Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison

by Adam Reich

Hidden Truth takes the reader inside a Rhode Island juvenile prison to explore broader questions of how poor, disenfranchised young men come to terms with masculinity and identity. Adam D. Reich, who worked with inmates to produce a newspaper, writes vividly and memorably about the young men he came to know, and in the process extends theories of masculinity, crime, and social reproduction into a provocative new paradigm. Reich suggests that young men's participation in crime constitutes a game through which they achieve “outsider masculinity.” Once in prison these same youths are forced to reconcile their criminal practices with a new game and new “insider masculinity” enforced by guards and administrators.

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2010

About the author

Adam D. Reich is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author of Hidden Truth: The Young Men Navigating Lives in and out of Juvenile Prison (2010); With God on Our Side: The Struggle for Workers’ Rights in a Catholic Hospital (2012); and Selling Our Souls: The Commodification of Hospital Care in the United States (2014).

Reviews

[Tristan Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Reich's analysis of a small newspaper that he participated in editing as a part of a youth correctional facility in Rhode Island is really an amazing read. Although he frames his findings most centrally in the criminology literature in sociology, his discussions of masculinity are throughout. In some ways, through his ability to write in criminology, he was enabled to push literature on masculinities in new directions. He argues that the young men that enter the Training School (a juvenile detention center) and that twin cultural ideologies concerning masculinity are pitted against one another in ironic, paradoxical, and often incompatible ways. Relying on a Bourdieuian theoretical frame, he refers to these warring ideologies as masculinity "games," arguing that young men often enter the facility with a certain level of adeptness with the "game of outlaw," and that this game is pitted against the Training Centers "game of law." Ultimately, he argues that it is a small population of young men (and some women) who are able to gain the critical consciousness necessary to form a structural critique of these "games" as helping to reproduce their positions of relative disadvantage who are the young people who are able to find a way out. It's a really wonderful read, filled with interesting anecdotes, methodological and ethical challenges, and nuanced findings and analyses. I loved it. I may even teach with it this spring.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

earnest, enlightening

[Mikaila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set at the RI Training School!