Transcript Fictive Kinship as Reentry Strategy

Fictive Kinship as Reentry
Strategy
The Role of Social Relations in
Reintegration Processes
Amateurs
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men of color between the ages of 17 and 27
state assistance and public housing
histories of incarceration
GED
unemployment and joblessness
Trainers
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men of color between the ages of 37 and 75
state assistance and public housing
histories of incarceration
GED
unemployment and joblessness
Methodology
• Participant observation research
• 50 open-ended and semi-structured
interviews
• Video solicitation
Tough Love
Engendering self-worth in body work
Maurice: My hand hurts.
Jerry:
What?
Maurice: My hand hurts.
Jerry:
Then why are you boxing,
Maurice, if your hand hurts? What are
you going to tell the guy next week?
That your hand hurts?
Maurice: No.
Jerry:
Right now forget about
your hand. You ain’t got one.
“I try to put them in situations-- if your right
hand really hurt, you got to use your jab
because I want to put them in the frame of
mind that if you hurt your hand in a fight,
what are you going to do? You gonna quit? Or
you gonna continue? Life is only over unless
you give up and give into it. When I was at
my lowest point, life could have been over for
me, but I refused to give up. I refused to quit,
and I wouldn’t give up. There’s a thing called
tough love.”
“Like yesterday, I got this kid Cedric and
he got hit in the throat and the stomach
yesterday. He fell down. ‘I’m getting-[out of the ring].’ ‘No you’re not. Finish.
Finish the round.’ ‘But my throat!’ I say,
‘Your throat is hurting because I always
told you “stop picking your head up.”
And you won’t. And your stomach hurt
because you won’t do no road work.’”
“If I make a way out for you, you gonna
take an easy road. You don’t pet grown
men. I’m not saying men don’t deserve
hugs and stuff like that. But you can’t
treat a man like a woman. You gonna
ruin him. You gonna take what’s
naturally in him and turn it into
something else. There’s a time to get
tough and a time to bite the bullet and a
time to get gritty.”
In Their Corner
Caring for amateur men
“I cursed him out three times yesterday. And I
gave him a long talk about discipline. First of
all I told him not to have a baby, and he had a
baby. You have a baby, you have
responsibility. Baby need pampers, baby need
milk, baby need Similac. Number two, you
have to deal with the baby mother. Whether
you like her or you don’t like her, you still got
to deal with her. Number three, you need to
work now. He’s bitching and moaning, ‘I’m
tired. I don’t want to
work.’ Yeah, everybody—that’s what
everybody in the real world do. You wake up,
you go to work, you try to get in your boxing
and workout. You go home, you play with
your baby. He’s feeling the crunch of the real
world. But before he was a teenager. He’d get
up and hang out in the street and come into
the gym and hang out in the gym for four
hours and then go home. Now he can’t do
that, and it’s a crunch on him and he gets
whiney and I don’t want to hear that shit. Be a
man and do what you got to do.”
“But eh, look, that’s life. Look, let me tell you
something. I’m not the most handsome
motherfucker. I’m short. I’m chubby. I got
fake yellow teeth. I’m going fucking bald. I
got bumps on the back of my neck, and I have
no fucking money. So I say, ‘Well, I’m short,
fat, bumps on the back of my neck, and I have
no fucking money. But the other side, I’m
smart. I’m charming. I make good fucking
jokes, and I make people feel comfortable.’ I
have to use my brain. I can’t match muscle for
muscle, look for look. So Adrian gotta
understand that. Yeah, he don’t have the
talent, so your endurance got to be incredible.
Your will power gotta override this man’s
talent. And that might go farther. You gotta
work with what God gave you. You can’t get
jealous. Yeah, I wish I was 6’2” and didn’t
have to sleep outside.”
“I like Scott. He’s a good kid. I mean, like I
say, I would love to see Scott become a world
champion because he has a hell of a story to
tell. Because of how he left and he came back,
what he had to endure to get back here. He
had to cross over the border and stuff like that.
That’s daring defeat when you do something
like that. To get back under those
circumstances, that’s a guy who wants
something out of life and who has a plan in
life.”
Trainer Notions of Justice
“Came home. First thing I went to a place
called Project Return. That didn’t work. Got
kicked out. When I got kicked out—I was in
there for like six months—I had nowhere to
go. My mother said, ‘You couldn’t come
here.’ When she told me I couldn’t come back
to the house, I immediately relapsed. Like
hours—I was desolate, down, nobody to turn
to, and I just went back to the streets. I was on
a mission for three or four months. Then I
heard about this place called Damon House.
And Damon House—I sort of pulled myself
together.”
“One thing led to another, and I fell in
love with the sport all over again but
from a different perspective, from a
different view, from a different angle. I
said ‘I can still make a difference but this
way. I can still make a difference.’”
“The world don’t owe me anything, so
what’s the point walking around bitter?
Every decision you made you made a
conscious decision. You did it to
yourself. You made your own decisions
in life. You just have to learn to deal with
it. Accept life for what it is. Cause if I
walked around bitter all the time, believe
me nobody would want to be around me,
and nobody would want to deal with
me.”
“Nobody navigated me. If somebody had
navigated me, I’d probably be in Harvard
somewhere. Street navigator. Yeah, that’s
what kids need. That’s the perfect word. They
want to do right, but they haven’t been
navigated. They don’t know what to do. You
counsel them on more things than this boxing
shit. They don’t know what to do. Baby stuff,
how you do the baby stuff. You gotta counsel
them on everything—where to get a job, what
to do.”
“These kids get raised on the street, and
they’re not guided. Max is smart guy, but he
didn’t know what to do. He had no guidance.
‘Where I go to get my GED?’ ‘My girlfriend
pregnant, where I go?’ ‘Where’s health care?’
‘How I fill out an application?’ ‘How you sign
up for a lease?’ ‘What to wear on a job
interview?’ You know, everything. These guys
just don’t know. When they go do things kinda
wrong and do a social faux pas, they get
frustrated. They get in a corner. And most
people—like almost my whole team is
criminals. All of them went to jail at one
period of time or another, and when you fill
out an application, you’re like ostracized. You
did your fucking time, that’s it. You can’t get a
job. You can’t do this, you can’t do that.
Boxing is like-- they embrace you.”
“I think this the last place where men get
trained by men. There used to be
outlets—like the army. There ain’t no
outlets anymore. They not used to
dealing with men. I don’t care—if you’re
a single mother, you can’t raise no
manchild.”
Conclusion
Alternative Kinship
Policy Implications
• Alternative spaces for successful reentry
• Alternative resources for reentry success
Warning
• Not a substitute for jobs, housing, health
care, and other crucial resources.