In March 2023, the suicide of 16-year-old Joshua Keith Beasley at the Travis County State Jail in Austin, TX, joined a tragically long list of preventable deaths in American youth prisons. Incarcerated at age 11 for kicking a school safety officer, Beasley over a multiyear period was bullied, beaten, placed in restraints, pepper sprayed, and placed in excessive isolation, before finally being transferred to adult jail. Within 6 months, he was dead.
Beasley's case exemplifies the horrors of youth incarceration that have fueled a national movement in recent years to replace state-run youth prisons with smaller facilities or noninstitutional programs located nearer to the home communities of adjudicated youth. This “community-based reform movement” forms the subject of The Myth of the Community Fix, which examines juvenile justice reforms in three bellwether states: Pennsylvania, California, and Texas. As the title suggests, the book focuses mainly on the politics surrounding the policymaking process in each state, the administration of state-level reforms, and their outcomes. Drawing from an extensive array of legislative, legal, social scientific, and journalistic sources, author Sarah Cate offers one of the first comprehensive analyses of this important yet understudied reform movement.
Cate's top-line conclusion is that juvenile justice reform has failed to live up to its lofty promises in all three states, and that it is best understood as a product of the neoliberal policymaking that has produced welfare reform, privatization of public goods, and mass incarceration. Juvenile justice resources reallocated to local governments have expanded rather than reduced imprisonment and punitive surveillance, while providing few of the noninstitutional programs evoked in the idealistic-sounding rhetoric of community-based reform. “Devolution, not decarceration” (39) over the last 30 years has occurred amid austerity budgets forcing cash-strapped local governments to turn to private sector providers for everything from regional detention facilities to mental health assessments. The former has nurtured the reopening of shuttered state prisons as private youth detention centers, some under the auspices of the Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America, with more abuse and less oversight than before. Indeed, as Cate notes, the notorious “Kids for Cash” scandal in Pennsylvania was uncovered not by a government inspector but thanks to a tip to the nonprofit Juvenile Law Center.
Meanwhile, large nonprofit foundations led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation have been the main drivers (and sometimes the authors) of reform legislation, providers of assessments and services, and sponsors of state and local level nonprofit advocates and providers. While foundations can bring critical expertise to bear, they represent no constituency and lack democratic accountability, particularly to the populations most directly affected by the policies they promote. This argument echoes that of Geoff Ward's pathbreaking book The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Reference WardWard, 2012, 1–16). Cate locates the roots of this more insidious form of privatization in the federal and foundation-led community action projects of the 1960s, arguing that elite, foundation-led reforms have perpetuated a misguided focus on changing individual youth instead of the structural and social inequities that shaped them. Cate identifies the latter-day version of this in the vogue of “evidence-based” programs, designed to alter an adjudicated youth's behavior, improve academic performance, teach “marketable” or “interpersonal skills,” and discourage drug use. In her view, these interventions focus narrowly on limiting recidivism while ignoring factors such as inequality in housing, schooling, health care, transportation, and policing (136).
Here, and elsewhere, Cate implies an “either-or” approach in weighing the individual and structural causes of delinquency, although some of the actors she describes seemingly adopt what James Forman, Jr., has described as an “all of the above” approach (Reference FormanForman, 2017, 12–13). To that end, Cate might have probed further into the discussions of the various state-level lobbyists, advocacy groups, and elected officials who jockeyed over reform legislation. For example, Cate rightly notes that national foundations and local reformers consistently have promoted community-based programs' supposed cost savings to legislatures from both major parties, in both liberal California and conservative Texas, a promise that aligns with budget austerity imperatives while sidelining what should be the central focus—the best interests of youth. To what extent did political pragmatism, rather than ideological conviction, drive these appeals for disparate reformers? The criticism is deserved, but if we are to learn from past failures, they must be described in all their nuance. Similarly, greater inclusion of the words and actions of youth themselves and their families might have added to this study.
One of the book's fundamental criticisms of the latter-day reform movement is that it privileges age as a basis for its failed promises to protect and treat individual youth. For Cate, this focus exemplifies the separation of “curable” or more deserving from “violent and serious” juvenile offenders (148), extended to age-specific and successful campaigns to end the juvenile death penalty and juvenile life without parole while ignoring adult offenders. This argument would have benefited from more attention to the Progressive-era juvenile court movement, whose leaders based their entire case for a separate system on the vulnerability, immaturity, and plasticity of children and adolescents. This wider historical context would have enriched Cate's otherwise spot-on analysis of the failures of the contemporary community-based reform movement.
While I concur with Cate's concluding recommendations for greater investment in publicly run, and publicly accountable, juvenile justice programs, I remain skeptical of her suggestion to re-invest in youth prisons. At this moment, Texas is poised to adopt legislation that will do just that, investing $200 million to build new state-run youth prisons while making it easier to transfer misbehaving youth into the adult prison system—the very thing that resulted in the youth suicide that led this review. Despite these criticisms, Cate has made a major contribution to the literature on juvenile justice, particularly as scholars from a range of disciplines reassess it against emerging scholarship on the carceral state.
