Youth behind bars

Through an ethnographic study, this thesis examines the everyday life and meaning-making of young people locked up in secure care institutions for young offenders in Denmark. The purpose of the thesis is to make sense of their everyday life both inside and the outside the secure care setting, actively drawing on theories of youth and crime. By applying a relational approach founded in interactional sociology, the thesis explores how apparently senseless actions and situations are constructed socially by the young people when they bring together meanings in their everyday practices. Data, including both observation and interviews with the confined young people, is analysed as context-dependent and relationally constructed.