The Biographical and Psychic Consequences of ‘Welfare Inaction’ for Young Women in Trouble with the Law
| Author | Randolph R. Myers |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225413505385 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
505385YJJ13310.1177/1473225413505385Youth JusticeMyers
2013
Article
Youth Justice
13(3) 218 –233
The Biographical and Psychic
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1473225413505385
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Randolph R. Myers
Abstract
While the neo-liberal drift towards ‘responsibilizing’ youth justice programs and policies has been explored
extensively in the literature, the lived realities of another aspect of the neo-liberal turn – welfare retrenchment
– have been given much less attention. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with detained girls in
the USA, this article explores what ‘welfare inaction’ means in the context of the lives of young women in
trouble with the law. While gendered tropes about self-sufficiency and individualized empowerment may
provide young women with the grammar by which to articulate self-reliance, the absence of welfare supports
seemed the most important mechanism for offloading responsibility on to them and shaping what justice
system intervention meant for them.
Keywords
gender, neo-liberalism, responsibilization, social justice, youth justice
Recent studies in youth justice and penology have analyzed the various ways in which late
modern justice system programs and practices work to produce self-sufficient, self-
governing subjects who can manage their own risks and meet their own needs in a post-
welfarist West (Gray, 2005, 2009; Haney, 2004). Drawing upon in-depth interviews with
detained young women in the USA, this article furthers our understanding of the lived real-
ities of neo-liberal youth justice by demonstrating how the most meaningful aspects of girls’
encounters with institutions of care and control flowed from ‘welfare inaction’ and the atom-
ization of social services rather than the substance of social control per se. Though welfare
retrenchment and the fragmentation of social support provision are core elements in most
Corresponding author:
Dr Randolph R. Myers, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, 6018 Batten Arts and
Letters, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
Email: rrmyers@odu.edu
Myers
219
sketches of the neo-liberal state (Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009), the lived reality of this
aspect of neo-liberalization has been left unexplored in theoretically inclined ground-level
examinations of social control (for a recent exception, see Phoenix and Kelly, 2013).
However, girls’ words make a compelling case that if we are going to understand more fully
how carceral institutions and treatment facilities shape the self-reliant subjectivities and
harm-filled biographies of the most important stakeholders in the punishment process, we
must acknowledge the nature and consequences of ‘welfare inaction’: the failure of state
systems of care and control to provide young women assistance with real world, often mate-
rial, problems. Such failures to act are particularly important in that they constitute the
broader backdrop on which responsibilizing (and gendered) ‘actions’ take place.
This article examines girls’ reflections on various aspects of juvenile and criminal jus-
tice, paying particular attention to their experiences with residential treatment and locked
detention as well as the social processes and circumstances that surrounded such interven-
tions. Because 34 of the 36 participants were adults and not children, their reflections
include contact with adult jail and residential treatment facilities for women. The article
shows that the atrophy of state supports shaped the significance that young women
assigned to all facilities and fostered their sense that they were responsible for their own
lives. Be they built to ‘treat’ or ‘punish’, be they built for girls or women, what the social
process of intervention meant to young women was shaped by the real world, often mate-
rial problems that remained waiting for them upon release, as gendered modes of gover-
nance on the ground were accompanied by a sort of structured ambivalence to girls’
post-intervention lives. Whether the ‘day to day’ practice was paternalistic or antiseptic,
caring or brutal, the structure of intervention meant that a fundamental ‘asymmetry of
citizenship’ existed (Carlen, 1996), as young women were exposed to a social ecology
riddled with ‘welfare inactions’ that lead many of them to swear off ‘intervention’ and
conclude that mainstream institutions were superfluous to their post-intervention lives.
Such failures to act came with long term and gendered consequences. Beyond fostering
a self-reliant worldview and a profound sense of social isolation, because they were adults,
this ‘welfare inaction’ in the face of these chronic deficits to citizenship meant that young
women were now exposed to an adult criminal justice response that was likely to undercut
any theoretical chance at full citizenship: the self-abuse via illicit substances that entan-
gled the majority of them in the juvenile justice system now put them at serious risk of
acquiring a felony drug charge. And this would mean losing their right to various social
services, disqualification from financial aid for higher education, and significantly
dimmed prospects for employment (Alexander, 2010). More immediately, such failures to
meet core material needs in a sustained fashion placed young women at heightened risk
for serious substance abuse as well as male coercion and exploitation at the margins of the
US social and economic landscape.
The Study
This work is based upon 58 qualitative interviews with 36 young women in the Valley
County Juvenile Justice System,1 which was located in the Western United States. The
220
Youth Justice 13(3)
data collection occurred in two waves. The first wave of interviews was collected from
April 2009 to January 2010. During the first wave, 45 interviews were completed with 27
different girls, and all of them took place at the Valley County Juvenile Hall. The second
wave of interviews took place between July 2010 and January 2011, during which time 13
more interviews were completed and nine new participants were recruited. Eight of the
second wave interviews took place at a public substance abuse treatment facility for youth,
the Public Teen Treatment Center, which was also operated by the Valley County Juvenile
Justice System.
Though both of these sites were a part of the Valley County Juvenile Justice System,
and linked to each other, important differences remained between the two facilities. Valley
County Juvenile Hall was a locked facility where young women were detained (i.e. incar-
cerated), while the Public Teen Treatment Center was an unlocked facility where young
women in the juvenile justice system who were deemed to have a drug problem were
‘enrolled’ as a condition of their probation. The Public Teen Treatment Center was techni-
cally unlocked, though it was surrounded by fencing. And young women faced conse-
quences if they decided to leave before completing the program since completion was a
condition of their juvenile probation. The populations at the two facilities overlapped
considerably. All of the participants who were interviewed at the Public Teen Treatment
Center had been to the Valley County Juvenile Hall, and many of the participants who
were interviewed at the Valley County Juvenile Hall had been to the Public Teen Treatment
Center. In addition to their experiences with these public ‘care’ and ‘control’ facilities,
many of the young women at both sites had been to private substance abuse treatment
facilities that partnered with Valley County Juvenile Probation.
Interviews were unstructured in nature at the beginning of the study. After themes
important to young women began to reveal themselves through unstructured interviews,
semi-structured interviews focusing on what school, secure detention, substance abuse
treatment and probation supervision meant to young women were conducted. Most inter-
views were audio recorded and each lasted, on average, a little over 80 minutes. In addi-
tion to audio recording most interviews, notes were taken during the interviews, and more
formal field notes were written at the conclusion of each day of interviewing. The field
notes were often used as a space to explore a particular theme by connecting or contrast-
ing bits of different accounts, or thinking about how newly collected data fit with past
scholarship.
More than half of the participants were interviewed only once, while 15 girls were
interviewed at least twice and six girls three times. Although less than half of the partici-
pants were interviewed more than once, these follow-up interviews were extremely valu-
able. When sitting down with a young woman for the second or third time I heard parts of
stories that I did not hear the first time through; therefore, it was my sense that follow-up
interviews were crucial in building rapport. Follow-up interviews with young women who
had re-entered the juvenile justice system after being on the outside were particularly
valuable for exploring the themes that are presented in this article. It was in these inter-
views with returning girls that the disjuncture between their notions of self-reliance and
their lived-reality was most stark, as their hopes for the future often met a grim reality. It
Myers
221
is also in these interviews that their anger at a system that often ‘works against them’
...
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