We interview Matías Cordero Arce about his book, Sketches from a Juvenile Justice Centre: Coercion, Relationships, Emancipation
Our member, Dr. Matias Cordero Arce (Spain) talks about his new book, Sketches from a Juvenile Justice Centre: Coercion, Relationships, Emancipation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
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Q: What is this book about?
This book is a distillation of the ongoing dialogue between my practice as an educator in a Juvenile Justice Centre (JJC) in the Basque Country (Spain), since 2014, and my uneven academic acquaintance with the diverse scholarly fields that touch on the reality of a JJC. This necessarily “compromised” standpoint means that the issues addressed are not the result of a systematic approach to youth justice, but rather a very personal selection owed to my own experience as an educator. This is not to imply that the choice is arbitrary, unfounded, or unsound, but that it is inseparable from my lived experience.
This very personal selection of issues include posing education in JJCs as a politically motivated practice; challenging dominant narratives that isolate youth behaviour from its social context; problematizing power differentials and power struggles between educators and youth; exploring the inevitable tensions between coercion and care; discerning the emergence of educator-youth relationships in the cracks of the institutional totality that is a JJC (a totality boosted by developmentalism and adultism); highlighting the importance of playfulness as an attitude that challenges hierarchical norms and fosters emotional bonds; and imagining ways to deschool JJCs.
To un-conclude, I argue that our relationships define the persons we become and the societies we build, that the enclosing nature of capitalism and adultism has harmed our relationships to their core, especially the relationships that constitute who children and youth are, and that it is not meant to be this way because we can choose otherwise.
Q: What made you write this book?
As I say in the book, I started to take notes and write things down about my work in the JJC years before I even thought of writing this book. I probably did this because of my academic training but also because of what I already then happened to see and live as a tension between what I did, what I believed in, and what I should believe in. So, when those notes started to take more shape, it was probably the outcome of this persistent need to understand, to make sense of what I do and what I should do.
There were, and still are, times that I come home after a shift hurting because of something or someone (that someone maybe being myself). And as I say in the book, doubt has been an inevitable companion throughout this long decade, and it was the underlying mood when writing. But there have been, and still are, moments that overflow with meaning. This book has put some order in, and given sense to this barrage of hurt, doubts, and meaningful moments, and in this sense, even if the book is a work in progress, in many ways, including very intimate ones, it has meant closure.
An excerpt from the book:
I… keep on working in my JJC… because it (still) makes sense. Specifically, because the relationships nurtured there with the young people make a lot of sense, because they are real. Actually, one could slightly twist Pierre Bourdieu’s own twisting of Hegel’s formula and say that, in a JJC, only the relational is real (in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 97).
I remain at my JJC because I think of abolition not only as a future utopia but as an action in which we engage every day. Abolition, which is a synonym of emancipation, is a verb to be conjugated in the present continuous: “we are abolishing,” as “we are emancipating.”
Thus, we are abolishing when we empathize with the profound discrimination that most of our youth suffer daily, a discrimination that many times, as with the Roma youth, has also been suffered by their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, and we side with the youth in its denunciation; we are abolishing when we have clear as crystal that “no one enters violence for the first time by committing it” and that “choice is for the lucky” (see Chap. 3, above); we are abolishing when speaking to Joaquín, and not to his symptoms; we are abolishing when, following Georges Snyders, we commit to broaden the limits of the youth’s desires; we are abolishing when we practice hope and conceive of our jobs as Núñez’s (1999, 2007) anti-fate; we are abolishing when and if, we choose to hug, not to physically restrain; we are abolishing when we try to shift the power balance inside the JJC from unilateral control towards collective equilibrium and mutual care; we are abolishing when we choose to trust the youth; we are abolishing when we make ourselves vulnerable in front of the youth; we are abolishing when we open work to play, and ourselves to playfulness; we are abolishing when we embrace every young person’s saying and doing that tends to level the hierarchical plain that we inhabit by default in our JJC.
In sum, we are abolishing in what John Holloway (2010) calls “interstitial moments,” by “cracking” a given and unproblematic hierarchy and status quo, and thus doing differently.