ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the youths and staff talk about everyday life at the institutions and the role played by different aspects of custodial openness. It is important to understand the functions that the staff feel that institutional leave serves, or should serve, and staff and youth narratives on the factors of significance to whether or not a youth is given institutional leave. These narratives show that institutional leave plays a central role as a disciplinary technique via the specification of good behaviour as a condition for being granted leave. The chapter therefore devotes a substantial amount of attention to this issue. The central focus on good behaviour has consequences for the everyday life of the institutions, both for the youths’ experiences of their period of institutionalisation and for the power relations between youths and staff, which is discussed in the chapter’s final section. However, in order to understand how and why opportunities for more open forms of custody are so important for everyday life in the institutions we first need to understand how the youths experience being incarcerated, and the chapter therefore begins with their narratives on this issue.
