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Defining Post-release ‘Success’: Using Assemblage and Phenomenography to Reveal Difference and Complexity in Post-prison Conceptions

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Abstract

The complexity of men’s experience of prison release is frequently reduced to singular narratives about reoffending risks or reintegration challenges. This paper seeks to enlarge this conventional view by highlighting the heterogeneous ways in which prison release may be experienced and understood. Analysis of men’s experience of release from prison in Victoria, Australia, shows how the concept of assemblage and a phenomenographic methodology can work together to capture and convey this heterogeneity. By assembling the ways ex-prisoners understand and experience release together with the conceptions of post-release support workers this approach highlights conflict and convergence between different ways of experiencing the post-release terrain, specifically around conflicting notions of post-release ‘success’. The innovative combination of assemblage and phenomenography thus contributes a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the challenges of release from prison and of supporting ex-prisoners’ so-called ‘reintegration’.

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Notes

  1. The notion of the ‘carceral assemblage’ incorporates Halsey’s (2007) ‘reincarceration assemblage’ and Arrigo and Milovanovic’s (2009) ‘prison-industrial assemblage’.

  2. The research also focused on maleness and masculinity in prison cultural contexts, but these concerns are beyond the scope of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, GPO 2476V, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia

    Diana F. Johns

  2. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Diana F. Johns

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  1. Diana F. Johns
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Johns, D.F. Defining Post-release ‘Success’: Using Assemblage and Phenomenography to Reveal Difference and Complexity in Post-prison Conceptions. Crit Crim 23, 295–309 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-014-9262-3

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