Available From UC Press

Lost Childhoods focuses on the life-course histories of thirty young men serving time in the Pennsylvania adult prison system for crimes they committed when they were minors. The narratives of these young men, their friends, and relatives reveal the invisible yet deep-seated connection between the childhood traumas they suffered and the violent criminal behavior they committed during adolescence. By living through domestic violence, poverty, the crack epidemic, and other circumstances, these men were forced to grow up fast all while familial ties that should have sustained them were broken at each turn. The book goes on to connect large-scale social policy decisions and their effects on family dynamics and demonstrates the limits of punitive justice.
 

Michaela Soyer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and author of A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men.

"Soyer gives readers heart-wrenching accounts, in which marginal young men make sense of their physical and emotional traumas, their parents' instability, and their striking out into a world that frames them as ‘undeserving’ from the start. She certainly captures the disastrous impacts of mass incarceration on the new generation of youths."—Randol Contreras, author of The Stickup Kids    

"In a powerful study based on interviews with imprisoned young men and their families, Soyer shows how the current lack of a welfare safety net and the crack epidemic shape extreme poverty. Its consequences, such as residential and family instability, in turn, contour the early experiences of serious delinquents. This book should be read by sociologists, policy makers, and legislators." —Ruth Horowitz, author of In the Public Interest

"Soyer’s account of incarcerated youth captures the structural foundations of their involvement in serious crime, especially grinding poverty and trauma. She demonstrates how the justice system fails to address these vulnerabilities and how disadvantaged youth avoid the helping arms of the system. Her book highlights the profound consequences of the eroding American safety net." —Jamie J. Fader, author of Falling Back

"Soyer offers timely and rich insights into how the justice system and the post-welfare reform context work at the macro level, along with deep poverty and young men’s experiences of trauma and masculinity expectations at the micro level, to shape their pathways to imprisonment. Soyer traces how these factors accelerate young men’s early assumption of and negotiation of adult roles and expectations culminating in incarceration. This book offers students in Criminology and Sociology a new integrated theoretical take on how social forces shape young disadvantaged men’s experiences with crime and punishment." —Holly Foster, Texas A&M University

"Soyer’s latest book is a must read—one that clearly shows how the dual curse of poverty and childhood trauma is the reason for America’s incarcerated youth.   The message is loud and clear: We can and must do more to assist our most troubled youth."—Simon I. Singer, author of America's Safest City