Social Service Review

In this article, we examine the experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals living in a brand-new reentry housing facility in Syracuse, New York, that we call “New Beginnings.” At this site, a select group of returning residents are placed in permanent supportive housing or shelter beds. In analyzing the experiences of residents, we borrow from Avery Gordon’s conception of “haunting” to explain the seething presence of the prison in a facility designed for its afterlife. We find that despite intensive service provision intended to help residents move on from their carceral pasts, New Beginnings reanimates the specter of the prison for its formerly incarcerated residents. Throughout, we present New Beginnings as an illustrative case study that demonstrates the blurriness of prison boundaries and the contradictions of contemporary reentry programs and policies.

In this phenomenological study, we seek to understand how former juvenile lifers, now middle-aged adults, navigate lost time and life course disruption in the context of family reintegration. Nine men who were incarcerated for an average of 27 years participated in multiple in-depth interviews. Life course theory, social support theory, and ambiguous loss theory are drawn upon to provide insights into their experiences of family reintegration and forging new family relationships following lengthy periods of incarceration that began as a youth. The concept of “lost time” encompasses major themes, including missing large portions of family members’ life spans, experiencing losses and major transitions, facing barriers to reconnecting, and attempting to forge new family relationships to make up for long developmental delays. Viewed through a life course lens, this study provides insight into the far-reaching consequences of harsh sentencing for youths in the context of American mass incarceration.

Child support arrears and criminal monetary sanctions are two forms of state-imposed debt that have gained increasing attention for their role in perpetuating inequality. Although past research recognizes that both groups of debtors tend to be socioeconomically disadvantaged and are disproportionately members of marginalized racial groups, the overlap between these populations has not been examined. Our study uses administrative data to link individuals from both groups, providing the first description and comparison of three populations of debtors—those with only criminal legal debt, those with only child support debt, and those with both types of debt—highlighting disparities and the compounding nature of both types of debt. We then draw on 30 in-depth semistructured interviews with individuals subject to state surveillance from both forms of debt, emphasizing three key themes that emerged: debt as carceral vulnerability, the relative salience of each type of debt, and perceptions of fairness.

Recent social movements have called for an end to mass incarceration and the diversion of funds from police and carceral institutions to social services. However, such a restructuring is limited without addressing the commonplace collaborations between criminal justice actors and social service practitioners. In an interview study with 66 social service providers who offer services to formerly incarcerated people, we examine practitioners’ relationships with the criminal justice system. Participants overwhelmingly report a reliance on direct collaboration with the criminal justice system to address a multiplicity of barriers people face when returning home to cities with weak social and economic infrastructures. Participants also described a moral frame situating themselves as mediators amid tensions between community members and the criminal justice system. Social service providers’ deep financial, logistical, and ideological entrenchment across the criminal justice system has several implications for the afterlife of mass incarceration and the capacity to reimagine justice.

We have all committed crimes, but few get caught. The distinction between carceral and conventional citizens is largely an illusion but one that affords great privileges to some and grave consequences for others. Rooted in critical feminist theorizing, intersectionality, and abolitionist scholarship, we extend Miller and Stuart’s conceptualization of carceral and conventional citizenship by embedding them in a social identity and system of power we call “carceral status” that intersects other categories like race, class, and gender. We draw from interviews with 32 formerly incarcerated activists to illustrate how carceral citizens experience “five faces of oppression” that define an oppressed group. Not only do they make material changes in institutions through their work, but they also symbolically restory themselves and transform the meaning of the carceral citizen category, providing new dignifying meanings to this aspect of identity. Our project introduces carceral status as a useful analytic tool for research and practice.

We theorize state governance through population spatial trajectories to capture how seemingly disparate systems of punishment employ the same set of punishment logics and technologies to spatially regulate populations of color, which produces and reifies racial projects. Advancing a theoretical framework called carceral migrations, we argue that governments use legal punishment to force, restrict, and prevent movement as a racializing project of settler empire and anti-Blackness. Carceral migrations extend understandings of mass incarceration beyond confinement and holding by articulating three major points. First, the state’s regulation of populations’ spatial trajectories is punishment by design. Second, these spatially-oriented punishments operate as race-making and reinforcing technologies by producing punitive and recognizable spatial trajectories (or nontrajectories) for groups of people of color. Third, despite appearing race neutral in language, the development and application of legal codes and policies have disparate impacts on the spatial trajectories of people of color.