Education in Youth Detention Homes

What an insightful book! Subtitled “schooling against the odds,” discovered is the surprising institutional context at the intersection of youth crime, treatment, and education. The diverse interests, competing accounts, and forms of sabotage transpire performatively within an orderly social world. Meaning-making, strategic actions, and everyday identities repeatedly construct and resolve for all practical purposes what might at a glance appear chaotic and contradictory. The documentation is superb and the message highly significant.

Jaber F. Gubrium, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Missouri, USA

This highly readable ethnography is methodologically innovative, theoretically informed, and rich with policy implications. The book’s crowning achievement may be the empirical and site-specific exploration of motivation, not as a fixed personal attribute but a collaborative effort. David Wästerfors artfully demonstrates how motivation is realized through ongoing and personalized interactions between the staff and youth against the backdrop of cold institutional conditions. While informed by Goffman’s total institutions, Wästerfors shows that institutions need to be malleable to effect reform. In sum, the book is a brilliant contribution to the multidisciplinary study of life in institutional settings.

Amir Marvasti, Professor of Sociology, Penn State Altoona