Fictive Kinship as Reentry Strategy

1. Fictive Kinship as Reentry Strategy The Role of Social Relations in Reintegration Processes

3. Amateurs • men of color between the ages of 17 and 27 • state assistance and public housing • histories of incarceration • GED • unemployment and joblessness

4. Trainers • men of color between the ages of 37 and 75 • state assistance and public housing • histories of incarceration • GED • unemployment and joblessness

5. Methodology • Participant observation research • 50 open-ended and semi-structured interviews • Video solicitation

6. Tough Love Engendering self-worth in body work

8. 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.

9. “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.”

10. “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.’”

11. “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.”

12. In Their Corner Caring for amateur men

13. “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

14. 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.”

15. “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

16. 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.”

17. “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.”

18. Trainer Notions of Justice

19. “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.”

20. “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.’”

21. “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.”

22. “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.”

23. “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

24. 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.”

25. “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.”

26. Conclusion Alternative Kinship

27. Policy Implications • Alternative spaces for successful reentry • Alternative resources for reentry success

28. Warning • Not a substitute for jobs, housing, health care, and other crucial resources.