Despite a growing literature on best practices, the details of how aftercare workers help young people transition into the community after incarceration remain unexplored. This ethnographic study examines the daily practices of direct care workers within a large juvenile aftercare organization, focusing on the dilemmas that they face as street level bureaucrats. Although aftercare workers face tremendous organizational constraints, they do not always exhibit the bureaucratic responses that some scholars describe. Using care work and public administration theory as a lens, we explore how juvenile aftercare workers draw upon intrinsic motivation to provide meaningful services for returning youth.

In this article we will show how a relational approach provides a conceptual framework that shapes and informs culturally sensitive practice with a severely disturbed client. We argue that a relational approach facilitates therapeutic action through the intense focus on countertransference, the close attention to enactments, and the therapist's authenticity and self-disclosure. Additionally, we emphasize that a therapeutic matrix that includes the cultural, racial, socioeconomic, and institutional factors, increases the likelihood clinicians will attend to what Perez-Foster calls their “dissociated and disavowed personal values.” We present a case that had a less than satisfactory outcome where the therapist found herself in a “sea of trouble.” The case illustrates how a relational approach enhanced the therapist's understanding of the case and allowed her to continue to work with a difficult and challenging client. We conclude by suggesting that our conceptual understanding of this case exemplifies a necessary and appropriate focus for future social work research and practice.