Book Launch | A Dream Denied
The Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us in celebrating the release of A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America by sociologist Michaela Soyer. The author will be in discussion with Ruth Horowitz and Jamie Fader.
Young men of color are often portrayed in the media as victims of poverty and discrimination. In A Dream Denied, Soyer delves deeper, investigating the social and cultural implications of the ‘American dream’ narrative for young minority men in the juvenile justice systems in Boston and Chicago. The book connects young male offenders’ cycles of desistance and recidivism with normative assumptions about success and failure in American society, exposing a tragic disconnect between structural and juvenile justice policy. This book challenges us to reconsider how American society relates to its most vulnerable members, how it responds to their personal failures, and how it promises them a better future.
Michaela Soyer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work on the subjects of delinquency and incarceration, resistance to oppression, research methods, and social theory has been published in Mobilization, The Journal of Classical Sociology, The British Journal of Criminology, and other journals. Dr. Soyer’s new research is focused on inmate networks and their significance for reentry and recidivism.
Jamie Fader is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Temple University and an expert on urban social inequality, crime, corrections, and juvenile justice, transitions to adulthood, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Fader is the author of Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood Among Urban Youth, and numerous articles and book chapters.
Ruth Horowitz is Professor of Sociology at New York University. An exemplary and award winning public sociologist, her work has focused on social control, urban and medical sociology, and research methods. Dr. Horowitz is the author of Honor and the American Dream, Street Kids, Street Drugs, Street Crime, Teen Mothers: Citizens or Dependents?, and, most recently, In the Public Interest: Medical Licensing and the Disciplinary Process. Her current research concerns the careers and career transitions of ballet dancers.