Michaela Soyer: Lost Childhoods: Poverty, Trauma, and Violent Crime in the Post-Welfare Era

Excerpt

In 1996 Pennsylvania passed “Act 33”, a statute that allowed children as young as 15 who had committed violent crimes to be sentenced as an adult. This act effectively ended the childhoods of any juveniles convicted. In Lost Childhoods: Poverty, Trauma, and Violent Crime in the Post-Welfare Era, Michaela Soyer (2018) seeks to gain an understanding of the structural causes that motivate children to resort to a life of crime. Soyer theorizes that this can be contributed to the United States’ lack of a robust welfare state. Given that extreme deprivation plays a key role in criminal trajectories, justice systems remain the only centralized government system to offer social services. To test her theory, Soyer completed a case study with 30 young men who were tried as adults, while they were still underage. Soyer completed three interviews with each young man over three months that concentrated on different aspects of their lives, especially their early childhoods. Soyer expertly weaves the findings garnered from her interviews into a coherent and scathing review of how the social service desert of the post-welfare era and the punitive justice system has adversely impacted disadvantaged children who experience traumatic childhood events. Soyer’s piece acts as a perfect vessel to motivate American society to begin rebuilding the welfare state. She strongly communicates that the systematic dismantling of the welfare state played a key role in pushing the 30 young interviewees to give up their childhoods and pursue a life of crime. …