Halfway Home: An Ethnographic Study of Ex-Offender Community Reintegration

Author: Reuben Miller

Dissertation School: Loyola University Chicago

Abstract:

Scholars attest to the expanded role of the criminal justice system in the lives of the urban poor. Staggering incarceration rates coupled with recidivism approaching 70 percent, nearly 700,000 ex-offenders annually released from prisons, and millions more from jails across the country, highlight the importance of prisoner reentry for urban communities. These concerns are especially salient in Illinois, a leader in sentencing disparity and recidivism, where 80 percent of arrests were drug related and, in Cook County, the most populous and diverse region in the state, African Americans represent 80 percent of all felony convictions. Finally, the ratio of persons incarcerated to those released is 1:1, with slightly more inmates discharged than admitted, the majority returning to just 7 of 77 Chicago community areas.

Despite the proliferation of reentry programming, we know little about ex-offenders daily interactions with state and community based organizations operating within “receiving communities” where most are arrested and returned. Few qualitative studies exclusively focus on the post-incarceration experience. Fewer still examine ex-offenders network interactions during community reintegration. Religious organizations provide the lions’ share of reentry services, yet little research examines the role religion plays in punishment and urban poverty policy. Finally, studies highlight the cogence of culture and context in the social outcomes of marginalized groups, but we know little about ex-offenders’ perspectives on the role identity and geography play in community reintegration.

This dissertation addresses these issues through ethnography of ex-offenders reintegration experiences on Chicago’s Near Westside, grounding interactions within the matrix of “people, places, and things” they engage from the point of admission into residential programming through the period of greatest vulnerability for relapse and recidivism—90 days post program completion. “Halfway Home” offers insight into the role of reentry organizations in contemporary urban life and community actors’ influence on ex-offenders’ transition home. Subsequently, this study has implications for urban poverty, social policy, punishment, and citizenship studies.

Halfway home employs mixed ethnographic methods to examine the reintegration experience. I will observe ex-offenders’ interactions during a six-month treatment and 90-day follow up period in their home communities, and use inductive case study methods to conduct in-depth interviews with 65-95 residents, their personal network members, and “prisoner reentry stakeholders”—staff, administrators, and relevant community leaders who work with ex-offenders. I will examine their perspectives on the criminal justice system, social inequality, the salience of race, class, place, and gender in community reintegration, and the importance of personal networks in the transition home. Finally, I will conduct qualitative archival analysis at local, regional, and national branches of the organizations in the sample.

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