“It is so good to be seen:” Care, Kinship and the Carceral Afterlife in the New Jersey Returning Citizens Support Group

Abstract

This thesis examines how formerly incarcerated individuals cultivate systems of care and survival in a continued structure of abandonment. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork with the New Jersey Returning Citizens Support Group, it seeks to understand how relationships formed during incarceration extend into reentry and become a foundation for support networks that address material needs, emotional healing, and social reintegration. Relationships are the basis of care, which is understood as an obligation in response to collective survival during incarceration. Reciprocity is reframed as a collective commitment to ensuring that no one is alone as they navigate reentry, generating kinship ties. This thesis embraces and is critical of mutual aid frameworks. While providing necessary emotional support, the group cannot address structural conditions such as barriers to employment. Additionally, the care provided can rely on female labor that goes unrecognized. Exploitative carceral logics are both resisted and adopted within what organizers call a broader movement for liberation. Bringing together literature and ethnographic fieldwork, this work understands reentry through kinship and care beyond exchange. It adds to the literature about the possibilities and limits of community-based responses to state violence.