A persistent problem in educational policy and research concerns how social (dis)advantage is reproduced in free societies built on ideologies of equality, opportunity, and social mobility. In this article, the author examines narratives by and for incarcerated young men about how they “got caught up” in illegal activity and eventually incarcerated. Young men and adults supervising them are found to contest choice and culpability in terms of generational and spatial legacies of possibility and social (dis-)advantage. This work is significant for what it suggests about juvenile culpability—specifically, how young people and those around them contest “choice(s)” and, subsequently “blame,” in narratives about childhood and young adulthood. The author argues that historical and geographic contexts frame universes of choices and developmental pathways that are always already present in young people’s lives. In doing so, the author challenges reductive and privatized framings of youth development to suggest a more balanced and comprehensive approach to working with and educating young offenders.
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