Prisoner Reentry as a Social Institution

• In Event: 536 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Paper Session. The End of the Beginning or the Beginning of the End? Race and Decarceration

Abstract

The expansion of the U.S. prison system has been accompanied by the historic increase in the number of former prisoners living within the “inner city,” transforming urban poverty in the United States. Given high rates of recidivism and the overwhelming concentration of criminal justice interventions within low income communities, arrests, incarceration and successive rounds of prisoner reentry have become a normative social arrangement. Prisoner reentry has thus emerged as a key social institution in the life worlds of the urban poor and the prisoner reentry program an important if under-examined organizational form. Drawing on a three and a half year ethnographic study of prisoner reentry on Chicago’s west side, I exhibit the institutional dynamics of prisoner reentry programming, showing how actors who have been classified into different social categories interact, how these interactions alter their classifications, and how such classifications shape how urban poverty is embodied and understood in the current age. I present the interactional mechanisms through which the ex-offender is in part “made up” and discuss the broader implications of reentry’s ascendance and proliferation.

Author

• Reuben Miller, University of Michigan