Reentry to Nothing #3: Home, sweet home (original) (raw)

This article draws from a 3-year ethnographic study conducted in Oakland, California among a group of formerly incarcerated people who face the challenge of reintegrating into society. An average of 1,700 prisoners are released daily from jails, prisons, and federal penitentiaries in the United States, only to be dumped into the segregated neighborhoods from which they were forcefully taken years before. In the wake of neoliberal cost-reduction strategies affecting community supervision programs and social service agencies, the experiences of returning prisoners suggest the emergence of a low-cost model of urban containment that devolves largely to market forces and nonprofit agencies. This barely regulated collection of private forces—backed by the ever-looming threat of prison or jail—is all that is left in a postindustrial city stripped bare of the community networks and welfare services that existed before the neoliberal punitive turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The article documents some of the survival strategies adopted by former prisoners and their families, and illustrates how the cycle of incarceration and reentry operates as a powerful engine for the reproduction of racialized social inequalities in the US.

Former prisoners are at high risk of economic insecurity due to the challenges they face in finding employment and to the difficulties of securing and maintaining public assistance while incarcerated. This study examines the processes through which former prisoners attain economic security, examining how they meet basic material needs and achieve upward mobility over time. It draws on unique qualitative data from in-depth, unstructured interviews with a sample of former prisoners followed over a two-to three-year period to assess how subjects draw upon a combination of employment, social supports, and public benefits to make ends meet. Findings reveal considerable struggle among our subjects to meet even minimal needs for shelter and food, although economic security and stability could be attained when employment or public benefits were coupled with familial social support. Sustained economic security was rarely achieved absent either strong social support or access to long-term public benefits. However, a select few were able to leverage material support and social networks into trajectories of upward mobility and economic independence. Policy implications are discussed. C 2014 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

An extensive body of research has documented the barriers faced by ex-offenders in the labor market. This article presents an ethnographic case study of an industry that actively recruits and makes profitable use of this stigmatized, yet abundantly pliable and easily exploitable, source of labor. In so doing, this article focuses on the qualitative character, as opposed to the quantitative (in)accessibility, of jobs available to the more than half of a million convicts streaming out of prison each year. Drawing upon extensive interviews and participant observation in the day labor agencies of Oakland and Baltimore—where poor, predominantly African-American and formerly incarcerated men clamor for a day’s work—the article documents day laborers’ experience of this precarious employment relationship as a kind of extended incarceration and enduring form of punishment, one that traps them in a forever liminal status. This study highlights the extraordinary vulnerability of formerly incarcerated workers and deepens our understanding of the interface between hyperincarceration and the restructuring of urban labor markets.

The Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority has been evaluating St. Leonard’s Ministries programs since 2011. As part of that evaluation, Authority researchers examined administrative program data and outcomes of residents after program participation, conducted interviews with program staff and stakeholders and completed field observations to identify program components that are effective in contributing to successful resident outcomes, learn about the programs’ residents and operations, and analyze client outcomes.This report focuses on Grace House, a voluntary, residential, prisoner reentry program for women. Those accepted into the program receive housing, substance abuse treatment, psychological services, life skills mentoring, and education and vocational services.

Property shapes the way we talk about our communities and ourselves. It also, unintentionally, shapes the way we talk about the poor. Within property, the doctrine of waste reinforces notions of autonomy, privacy, and boundary-making for property owners, while leaving those without property searching for other ways to assert these self-defining protections. Likewise, nuisance assists owners' participation in their communities by dictating when individuals must account for harms their property use causes to neighbors. The law, however, provides few legal remedies for poor persons who are harmed by owners' sanctioned use of property. Through the language of ownership, property doctrines facilitate special benefits for those with property, while forcing those outside of property to seek other means to assert similar benefits. Owners-landlords of gap rentals, public housing authorities, and cities-often treat their poorest residents as problems to be managed rather than residents deserving autonomy and community. Housing units are destroyed, families are displaced, and homeless are forced further out of sight. The doctrines and rules that encourage these outcomes focus on the improper, the impaired, or the imperfect instead of facilitating discourse about how living environments promote human flourishing for these residents. In this way, our property system's rules and language create a class of persons who are under-propertied, under-housed, and under-valued.