From Bureaucratic Boundaries to Emotional Binds: Conflict and Control in the Governance of Crossover Youth

• In Event: Everyday Carcerality: How Organizations Police, Punish, and Control

Abstract

In their desire to help people and feel good about their work, bureaucratic professionals—across both conventional welfare and punishment organizations—often unintentionally facilitate greater coercive control for the most marginalized people in their care (Fong 2023; Seim 2020; Watkins-Hayes 2009). In this book chapter, I illuminate the emotional process through which this happens. My analysis draws on over 300 hours of ethnographic observation and 40 interviews with professionals who manage crossover youth (children at the junction of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems), from social workers, probation officers, and attorneys to judges and agency directors. I show how workers in a variety of organizational positions across different state institutions share the aspiration to set children up for long-term flourishing, including directing them away from carceral control. But bureaucratic boundaries place these workers in three types of emotional binds: what to do in the face of complex problems (a crisis of efficacy), whether they are doing the “right” thing (a crisis of morality), and how their work shapes who they are (a crisis of identity). These inner conflicts influence workers’ outward behavior, leading them to favor professional responsibilities over which they feel they have more control, reframe their values in a way that accords with bureaucratic rules, and increase the emotional distance they have from their work. Together, these emotional binds and resulting behaviors lead workers to favor children they perceive as less complex and more compliant. In some cases, bureaucratic professionals—in part to minimize their own emotional pain—act in ways that appear dispassionate or even cold-hearted toward those who may be most in need. These findings thus illuminate an important micro-level mechanism through which bureaucratic conflict shapes high-stakes decisions of state control for marginalized groups.

Author

• Catherine Sirois, University of Pennsylvania