Abstract
In Can’t Catch a Break, Susan Starr Sered and Maureen Norton-Hawk take on a Socratic-methodic tone in their exploration of gender, jail, drugs, and the limits of personal responsibility. Like the Greek philosopher, their words come at you with the softness of an inquisitive toddler but with the wrath of a scolding mother hurling rhetorical questions. Critically posed and intellectually driven, questions by the authors encourage truth seeking. By the time you’ve finished the book, plaguing questions about how “America deals with human suffering” (p. 3) unsettles you to the point you’re almost forced in to action.
With no particular hypothesis to test, the authors set out to understand the lives of women who have experienced incarceration. Although the title suggests exclusive exploration of gender, jail, and drugs, it is clear by the table of contents that the book aims to also explore the intersection of gender and several areas of social welfare. Each of the eight chapters is focused on a single paradigm of the social welfare system, yet the authors flawlessly transition from one topic to another to form a literary documentary. This work brilliantly takes the reader on a journey through the lives of nine women, allowing us to experience their marginalization as we have a proverbial “front-row seat” to their cycles of domestic abuse, incarceration, homelessness, illicit and nonillicit drug addiction, foster care, and mental illness.
Beginning in 2008 and spanning 5 years, Sered and Norton-Hawk and a team of researchers follow the lives of 47 women at a Boston halfway house for women on parole and at a neighboring drop-in center for poor and homeless women. Most women were from middle-class families but found themselves in cycles of violent relationships, incarceration, and drug addiction. The authors focus on the irresponsibility of policies and treatment programs that seek to have “deviant” persons correct their own “unethical” behavior by encouraging them to take responsibility for their actions and suggesting that “they” are the problem. The authors highlight the hypocrisy of such programs by candidly describing the women’s experiences with the very systems designed to help them. In order to support their views, Sered and Norton-Hawk offer anecdotes by the study participants in which they describe their experiences with hospital staff, judges, social workers, housing authorities, and law enforcement officers.
A major strength of Can’t Catch a Break is the detailed history of the nine women they chose to focus on throughout the book. By describing their histories, the reader is able to see that homelessness, drug addiction, and incarceration is not always a condition of a bad person. It is often the result of cycles of inefficient treatment and bureaucracy. A limitation is the small sample of African American and Latina women compared to the large number of White women involved in the study. The authors note that this is a result of the demographics of the geographical area where the study took place.
True to Socratic form, Sered and Norton-Hawk bring the book to a close by posing further questions in the final chapter titled, “The Real Questions and a Blueprint for Moving Forward.” This chapter, as well as the book in its entirety, is vital to social work education specifically on the macro level because it highlights the need for research on why women like the ones in this study find themselves in cycles despite the plethora of programs and policies specifically designed to treat and rehabilitate them.