Abstract
Academic research on “prisoner reentry” has been heavily focused upon experimental design and program evaluation rather than broader shifts in race and class relations or underlying economic change. Deeper theoretical attention to the subaltern context of prisoner reentry would offer a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the challenges facing the highly-marginalized populations of former prisoners now increasingly the objects of “reentry” programming. This paper employs a sociology of punishment perspective to foreground recent scholarship on the prisoner reentry movement and to document the still nascent implementation of a “prisoner reentry” agenda, despite nearly two decades of effort. The paper argues that long-neglected needs of subaltern populations incarcerated over the past several decades in the United States should become a more central focus of prisoner reentry research. The paper highlights the work of several theorists to summarize three theoretical perspectives to help balance the “reentry” research agenda: prisoner reentry as neoliberal punishment; prisoner reentry as peculiar institution; and prisoner reentry as criminological scientism.
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Notes
“Penality” * Drawing from the work of Foucault, David Garland’s classic statement on the meaning of “penality” “refers to the complex of laws, processes, discourses, and institutions which are involved in this sphere and is a synonym for legal punishment in this broad sense” (1990 p. 10, fn12). He continues: “The suggestion I wish to make here, is that penality communicates meaning not just about crime and punishment but also about power, authority, legitimacy, normality, morality, personhood, social relations, and a host of other tangential matters” (1990, p.252). See Punishment and Modern Society.
By setting the standards of living for those punished ‘below the situation of the lowest socially significant proletarian class’ (Rusche, 1933/1978: 4), the principle of less eligibility would ensure that the most marginalized fractions of the proletarian class will accept any level of exploitation in the capitalist labor market, as this will be in most cases preferable to being punished for refusing to work at the given conditions (De Giorgi 2010, p 149). This is not dissimilar to an earlier articulation of the panoptic notion of “transcarceration” developed by Marxist criminologist Stephen Spitzer and others. See “Security and control in capitalist societies: the fetishism of security and the secret thereof.” In: TRANSCARCERATION: Essays in the sociology of social control. John Lowman, Robert menzies, TS Palys (1987). Wacquant later referred to the “carceral continuum,” in reference to the ghetto and the prison-a singular social institution which “ensnares a supernumerary population of younger black men, who either reject or are rejected by the deregulated low wage labor market, in a never-ending circulus between the two institutions”.
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Acknowledgment
M. Hallett thanks Dion Dennis, Hal Pepinsky, Dennis Sullivan, and anonymous reviewers.
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Hallett, M. Reentry to What? Theorizing Prisoner Reentry in the Jobless Future. Crit Crim 20, 213–228 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9138-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9138-8