Improvised Lives: Stories of juvenile offenders

Improvised Lives is a work that straddles fiction and ethnography, narrating the life stories of former juvenile offenders—boys and girls who served their sentences in a juvenile detention center and now recall their experiences.

It's an essay that delves into what it means to be incarcerated and how one ends up there. It explores the metamorphosis they underwent, if any, the changes in their lives, if any, and the memories they hold of those experiences.

All of this unfolds with the ethnographer as a character in the story, told in the first person. This study invites reflection on the effects of detention, while also offering a different perspective from which to understand this group: their own.