Preface. This book is about what happens to released prisoners. Many of the homeless you see on the street were prisoners who are on the street because landlords won’t rent to them, and their family won’t let them move in since landlords won’t hesitate to evict them as well (do read “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” — far more people are thrown out on the street with all their belongings than you ever imagined — this is one messed up nation to treat people so brutally). Employers usually won’t hire felons either, so they have no money to pay rent with. And even the slightest infractions can send someone on parole or probation back to jail. These are some of my kindle notes. I left most of the heartbreaking stories out.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Miller RJ (2021) Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Little, Brown & Company.
The word justice suggests some harm repaired or some truth revealed, but 95% of all court cases end in a plea deal after a person has spent anywhere from several weeks to several years in a cage. Of the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated, 40% are black, 84% are poor, and half have no income at all. The 2,626 people who have been exonerated since 1989 spent an average of nine years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Nearly half are black, and almost all of them are poor. It is clear to anyone paying attention that the legal system does not administer anything resembling justice but instead manages the nation’s problematic populations.
To fully understand mass incarceration, we must go to the neighborhoods that hemmed them in long before they occupied cages, the same places that serve as their confines for years after they return.
We must wait with them for a space to open in the halfway house or in the shelter, because the laws and policies that the U.S. government has enacted ensure there is no place for them to go. We must sit in the homes of the parents, lovers, and children who share their burdens.
The story of mass incarceration in America is bigger than American jails and prisons, even with their two million captives. And it’s bigger than probation and parole, even with the five million people held in the prison of their homes through ankle bracelets, weekly drug tests, and GPS technology. This is because mass incarceration has an afterlife, and that afterlife is a supervised society—a hidden social world and an alternate legal reality. The prison lives on through the people who’ve been convicted long after they complete their sentences, and it lives on through the grandmothers, lovers, and children forced to share their burdens because they are never really allowed to pay their so-called debt to society.
Today, 19.6 million people live with a felony record, four times the size of the population on probation and parole, and ten times the size of the American prison census. Almost all of these people lived in dire poverty before they entered a cage, and they return to these same conditions on the day of their release. One-third are black; one in three currently living black American men have felony records. And while the number of black women held behind bars is eight times higher today than it was in 1980, the reach of the carceral state does not stop at the threshold of the black family.
There are 45,000 federal and state laws regulate the lives of the accused. They dictate where and with whom they may live and what they may do with their days. The greatest harms are concentrated at the state level, reaching into their neighborhoods. In Michigan, there are 789 of these laws.
In most states, this means that people with criminal records may not hold public office or live in public housing. They can be fired from their jobs on the whim of their employers or have their applications for apartments denied, even when they have the jobs, the credit scores, and the references to qualify otherwise. In some states, they may not be allowed to vote. With few places to work or live and fewer ways to change the circumstances they face, they still may not qualify for food stamps or student loans to go back to school and improve their living conditions. They may have to give up their parental rights. They certainly may not adopt children or even live in a home with a foster child.
They may not be able to leave the country, and, for some crimes, they can’t even leave the state. It doesn’t matter that they’ve finished probation or that their incarceration was decades ago. They can still be rejected, and there’s nothing that anyone can do.
Over half of the 35,000 people released from Illinois prisons annually return to Chicago, and half of them, about 9,000 people, to just six of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. All six areas have crime, arrest, and unemployment rates triple the national average, with black Americans accounting for 90% of their residents, save one neighborhood that is over 90% black and Latinx.
No other marginalized group—not poor black people without criminal records, not mothers on welfare, not even undocumented immigrants—experience this profound level of legal exclusion. No other group shoulders the burdens of social policy in quite the same way.
The supervised society has produced a new form of citizenship through practices of punishment and exclusion that target our nation’s poorest families. We’ve failed to see, or perhaps we’ve ignored, how the ways we’ve chosen to punish the poor extend far beyond the prison’s walls and start long before an arrest occurs. This, too, is part of the afterlife of mass incarceration
Today, 100,000 men, women, and teenagers, nearly half of whom are awaiting their trials, circulate between the Cook County Jail and some poor black neighborhood on the South Side or West Side of Chicago each year.
Long lines of visitors snake around corners outside the entrances to each of the main dormitories. Once visitors get inside the first gate, longer lines mark the pilgrimage of overworked public defenders, parents and grandparents, social workers, wives, husbands, and partners, some with strollers, others holding the hands of their little ones, huddled together under the elements. One line is for visitation, another is to post bail, a third is to retrieve property.
When “feeding time” is announced, some man in oversize khakis hauling an industrial-strength black garbage bag filled with bologna or ham sandwiches on white bread, sometimes with oranges and cartons of milk, makes his way to the front of the wing to pass out his goods.
