From Prison to Halfway House: Using Lived Experience and Feminist Co-Ethnography to Reform Community Corrections

• In Event: Beyond Autoethnography: Lived Experience Criminology

Abstract

This paper narrates the disconnect between Community Corrections policy and its implementation in Colorado (USA), noting tensions between evidence-based practice and the discourses of fiscal responsibility and public safety that shape post-release success, particularly in private halfway houses. Drawing on Feminist and Lived-Experience Criminology (LEC), we present co-author JoyBelle Phelan’s first-hand account of life post-release in dialogue with investigative journalism, peer-reviewed research, and government documentation, identifying failed enactment of the state’s own measures and misapplication of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need (Maslow, 1954). Though this chapter is not a critique of Maslow’s framework in the Community Corrections context, we do structure JoyBelle’s lived experience according to Maslow’s five categories of need. We conclude by providing examples of policy and more holistic, gender-informed programming that might remediate those challenges, emphasising how both system-impacted residents and their facility allies make use of Community Corrections infrastructure for their own ends.

Authors

• Libby Catchings, University of Denver

• Joy B. Phelan, University of Denver