Youth Perspectives on the Experience of Reentry

• Author: Mercer L. Sullivan
• Published date: 01 January 2004
• Date: 01 January 2004
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1541204003260047
• Subject Matter: Journal Article

10.1177/1541204003260047ARTICLEYouth Violence and Juvenile JusticeSullivan / PERSPECTIVES ON THE REENTRY EXPERIENCE

YOUTH PERSPECTIVES ON

THE EXPERIENCE OF REENTRY

Mercer L. Sullivan

Rutgers University

This article outlines the reentry process of youth who are released from secure con-

finement experience and describes some contextual factors affecting that experience.

Using interviews with young people released from prison, several dimensions are

discussed including prior criminal involvement and lifestyles, education, mental health,

continuity and change in social relationships, and reentry into different kinds of com-

munities. Specific descriptions of several youth, some with extensive criminal records

and some without, are used to highlight the conclusion that traditional methods of

determining the success of youth reentry are limited and may obscure important

variation in whether and how certain factors, such as criminal records, lead to certain

outcomes, such as crime. A discussion of workable approaches to youth reentry is

offered, highlighting the need for increased community involvement and aftercare.

Keywords: youth incarceration; youth reentry; life-course criminology

There are certain basic challenges that face all persons returning from secure

confinement to the community. These include finding shelter and sustenance, establishing

or reestablishing social relationships, and engaging in productive activities, such as

education and employment. These broadly defined challenges of reentry have more specific

characteristics for youthful returnees. Youth have different developmental needs and

capacities than adults and occupy different roles and ecological niches in the community.

The specific challenges of reentry for youth are shaped by these developmental and social

factors.

Any discussion of these issues in the context of the contemporary United States must

acknowledge at the outset the enormous disparities of race, ethnicity, and social class in the

distribution of experiences of secure confinement. Confined youth disproportionately come

from poor and minority communities and return to these same kinds of communities. This

disproportionality is of a large order of magnitude. In 1990 and 1991, for example, African

Americans made up 15% of the population aged 10 to 17 but made up 46% of juveniles in

residential placement (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999, p. 194).

Within these communities, the experiences of secure confinement are far more

prevalent than elsewhere. In addition, the trajectories of human development themselves

differ, on average, from developmental trajectories in less disadvantaged communities. To

take two salient areas, the patterns of transition from school to the labor market and of

family and household formation often differ from patterns that obtain in less disadvantaged

communities.

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Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, Vol. 2 No. 1, January 2004 56-71

DOI: 10.1177/1541204003260047

© 2004 Sage Publications

Thus, not only are disadvantaged youth more likely to experience confinement and

reentry, they typically leave and return to a small subset of American communities in which

these experiences are much more common than elsewhere and other patterns of youth

development also tend to differ. To think about the special challenges of youth reentry, we

must therefore think not only about biological and social differences between youth and

adults everywhere. We must also address the particular circumstances of youth

development within the disadvantaged communities from which such a disproportionate

share of confined youth are drawn.

These issues are discussed here from a perspective informed by ethnographic

research, by myself and others, and by a theoretical orientation toward viewing the

experiences of individuals as embedded in webs of social and institutional relationships.

This community embeddedness constrains them in terms of the things that they need to

accomplish during reentry, the resources available to them, and the ways in which they

interpret opportunities and obstacles. Although these social and cultural factors do not

rigidly determine the choices that individuals eventually make, they do define particular

ranges of options.

The ethnographic examples that are presented here are all drawn from research in

inner-city communities. They are intentionally selected to illustrate some dimensions of

variation in processes of youth reentry. These dimensions include age, seriousness of prior

criminal involvement, and sources of social support.

It is important to study variations among reentering youth because they are probably a

more diverse group than in the past. The sharp increase in levels of incarceration over the

past two decades has spread an ever wider net, with the result that the young people leaving

secure confinement today represent a wider range than in the past. By their early 20s,

substantial proportions of males in inner-city areas have some experience of incarceration.

Smaller proportions already have several years of experience in correctional facilities.

Beside these variations in direct experience of secure confinement, there are also substantial

variations in the extent and character of social connectedness of individuals to their

communities. Some people have extensive and deep ties to both law-abiding and criminally

involved others. Some are deeply involved in social networks in which criminal activity and

heavy substance abuse are central. Others are relative loners, adrift in and between

communities where lots of people are poor and isolated from others. Both the extent of prior

involvement in crime and heavy drug use and the range of prior and subsequent social

relationships have important implications for the course of the reentry process.

Data and Method

The examples discussed here come from several research projects I have directed.

These include three field studies from the 1980s, one that led to my book Getting Paid:

Youth Crime and Employment in the Inner City (Sullivan, 1989b), subsequent work in the

same neighborhoods on young fathers (Sullivan, 1989a, 1993), and work on (and in) an

employment program for ex-offenders. More recent work in the late 1990s focused on

violence among younger adolescents. All of these studies were conducted in New York

City. Here is a brief introduction to the cast of characters.

Doug and Reggie were participants in the Vera Institute of Justice’s Neighborhood

Work Project, a program that offered immediate employment to anyone released from jail

or prison in New York State during the prior 30days. I had known Reggie before, during the

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