In the early 1980s, my grandmother, whom we called Ma Ma (pronounced “Mah-Ma”), took me to court with my two brothers, Joseph and Jeremiah. Our mother had left us at a police station. This was right before the crack era but after Reagan made a scandal out of the “welfare queen.” The police station was one of the few places that a poor, drug-addicted, or mentally ill woman could leave the children she couldn’t raise, or simply did not want to raise, without risking a charge of child neglect.
Some judge or underpaid hearing officer got to decide whether or not my family stayed together or if my brothers and I would be sent back to the foster homes where the other kids did not know us, where we could not play with the toys, where as a toddler I once sat in shit for an entire day. As we grew up, my brothers and I got into trouble. We got into fights and dropped out of school. My brothers cycled between different kinds of confinement—group homes and foster care and jails and prison cells and treatment facilities and electronic monitors. At various points in our lives we’ve all slept on park benches or stayed in shelters and lived in neighborhoods that none of us felt were safe.
On a hearing officer’s whim, I was spared the worst parts of the system and left in the care of my grandmother. I’m fortunate never to have done time. My brothers weren’t so lucky.
The plea deal is a perverse kind of a confession. It is an abdication of the inquisitorial process. Fact-finding is unnecessary. No deep truths are revealed through plea deals. They are negotiations between a prosecutor with the power of incarceration and death at his or her disposal, whether or not there is evidence, and a defendant who just wants to go home.
The people who take these pleas are typically stuck in cells and live under the threat of long prison sentences. They’ve been separated from their families. They confess guilt to a judge and to their accusers in open court, giving up their right to a trial that they likely couldn’t afford. They do this whether or not they believe that they are guilty because copping a plea is the fastest way to get home, but almost everyone I met who took a plea regretted it. You cannot undo a guilty plea.
Once it’s entered, the defendant gives up the right to an appeal. And you can never do enough to erase it. A conviction follows you through news clippings, mug-shot databases, and cheap electronic background checks easily accessible to employers, landlords, licensing officials, and anyone with thirty dollars, a credit card, and enough curiosity to look. There are whole industries built around disseminating criminal records and storing files in digital databases. Sometimes, companies make records publicly available and charge a fee to take them down. Most times, they compile the data and charge a fee for people who want to use the information to investigate others. And while a plea deal saved Ronald’s mother from a lifetime of incarceration, this was an atypical outcome.
I launched the Detroit Reentry Study, a research project that would follow 90 newly released prisoners for two years. I would meet them on the day of their release from jails, prisons, and police lockup facilities nearby and observe them as they tried to put their lives back together. We followed men and women as they looked for work or places to live and as they did their best to reconnect with their families. Some had been locked up for just a few days; others had been incarcerated for decades.
My brother Jeremiah was pulled over one day, and the officers found he was driving without a license; it had been suspended after his last DUI. When they ran his name, they saw he had an open warrant in Michigan. They took him into custody. He was processed, shackled, and put on a transport van to Ann Arbor, where he would face his day in court. He told me the trip took three days even though Chicago to Ann Arbor is only a 4.5 hour drive, five hours if you stop for coffee and bathroom breaks. The van, which was privately owned, took a detour to the East Coast to pick up additional passengers. After three days in a van and three days in jail, Jeremiah was released on his own recognizance. A judge ordered him to check in with a probation officer and submit to weekly drug tests, even though he had not (yet) been convicted of a crime. It didn’t matter that he had a wife and a job back in Chicago. He could not leave Michigan. He could not go back to my home, which was, after all, the scene of the crime. It would have been hard for me to let him stay anyway.
While he awaited trial, no one in liberal Ann Arbor would hire him. He did not have an address, which made it nearly impossible for him to find steady work, and he knew landlords rejected applicants with records. With no job, he couldn’t have afforded an apartment anyway. Jeremiah couch-surfed with people he barely knew or slept in a moving truck. He eventually found a community—a local priest allowed the homeless to erect a tent city in the church parking lot, and he slept outside on the asphalt on a makeshift cot.
He went home a free man with a charge that he could probably explain if he was asked about it in an interview, but he had a conviction. He would be considered a “habitual offender” should he ever be arrested again, and “habitual offenders” got “sentence enhancements”—legalese that meant a judge could give a longer sentence. I turned to his attorney and asked, “What if we fought and lost?” He said that if Jeremiah was convicted, he would do 10-15 years. Plus, the judge could add an additional 10-15 years because he was a “repeat offender.” Jeremiah had been caught shoplifting a cart full of goods worth more than 500 dollars from a Target in Ohio. He had been convicted of grand larceny, making him a “habitual offender.
