Reentry in an Era of Criminal-Legal Reform

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this study explores the experiences of people coming home from prison in Pennsylvania. The dissertation includes three standalone articles. The first chapter identifies an overlooked reason why people on parole engage in rule-breaking and withdraw from otherwise supportive resources. I leverage insights from organizational sociologists and poverty scholars to show how parole’s inattention to socioemotional dynamics and individuals’ efforts at dignity maintenance impede reentry and risk reincarceration. Moving beyond a focus on material hardship, network dynamics, and carceral governance, this chapter broadens our understanding of failure in criminal-legal supervision and the promise of reform. The second chapter investigates how the rise of “lived experience,” typically understood as exposure to adversity in mainstream circles, is shaping reentry work. Using a symbolic interactionist approach, I trace how lived experience is understood as a biographical credential that facilitates bureaucratic achievements and permits social validation within our credential society. While the credentialing of lived experience has reinvented stigma in some respects, it runs the risk of freezing identity and exacerbating the burdens of already marginalized people. The third chapter examines people’s experiences navigating and working within the broader reentry landscape. I analyze how people respond to conditions of institutional fragmentation and attempt to construct a safety net. I document how their strategies secure concrete gains and sometimes falter in a complicated criminal-legal bureaucracy. Accordingly, this chapter sheds new empirical light on how organizations play a central role in people’s post-prison trajectories. Together, these three chapters make contributions to sociology, criminology, and social policy.