Book Review: Ending zero tolerance: The crisis of absolute school discipline

• DOI: 10.1177/0734016819856069
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Author: Brandon C. Dulisse
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

pasts. Abrams and Terry explored three strategies for dealing with daily risks—avoiding dangers,

running and hiding, and calculated risk-taking. Youth also reported their past interactions with the

police, including incidents of racial prof‌iling and harassment.

Chapter 7, “Finding a Net to Fall Back On…,”focused on desistance experiences of female youth.

The authors discussed how females’obstacles differed from males’and the role of relationships in the

desistance process. Although females and males had similar struggles with housing, jobs, and eco-

nomic issues, females did not experience criminal temptations and being marked as the males did.

Instead, the females reported struggling with personal safety and economic issues.

Chapters 8 and 9 conclude the book. In Chapter 8, “Everyday Desistance: Theory Meets Reality,”

Abrams and Terry summarize their major f‌indings. They discuss how desistance appears for youth,

the role of motivation to change, and gender-specif‌ic patterns. Further, they did not f‌ind one single

pathway to desistance but a number of internal and external factors that contributed to desistance.

Abrams and Terry found that individual motivation contributed to the desistance process but was

not enough alone. In this chapter, the authors state that instead of trying to pinpoint “desisters”

and “persisters,”we should focus more on tools that help youth reach desistance goals. In Chapter

9, “Policy and Practice Reforms…,”Abrams and Terry explore the importance of prevention

against initial delinquent involvement, and how youth can navigate the pathways of desistance,

and specif‌ic policies supporting desistance.

A notable limitation to Everyday Desistance is its generalizability. Their study was qualitative,

with all participants from the same geographic area. However, Abrams and Terry note in Chapter

9 that their study was not intended to be generalizable but that they purposefully sampled youth

whose experiences captured a more typical, nonlinear trajectory of the desistance process.

Everyday Desistance is a well-written, comprehensive examination of formerly incarcerated youth

navigating the outside world, while dealing with obstacles and barriers. This book would be well

suited for both graduates and undergraduates, as its introduction provides the basic background to the

concept of desistance. This book would be appropriate for courses such as criminological theory and

juvenile delinquency. Additionally, this book goes beyond criminal justice and applies to those inter-

ested in social work and child welfare. Abrams and Terry effectively tie together the importance of

understanding desistance and the policy implications surrounding desistance research. They break

down the desistance process in a way that is easy for students to grasp, and the book would be insightful

and valuable to those interested in working with juveniles. Abrams and Terry note how the current lit-

erature and theory “lacks a rich description of the everyday challenges that these young people face, the

way they navigate these barriers, and the personal victories they achieve along the way”(p. 8), and they

successfully helped f‌ill this gap in the literature through their work—Everyday Desistance.

ORCID iD

Beverly Reece https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2537-4984

Black, D. W. (2016). Ending zero tolerance: The crisis of absolute school discipline. New York: New York University

Press. 237 pp. $24.95, ISBN: 9781479882335.

Reviewed by: Brandon C. Dulisse ,Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016819856069

For over half a century, legal questions over public schools’ability to administer punishment have

been meted out in the appellate court system, leading to an ever-changing def‌inition of legal and

400 Criminal Justice Review 47(3)