Making the ‘Ex-con:’ Identity and Relational Reconfiguration in a Prisoner Reentry Organization

• In Event: 236 - Regular Session. Prisons and Prisoners 2

Abstract

Every year 700,000 men and women are released from penitentiary. A growing literature in criminology and sociology examines their struggles in trying to find a way back in society. Research currently focuses on individual struggles during reentry, neglecting that individuals reenter through an organizational context. Building on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with Safe, a government-funded nonprofit contractor servicing formerly incarcerated men and women (‘clients’), I show the pivotal role that the reentry organization plays by institutionalizing the pathway to prisoner reentry: a reentry trajectory, established and enforced by Safe, that is directed toward a particular idea of rehabilitation, defines the steps to get there, and keeps clients away from the ‘people, places and things’ of their past. The reentry trajectory takes formerly incarcerated men and women through a process of identity and relational reconfiguration, the product of which is the ‘ex-convict,’ who is dependent on professionals, isolated from his or her community, and equipped with an exaggerated sense of agency in the face of sizable barriers to housing, employment, and community life, and a strong likelihood of re-incarceration.

Author

• Jonathan Jan Benjamin Mijs, Harvard University