A Little Help From Prison Friends: Networks and Post-Prison Social Integration

• In Event: 423 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Paper Session. Classic and Emerging Perspectives

Abstract

With mass incarceration in the United States increasingly being recognized as an independent source of social stratification and a mechanism for reproducing urban poverty, understanding how individuals transition from prison to community has arisen as a major sociological and public policy concern. Distinct from what criminal justice scholars and practicioners term “prisoner reentry,” the social reintegration perspective focuses on how former prisoners rebuild ties to family and community, achieve a degree of material stability, and attach to conventional institutions and orientations after prison. This article develops social reintegration theory by drawing on advances in Durkheimian social integration theory, which increasingly views integration in terms of social network connectedness. I argue that social reintegration after prison can fruitfully be studied as a process of attachment to mainstream institutions and orientations through activating, using, maintaining, building, and interacting within social networks after release from prison. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among men in transition from prison to community in New York City and on case studies of individual personal networks, I find systematic network inequality among research participants. I demonstrate how, contrary to conventional wisdom, certain types of prison-forged social ties acted as a form of what I refer to as transitional social capital for some of the participants. The study builds on recent attempts to theorize social reintegration, demonstrates the benefits of a network approach to studying prison-to-community transitions, and produces findings with important policy implications.

Author

• Robert Riggs, New York University