To Go Straight or Return to the Street?

Abstract

In the wake of decades of growth in the American prison system, unprecedented numbers of people flow out of penal institutions each year: 750,000 are released from state and federal prison, and 7 million more from local jails. Reentry on this scale creates a host of new policy challenges and important openings for social science research. I study the problems of reentry ethnographically. Based on nine months living in a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail, I examine how the prison experience follows people after they leave, the forces and processes that push people back toward prison, and the strategies of former prisoners confronting often extreme forms of social exclusion. My reentry research doubles as a ground-up account of the American prison boom: a window on the world of a small group of men and women rebuilding their lives under the long shadow of mass incarceration. I present the research in three articles: Reentry within the Carceral: Foucault, Race and Prisoner Reentry uses concepts from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to re-frame the way we think about reentry, while also taking account of the deep racial inequalities that stamp the American prison system. I argue that people leaving prison are branded delinquent in a society infused with technologies of surveillance and control. In this context, reentry is best conceptualized not as a move from confinement to freedom, but along a carceral continuum of graded intensity. Further, the racialized features of social control in the United States often leave black and brown bodies in themselves marked delinquent. An individual need not commit a crime or spend time inside to become enclosed in social spaces characterized by exclusion and close surveillance. In the case of many black prisoners, formal processing by police and prisons only intensifies a process already underway, and the experience of reentry is best understood as a particular moment in long-term process that begins before imprisonment. The Social Logic of Recidivism: Cultural Capital from Prison to the Street develops a conceptual framework for explaining the cycles of incarceration that so often enveloped the lives of participants. I argue that the growth of incarceration, concentrated geographically along race and class lines, establishes the structural context in which the choice to enter street culture makes sense for large numbers of former prisoners. In high incarceration neighborhoods where street culture is predominant, large-scale movements in and out of prison create networks of relationships that traverse and blur carceral boundaries. Prison and street cultures become partially fused – at different times they are populated by many of the same people - and because of this overlap, the skills and knowledges people learn while incarcerated are also valuable in the street. That is, incarceration involves an accumulation of cultural capital that increases the potential rewards of street crime. Rather than providing roads toward a new life, incarceration creates a structure of constraints and opportunities that pushes people back toward the street. Free But Still Walking the Yard: Prisonization and the Problems of Reentry examines the deep and lasting changes that people carry with them after leaving prison. I argue that prisonization transforms the habitus, as penal institutions are deposited within individuals as lasting dispositions, motor schemes and bodily automatisms. This prisonization of the habitus can be observed in the everyday practices of former prisoners: the experience of physical space, the rituals of cleaning and bodily care, and the practices of consuming food. While some of these habits and dispositions may seem innocuous, they express an underlying adaptation of the convict body to the rules and rhythms of prison life that can have powerfully disruptive effects during reentry: creating feelings of stress and anxiety, making it difficult to function in routine social situations, amplifying exclusion from the labor market and other institutions, and encouraging return to street cultures shared with other former prisoners.