Ethnographies on Prisoner Reentry

This chapter discusses ethnographies of reentry, or the process of people returning from prison to the community. In the chapter, both ethnography and reentry are defined broadly. For example, qualitative interviewing, participation observation, and a combination thereof are included under an umbrella of “ethnography.” These studies share an inductive or abductive analysis, with iterative engagement between data and existing literature and theories, and therefore the possibility for theoretical development. While much of the focus is on the return of people to the community after a period of incarceration, key works that focus on adjacent concepts, such as desistance, or why and how people with a pattern and history of offending stop, are also included. The chapter begins with a discussion of major ethnographic works on reentry, organized by those that focus on the individuals experiencing reentry (including major subgroups, such as men or women, people of different race/ethnic groups, youth, or young adults) and those that focus on systems and organizations. Then, it discusses major methodological issues, including researcher positionality. It concludes with brief discussions of future directions, which build both on earlier findings and on new technologies, and policy suggestions that emerge from both findings and practices in ethnographic work.

Got Faith? - An in-depth analysis and review of five faith-based prisoner reentry programs in Florida

In the United States, prisoner reentry programs are a necessity to re-integrate back into society and are of two types: Faith and Non-Faith. With increased emphasis placed on reforming the criminal justice system policies due to Black Lives Matter and other non-profits actively working to change the system from the outside, reentry programs are having a resurgence of interest for effective public policy. There are significant barriers for major policies at the state, local, and federal to be alleviated, nevertheless, our research wanted to consider the effectiveness of five faith-based, male-only reentry programs in central Florida. Small focus groups were utilized to better understand the concerns and issues returning inmates faced in the program as well as when returning to society. Reentry participants were found to have high confidence in the success of their participation in their faith-based program’s efforts on their personal and family growth.

An Assessment of Prisoner Reentry, Legal Financial Obligations and Family Financial Support: A Focus on Fathers

Scholars have found that family support is an important facilitator of successful reentry from prison to the community. At the same time, they have argued that owing court-ordered fines or fees, also called legal financial obligations (LFOs), can act as an additional barrier to reentry, especially for parents. There remains a need to test how LFOs impact the financial support formerly incarcerated parents receive from their families. The current study responds to this gap by employing logistic regression analyses of the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) data to test whether owing court fees is associated with formerly incarcerated fathers’ (1) perceptions of available financial support from family and (2) receipt of financial support from family. We find that owing court fees is not associated with perceptions of available financial support. However, owing court fees has a positive, statistically significant association with receiving financial support from family during the first three months after prison release. This relationship remains after accounting for whether the person owes child support or sees their children monthly. Our results suggest that LFOs may create a greater need for financial support among formerly incarcerated fathers, making the financial challenges of reentry a consequence not just for those who were incarcerated but for their loved ones as well.

“A Program, Not the Projects”: Reentry in the Post-Public Housing Era

Prisoner reentry is widely recognized as a hybrid project of poverty governance situated at the intersection of the welfare state and penal state. Numerous scholars have examined the devolved terrain and organizational dynamics of reentry services. Still others have emphasized the particular challenges and importance of housing to the reentry process. However, few have examined how reentry organizations secure or manage housing for their clients, particularly in an era marked by a widespread housing affordability crisis and the retrenchment of public housing in favor of privatized subsidized housing provision. In this article, we present an ethnographic case study of one particularly illustrative site: “New Beginnings,” a new and novel housing development in Syracuse, NY, codeveloped and comanaged by a prisoner reentry organization and a local housing authority. We show that, despite its ostensible mission to integrate the formerly incarcerated and provide much-needed housing to the poor, the development reproduces the stigma of criminal history, producing a sense of ambivalence among residents, who are both grateful for the quality of their new housing and resentful of ongoing forms of carceral supervision and control. In turn, formerly incarcerated residents uphold their participation in the program as a way to distinguish themselves from traditional public housing tenants, further entrenching dominant narratives about the failures of public housing. These findings reveal the complex interplay between the project of reentry and the provision of subsidized housing in the post-public housing era.