"It's a Second Chance, but a First Life": Re-Engaging Those Reentering after More Than 20 Years of Incarceration

Background and Purpose: In 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that imprisoning juveniles for life violated their constitutional rights, leading to the release of a large number of those who had grown up and spent their lives incarcerated. They added significantly to the regular stream of people above 50 who are released after a long incarceration term, having served out their terms, been exonerated, or transferred to parole supervision. Scholars have pointed to the high rates of re-incarceration among those reentering, documenting the lack of accessibility of reentry services, and their ineffectiveness in securing housing, employment, or improving physical and mental health. Critical carceral theorists like Loic Wacquant have argued that many reentry agencies operate more out of an imperative to secure legitimacy within the greater reentry services institutional field, than to effectively intervene with clients. Given this fraught reentry landscape, older people being released after a lengthy incarceration term face multiple challenges. Research on the reentry community has failed to document their experiences. This paper responds to this vacuum by examining the experiences of older people reentering after a long term of incarceration. Specifically, we examine the challenges, supports, service engagement, and mobilizational experiences in a community of older reentering people (ORP) in Philadelphia over the age of 50, released after serving at least 20 years.

Methods: We conducted a mixed methods study from 2020 to 2025, utilizing semi-structured qualitative interviews with ORP (n=30), focus groups (n=5), and ethnographies of public events. A grounded theory approach was utilized to code the data.

Results: Participants described an extension of their incarceration trauma by being confronted by challenges that included: 1) a lack of attachment to community, family, and service providers; 2) a feeling of temporal disconnect or “being left behind”, logistically, and emotionally; 3) increased pressure to make life “count”, a notion we describe as a sense of “accelerated capitalism”; and 4) being hailed by reentry service providers and clients as “survival models”. Participants described a steady process of engagement with, and rejection of reentry services that didn’t fit, a process we describe as “filtering”, until many settled into an engagement with the same small group of reentry providers. Participants noted that these providers facilitated their reentry by: 1) strategically addressing their special needs, while simultaneously normalizing their experiences by embedding them in every-day communities and experiences, a process we describe as “slowing into normalcy”; 2) creating a strong sense of attachment through community-building within the agency, and outside; and 3) mobilizing them as a political community.

Conclusion and Implications: We discuss the emerging conceptual framework delineating the challenges and facilitating factors shaping reentry in this community. We describe the implications for practice, specifically noting that providers need to pay close attention to differing experiences of time, community, and existential worth. We argue that the institutional critique of the reentry field can be countered by agencies willing to resist pressures to become isomorphic with the reentry field, to refocus on collaborating with the ORP community.