In the United States, about 650,000 people are released from prison each year; many will return. Bruce Western and his research team followed 122 of these “releasers” for a year.
Bruce Western is a central figure in the work on mass incarceration. He had shown with Katherine Beckett that the American prison population had become so large in the 1990s that the unemployment rate was artificially reduced. With Becky Pettit, he had calculated that for black men who reached adulthood in the 1980s, the probability of having been incarcerated at least once was 60%. In Homewardit reports the results of the longitudinal follow-up of 122 men and women who were released from prison in the state of Massachusetts in 2012 and 2013.
Research among people leaving prison is generally complicated by the fact that respondents disappear, due to their residential instability, their low internet use, their difficulty in keeping a mobile phone and their impromptu changes of telephone number. However, the people who disappear are those who present the most difficulties; longitudinal follow-ups of people leaving prison generally tend to present an artificially optimistic view of the situation of the respondents. The success of the survey of Homewardthere Boston Reentry Studyis to have completed 94% of the planned interviews (an interview in prison before release, then interviews one week, two months, six months and twelve months after release). B. Western offers a qualitative analysis of the survey, which is a novelty in his career. The statistics are descriptive, and the chapters link life stories that illustrate how different groups of releasers (men/women, whites/minorities, etc.) experience different aspects of leaving prison.
When the prison continues outside
On the day of release from prison, there are those who are expected by family or friends, and those who take the bus alone (or even walk along the road). The survey shows that six months later, this second category of releases is still just as isolated. The first weeks, the adjustment is very difficult for everyone. Technology has changed, everything is complicated, and any place where there are crowds causes intense stress. Releasers are also acutely aware of their position in the social hierarchy, especially when they live in shelters for the homeless.
The interviews made Western aware that mental and physical health problems—depression, schizophrenia, illness, disability, chronic pain, and addiction—were important components of the overall problem of leaving prison. All of these problems combine: heroin is used to relieve sadness and pain, a dirty needle transmits an infectious disease, pain becomes unbearable and intensifies addiction, a drug-using companion dies of an overdose, worsening depression, and so on. For some of the sample—especially older white women and men—the physical and mental problems are so severe that the idea of rehabilitation through work makes no sense.
Men and women
Men and women released from prison are two distinct populations in their relationship to the labor market. To put it simply, men and women face different pressures to generate income. Women have more family support and more welfare, which means they don’t have to look for work. Men face a racially stratified labor market. Their criminal records, poor health, and skill levels generally leave them with few prospects. But white men may fare better if they have maintained contact with a union and are not completely destroyed by their addictions; while black and Latino men tend to have access to only the least attractive jobs. Overall, against the tendency in the social science literature to view work as the royal road to rehabilitation, Western shows that most of the income generated by people released from prison comes from welfare and financial support from their families. For those who are alone, there remains begging, to which the book does not devote a particular chapter, but which often appears in life stories.
The families of the released prisoners have generally been very hard hit by the incarceration, the visiting rooms, and by all the money they have had to send to the prisoner for his canteen. The consequences are particularly adverse for the mothers of the prisoners who, after fifty and having all sorts of worries of their own, have to do the work of care for their son. According to B. Western, the family is an ambivalent resource. The relatives of the leavers are almost always from the same very disadvantaged social background. The family is both a source of income and housing, but also an instance where poverty, violence, mental illness, addictions as well as the tensions induced by family recompositions will have a destabilizing role.
Back to the prison box
The lives of those leaving are also (de)structured by violence. Contrary to a strong trend in the social sciences, B. Western defines violence as violence physicalHe believes that, in order not to stigmatize vulnerable populations, certain literature tends to minimize or contextualize the extent of the violence. Homeward shows the omnipresence of violence in the lives of people who go to prison. Since childhood, most of the people surveyed have witnessed violence, including murder, lost loved ones to violent deaths, had serious accidents, and suffered and committed violence. B. Western recounts the trajectory of a woman who was harassed (bullied) at school, then raped twice, then beat up a love rival, had two serious car accidents, overdosed, was infected by a dirty needle, lost a loved one to an overdose, fell back into opioid addiction, developed hepatitis and multiple lung and kidney infections, was assaulted on the street, etc. It is this violence, often linked to alcohol consumption, that sends those released back to prison.
38 of the 122 people surveyed returned to prison during the period of the Boston Reentry Study. Those leaving under judicial supervision (word) were more likely to return to prison, primarily because of their addictions, leading Western to argue that recidivism is not really a matter of choice. Consistent with the standard criminological script, older releasees are less likely to return to prison, both because they are less likely to be stopped by the police and because they commit fewer crimes.
B. Western devotes two chapters to the specific experience of women, who represent 10% of the prison population in the United States (compared, for example, to 6% in Germany, 4.5% in the United Kingdom and 3.5% in France), and to the question of racial inequalities (the rate of detention of blacks is 5 times higher than that of whites). But the message of her book is first to reaffirm the link between poverty, crime and punishment. Her central aim is to show how under-proletarianization leads to prison, and how prison perpetuates under-proletarianization. Taking the implicit counterpoint of urban ethnography, Homeward offers an extremely harsh and pessimistic vision of poverty, where violence, mental illness, alcohol and drugs rule out any idea of rehabilitation. Crime is a logical and normal consequence of poverty, and recidivism is a logical continuation of fundamentally pathological lives. Not that B. Western seeks to blame his respondents, on the contrary: for him, the fundamental problem is the inability of the social protection system to take care of the most deprived, and the inhumane excess of the penal system. Homeward suggests that mass incarceration is a cruel and counterproductive policy, with little effect on crime and terrible damage to the poor in American society.