generally) view themselves
can either facilitate or hinder desistance from offending (Giordano et al., 2002;
Laub and Sampson, 2003; Maruna, 2001).
The stigma of criminal justice processing is typically adhered in ceremonies or
rituals that mark the passage of status from law-abiding to criminal and which
designate the perpetrator as deserving of punishment. The significance of ceremo-
nies or rituals dates back to Durkheim (1893/1984), who argues that the public
punishment of crimes against the collective conscience serves to reinforce the
morality of law and promote social solidarity. Garfinkel (1956: 420) describes
the features of successful status degradation ceremonies where the offender is for-
mally denounced and ‘positioned outside the social order’ or ‘made strange’
through the ‘communicative work directed to transforming an individual’s total
identity into an identity lower in the group’s scheme of social types’. While
Garfinkel notes that the courts typically have a ‘fair monopoly’ over these cere-
monies, Goffman’s (1961) work demonstrates the continued use of identity strip-
ping rituals within total institutions such as prisons. Here, heads are shaved, prison
uniforms are issued, and any shred of the prisoner’s former self is broken down in
the hope that it can be rebuilt in a new form.
Neither Garfinkel nor Goffman offers much description of the moral career after
prison, however. Maruna (this issue) astutely points out that, unlike the rites of
passage marking the transition into prison, community reentry typically occurs
quietly and with little fanfare. Using Braithwaite’s (1989) notion of reintegrative
shaming as inspiration, he hypothesizes that redemption rituals could become a
meaningful component of the reentry process. In these ceremonies, the prisoner
would be delabeled and reinstated as a member of law-abiding society. Redemption
rituals would be most powerful, he asserts, when they (1) are symbolic and emotive,
(2) are community-based and public, (3) emphasize achievement over risk, and (4)
eliminate the criminal record.
In this article, I recount the experience of attending a graduation ceremony from
Santana School,2 a reform school targeting youthful drug offenders. As part of a
larger ethnographic study of youth incarceration and community reentry, I accom-
panied five of Santana’s graduates who had been in the community for approxi-
mately six months back to the facility to attend the ceremony. My research
Fader
31
questions were: (1) What did the ceremony mean to the young men? Why were they
so invested in attending? (2) What other purposes did the ceremony seem to serve?
Was it a redemption ritual? Was it a success and by what standards?
I contend that ceremony was a rare opportunity for these young men to reclaim
the carceral experience on their own terms. Wearing their own clothing, using their
own language, and playing their own music, they affirmed their personal choices
and their compatibility with success. Returning to the place where they had been
held against their will offered them the chance to actively shape the staff’s collective
memories of them and who they could become, as well as transforming their own
narratives of the place and their time there. With their mere presence as the primary
indicator that they were ‘doing good’ in the community, they strove to prove the
staff members’ dire predictions about their limited futures wrong. For several hours
during and after the ceremony, they stood on the same side of the moral boundary
with the staff members and enjoyed the benefits of being treated as law-abiding
adults and productive citizens.
However, unlike most status passages, Santana’s graduation ceremony failed to
confer the concrete privileges of a truly new status. In many ways, their victory
there was merely symbolic because its effects were so transitory. The young men in
my study returned to the same daily challenges of living in poverty-filled and
racially segregated neighborhoods with few concrete opportunities for success.
No-one in their communities viewed them differently after the ritual, nor did
they seem to regard themselves in a new light. Moreover, although their claims
to doing good were not challenged by the staff, they were quite shaky. As I detail
later, none was able to carry through with the plans for school, work, or family that
he had made at the time of release. From the perspective of the graduates, the
ceremony was not a success because it failed to permanently remove the stigma of
juvenile justice system involvement and return graduates to their former status in
the community.
The graduates’ desire to prove the staff wrong and the exceptionally low stan-
dards the staff used to accept claims of doing good (i.e. presence at the ceremony)
revealed some lasting features of the carceral experience. First, the deep, pseudo-
familial ties residents formed with staff members created a profound ambivalence
in which the graduates struggled to separate the more positive affective dimensions
of the experience from their anger at being confined and controlled. Second, the
claims that appeared most important during the ceremony (e.g. avoiding arrest and
death) were the very ones that staff members had previously used to predict failure
on the outside. Because of the close relationships built with the staff, these messages
about the residents’ limited potential were deeply stigmatizing, adding to the layers
of disadvantage experienced by urban minorities in the juvenile justice system
(Sampson and Laub, 1997).
Ultimately, the ceremony was successful only from the perspective of the
institutional staff and administrators. Aware that working with delinquent youth
is a thankless job, the administration offered the graduation ceremony each year as
a means of reinvigorating its staff and reaffirming the value and effectiveness of
32
Punishment & Society 13(1)
their work. Since staff members typically only received news about former residents
who had been re-incarcerated or had met untimely deaths, the ceremony allowed
them to enjoy stories of graduates’ success on the outside. These stories, Schneider
(1994) argues, are one of the key mechanisms by which staff and administrators
cling to a ‘slim reed of hope’ that their work is effective. They allow reform schools
to continue to operate despite their overwhelming degree of failure to reform.
Research methods and setting
The data from this study are drawn from a larger ethnographic, longitudinal study
of 15 young Black and Latino men who were returning to Philadelphia after a
period of incarceration at Santana School, a juvenile correctional institution for
drug users and sellers. I recruited those who were aged 17–19 at the time of release
so that I could examine the ‘dual transition’ from facility to community and from
adolescence into young adulthood. Young men of color were...
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