The Affective Experiences of Reentry Survivorship

• In Event: Restorative Justice and the Complex Realities of Coming Home

Abstract

Reentry research to date has thoroughly explored formerly incarcerated individuals’ exposure to structural harms that jeopardize their literal and social lives. There is thus a wealth of criminological scholarship that highlights system-impacted individuals’ high risks of “poor” outcomes after incarceration, including re-incarceration and death. In this presentation, I shift focus from the harms that system-impacted individuals face after incarceration to explore the experiences of those who, at least on paper, are success stories in that they are (1) living in the community, and (2) alive. Drawing on 28 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals, I explore participants’ complicated emotions and sense making processes as they negotiated their successes and survival. As participants reflected on their own survival in light of peers who did not survive (in both the social and literal senses), many of their narratives centered on feelings of survivor guilt and grief. However, others sought to make sense of their differential outcomes by focusing on the individual attributes that separated them from those who had not survived. Drawing on theoretical scholarship in survivorship, I argue that these findings reveal the complexity of surviving multiple overlapping structural harms.

Author

• Arden Richards-Karamarkovich, George Mason University