Timothy’s story was like that of so many other people I’d interviewed. I would ask, “How old were you when you were first arrested?” They would tell me 10 or 12 or 16. I would ask, “How many times?” They would say 10 or 15 or sometimes laugh and say something like “Shit, too many times to count.” Chicago, Detroit, New York, LA, Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti, Michigan, even Harvey, Illinois. It didn’t matter what city. Boys got in trouble. Boys got into fights. Boys cut class. Boys got arrested. And their trials were so similar: A boy or his mother or his brother or his friend was assaulted. The police were called, and they either came too late or didn’t come at all. In Detroit, in 2013 the average response time for a 911 call was 58 minutes, and that was for “high-priority calls” like robberies, sexual assault, or active shooters. And the homicide clearance rate in Chicago in 2017 was just 17%. This meant that 83% of the city’s murderers were never brought to “justice.” Why would anyone call the police? The girls’ stories were similar, but there were important distinctions. They were 16 on average when they were first arrested. Almost all of them had children. They leaned on their mothers or sisters or friends when they were locked up, rarely on their lovers. Almost all of them had been sexually assaulted—by babysitters, by parents, by boyfriends, by strangers. (Some of the boys were sexually assaulted too, but it took many, many interviews and sometimes a number of years before they shared those stories with me.) New York City had something like 17,000 untested rape kits; Detroit and Chicago and every other major city in the country were about the same.
The people I met told me without fail that the police didn’t come when they needed them, but they were there when they smoked a joint or sold a few rocks or turned a trick to get out of a bad situation.
I’ve sat across many tables from many different people, sometimes when they were in prison, most times after they were released. Most had been locked away for years. We’d have coffee or break bread or share a bench during cigarette breaks at their AA meetings or their anger-management sessions. I’d meet them at the unemployment office or a library or when they filled out applications for public aid. I’d go to their homes and sit with their families, doing my best to learn what it was like to live in a supervised society. I spent hours talking with some and years talking with others. It didn’t matter if they were convicted of killing a man or robbing a store or getting high. There was a pattern: An arrest. A series of incarcerations. A sense of guilt. A feeling of shame. A struggle to find their way.
The outcomes were almost always the same. Very few people landed jobs. Fewer still could rent apartments. They moved from couch to couch as their lovers and family members grew exhausted caring for able-bodied adults who could not find their way.
The psychologist Geraldine Downey studies the weight of rejection in people’s lives. She studies how the anticipation of rejection affects psychological and physical health. In adults, it leads to anxiety and depression and a sense of dissatisfaction with life and intimate partners. No wonder so many relationships dissolve when a lover comes home from prison; no wonder so many people struggle to get their footing after hearing No dozens of times.
Locked out of the political and economic life of the city, formerly incarcerated people must depend on the mercy of others, although they rarely find it. They look for housing, but options are scarce or unaffordable. Social-service agencies refuse to help them or have long waiting lists.
Jimmy (one of the 90 people the author interviewed for this book)
He had just come from a meeting with his parole officer. When I asked how it went, he whipped out a photocopy listing his “conditions of release.” He could not cross state lines without the court’s permission. He could not possess a firearm. He could not return to or be near the vicinity of his last arrest. He could not “associate with known offenders.” That is, he could not live or work with anyone who had a criminal record, and he could not spend time with anyone on probation or parole. He could not drink alcohol or use “any controlled substance.
The restrictions were straightforward, but the sheet also listed tasks he was required to accomplish. He had to report to his parole officer once a week to submit a urine sample for drug testing, which he was expected to pay for—ten dollars for every test. He had to complete a job-skills training program at the Michigan Works! Association, a workforce-development agency. He had to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings twice a week. He had to attend all other “physical or mental health treatment” the courts or his parole officer deemed necessary. He had to search for employment. He was on an electronic monitor, his whereabouts tracked through an ankle bracelet and GPS satellite technology, so he had to do all of this between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. each day. If he violated any of these conditions, he could be sent back to prison.
The parole officer sent Jimmy to a job agency that was closed. That was not unusual; these kinds of places folded all the time. But it had taken Jimmy an hour to get to me on Detroit’s notoriously unpredictable transit system, and we’d still ended up walking a mile. I wondered if there was somewhere else we could go, somewhere closer to Midtown. But that would just make it harder for Jimmy to get there when the bus pass I’d given him eventually expired. Besides, there was no phone number on the printout for the agencies we might go to, and in any case, Jimmy’s phone had run out of minutes. There was no way to know which place would be open.
If the workforce-development center had been open, he could have gotten a bus card for the month from a case manager. Without a bus card, Jimmy would have to walk nine miles to the other center. He would have to walk to his court-ordered AA meetings and he would have to walk to the parole office to give his weekly drop. He told me he could be sent back to prison for missing any of these appointments, and he was right.
We both knew men who had been “flopped” for similar reasons. Nearly a quarter of all prison admissions the previous year were for parole violations like these, and the price of violation was steep. Parolees who got flopped had to finish their sentences, and Jimmy had eighteen months left on his. Even if his PO didn’t think Jimmy’s violation was serious enough to warrant prison, he could be held for ninety days in the “eye-drop” unit at the detention center.
