Jamie J Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Barry Feld |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513505166 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Rambo KS (2009) ‘Trivial Complaints’: The Role of Privacy in Domestic Violence Law
and Activism in the U.S. New York: Columbia University Press.
Maria Bevacqua
Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA
Jamie J Fader, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth, Rutgers
University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 2013; 256 pp. (including index): 978081356074, $75.00
(cloth), $27.95 (pbk)
Jamie J Fader’s Falling Back is a three year ethnographic study of young black and
Latino males making the transition from a juvenile training school in rural
Pennsylvania back to inner-city Philadelphia. The book’s title – Falling Back –
has two meanings – ‘going straight’ and staying out of trouble, and also ‘‘‘falling
back’’ into their old patterns of criminal activity’ (p. 4). The study examines how
the youths experienced and interpreted their incarceration, how the institutional
treatment did or did not prepare them to go straight after release, how they tran-
sitioned back to their communities and from adolescents to young adults, and what
factors contributed to post-release success.
The book is organized in eight chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the youths whose
lives Fader follows on re-entry and the context to which they return. Philadelphia
is a hyper-segregated city (Massey and Denton, 1993), and these youths live in the
de-industrialized urban core marked by failing schools, racial-ethnic tensions, high
crime rates, aggressive policing, and a lack of jobs (Feld, 1999). Inner-city youths
adapt to this dangerous environment by adopting the ‘code of the street’ to survive
(Anderson, 2000). Chapter 2 examines the treatment program at Mountain Ridge
Academy (MRA) to correct youths’ ‘criminal thinking errors’ – embodied in their
adherence to the ‘code of the street’. The ‘criminal personality theory’ assumes that
youths freely and rationally choose to engage in crime. As part of Goffman’s ‘status
degradation ceremony’, rural white correctional officers stigmatize youths’ urban
black identity and assault their street culture – their walk, language, mode of dress,
and so on. ‘Blackness is criminalized and therapeutic parlance is used to disguise
the racialized nature of the program of change’ (p. 14). I frame this review with a
word about my own perspective. My career in juvenile justice began more than
40 years ago studying the youth training schools in Massachusetts before Jerome
Miller closed them (Miller, 1998). Although the MRA program used a somewhat
different ‘treatment’ vocabulary, Fader’s descriptions were highly reminiscent of
the training schools of the early 1970s that emphasized institutional adjustment,
ignored structural causes of offending, and failed to prepare youth for the crim-
inogenic environments to which they would return (Feld, 1977). As Fader observes,
‘The disconnect between what youths experience inside reform schools and the
settings in which they must put their new skills and achievements into practice
contributes to a high rate of failure on the outside’ (p. 19). As youths recognize
Book reviews 573
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