"You're in a Room Full of Addicts! Towards an Analytic of Prisoner Reentry As a Social Institution

Background and Purpose: Keeping pace with mass incarceration, the number of former prisoners living in “inner city” neighborhoods has increased dramatically, transforming the urban landscape and altering the face of urban poverty in the U.SA. Former prisoners are a vulnerable group by any measure of population wellbeing, disproportionately suffering from chronic illness, housing instability, near intractable poverty and exclusion from social, civic and labor market participation. Furthermore, almost all released prisoners are re-arrested repeatedly and in short order. Given the number of people cycling between prison and poor urban neighborhoods, prisoner reentry has become an important social institution in the life-worlds of the urban poor and the prisoner reentry program, a key, if under-examined, urban organizational form.

Few studies attend to the practices and interactions that take place within reentry organizations or the broader implications of their ascendance. This study asks: (1) what strategies do reentry organizations employ? (2) Through what mechanisms do participants internalize or resist them? (3) What are the broader implications of reentry’s ascendance?

Methods: Findings are drawn from an ethnography of prisoner reentry programming on Chicago’s west side that occurred between January of 2008 and December of 2014. I participated, as a volunteer at a faith-based residential reentry program, observing participants’ interactions during health and mental health treatment, and “life skills”, “soft skills” and workforce development groups. I conducted fieldwork 3 to 5 days per week for 4 to 6 hours per day. Findings are drawn from a sample of 45 male participants consisting of 27 black, 13 white, and 5 Latino men between 18 and 65.

Findings: Building on Hasenfeld’s work on organizational forms, I exhibit reentry as a “people changing institution” where actors engage in the “moral work” of “transforming ex-offenders lives.” Unable to address structural barriers associated with having a criminal record, reentry programs employ cognitive-behaviorally inspired group-work, addressing participants’ perceived propensities to engage in “criminal thinking” while activating their work ethic and sense of personal and communal responsibility. Such programs seek to increase participants’ social and human capital, preparing them for the worlds of work and prosocial relationships after prison.

Conclusions and Implications:  Like all social institutions, reentry has classifying and stratifying effects. During group work, participants learn to embody group norms, internalize social problems, and “give back” to the group, sharing their experiences and engaging in mentor/mentee relationships—helping fellow participants to “transform their lives.” Those who embrace this process ("good ex-offenders") are rewarded with affordable housing, employment, and social service support upon program completion. Those who resist it ("bad ex-offenders") are left to their own devices. Thus, reentry services not only reflect broader deficits-based discourses on the raced and criminalized poor (i.e. they are dangerous, deviant, dependent, and in need of personal rather than structural transformation), but helps shape how former prisoners’ come to understand themselves (as "good" or bad ex-offenders), the category to which they belong (ex-offenders as a distinct class) and their place within the social world (e.g. as a mentor or one in need of mentorship).