The staging of change: Interventions of the juvenile secretariat of a juvenile criminal court in Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Abstract

From my ethnography on daily activities and interventions of a juvenile secretariat of a juvenile criminal court in the city of Buenos Aires, in this article I focus on what I identified as the second stage of the work process of that secretariat: The treatment. I identify how delegated inspectors construct and interpret certain attitudes, acts and expressions as a “desire for change”, or a lack thereof, in young people, and thus give continuation to their work. I want to show, ethnographically, the importance that demonstrationof change that young people and their families express acquires at this stage, beyond search or expectation to reach or prove a “real” change.
My goal is to deconstruct certain crystallized images on ways these professionals intervene, looking specifically to understand the meanings attributed to the notions of “resocialization” and “transformation” of young people who go through “juvenile justice”, stated like clear objective of this “justice.” I seek to evidence and to analyze what these notions mean, understood as native categories (Geertz, 1999) in practice. In this regard, I look also to propose an understanding of the notion of “accountability” other than the one it has been given in the work inspired by the Foucault pose. To do this, I will show that, at least in the investigated context, the processes of “responsibility” are not necessarily linked to the production of “autonomous subjects,” to the “universal internalization of norms” and to the notions of “self government” (Foucault, 2007), but other local senses that record particular modes of social control and formation of subjectivities.