Jimmy had been laid down many times. He did seventy-seven days at a work camp for stealing something from a garage with a partially open door. He did thirty days in the county jail for “pissing hot”—failing a drug test—and another thirty days at the eye drop for missing his very next appointment.
Missing an appointment because he overslept or not going to a treatment group because he couldn’t borrow bus fare—could cost this man his freedom.
We walked to the counter together to sign Jimmy up for a session. The receptionist told us that all the classes were full. She instructed Jimmy to put his name on the waiting list and to come back the next week because a parolee might fail to show. They did not give out bus cards to people who were not yet in the program, and they could not guarantee him a spot.
In that moment, I understood why Jimmy worked so hard to make sure that I was comfortable. He lived in an economy of favors. With so many rules to follow and so much risk involved—one mistake could cost him his freedom—he needed favors from people he barely knew to meet his basic needs. Life for Jimmy was so chaotic in part because he was so often rejected.
He moved from one catastrophe to the next. There was no way for him to anticipate that he would need a ride from me, but he had to stay in my good graces just in case he needed me. In the end, my help didn’t matter. The agency had no room for Jimmy, and it would make no room for him, even though he’d spent a good part of the day trying to get there.
Jimmy turned to his girlfriend for a place to stay each time he was released. And she would always help him, letting him sleep on her couch or giving him a hot meal or cash when she could afford it. But her landlord started asking questions. He told her he saw Jimmy come and go at night. He didn’t want trouble in his building. And he knew, like everyone else, that Jimmy had been to prison. He told Ruth that he liked her, but if Jimmy moved back in, he would be forced to put her out.
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Of the 250 dollars I sent my brother in prison, 100 dollars was applied to fees he owned — a 400-dollar extradition fee and a 68-dollar fee for the “state minimum costs” to record his felony conviction. We were both surprised to learn that half of everything he received over 50 dollars in a 30-day period would be applied to pay down his legal debt. He owed thousands of dollars. He was charged $650 for the privilege of being represented by a public defender he’d met just once, on the day of his hearing, and $1611 for “court costs.” Judges, stenographers, bailiffs, and clerks had to be paid.
One in three black American men lives with a felony record and where almost nothing they can do will save their children from meeting the same end.
A million families live this way: Sending money they can’t afford. Making court dates they don’t have time for. Driving five hours only to be turned away because there’s been a lockdown at the facility or their names weren’t on some registry or they showed up on the wrong day or someone’s dress wasn’t quite long enough.
Over half of all Americans, including nearly two-thirds of all black people in this country, have a family member who has been to prison.
“At the halfway house,” Yvette told me, “my roommate was using and selling drugs and boosting.” Her roommate was supporting a heroin habit by stealing clothes from local department stores and selling them on the street. “Of course she gave me some,” Yvette said, “which started me back up, you know.” Yvette was using again just a few days after her release, a parole violation for sure. She knew she would give a dirty drop. She knew she was headed back to prison.
Yvette and a few girlfriends stuck together in those early days, sleeping on couches and alternating nights at some “guy’s house” that one of them was “talking to.” Nights on the street. Nights in dope houses. Nights in the beds of people they didn’t know very well. Yvette lived like this for a year.
Just about every woman I talked with had been sexually assaulted. An uncle. A boyfriend. A parent. A half sister’s husband. One in six women nationally and a staggering 86% of all incarcerated women are survivors of sexual assault; 75% were abused at home, and over half were abused as children.
Rich kids didn’t get arrested; people like Yvette did in the early 1970s. With just 300,000 people in cages and a population that exceeded 200,000,000, the U.S. incarceration rate was relatively low. Mass incarceration at the scale and concentration that we know it today was in its nascent stages. She had seen so many people who were released come back to prison in just a few months. A new prostitution charge. A parole violation—pissing hot or missing appointments or getting into a fight with a boyfriend.
Her boss understood but said there was little he could do. An employer could be sued for having a felon on the payroll. A decade free and a decade sober. A volunteer. A hard worker. A good daughter and wife, and soon to be a mother. In the end, none of that mattered.
It was 1991. Mass incarceration had reached its midpoint, with 1.2 million people held in American jails and prisons.
Changes in liability law, beginning in the 1980s, started in housing. Tenants sued negligent landlords when they were robbed or mugged in their buildings. The courts sided with the renters, finding that crime prevention was part of every landlord’s responsibility. More lawsuits followed. Landlords were fined under nuisance ordinances for letting their buildings fall into disrepair, for harboring drug users and gang activity, and for leasing apartments to felons. Almost overnight, property owners became part of the crime-fighting machine.
They responded to this new responsibility by evicting tenants with even decades-old criminal records, and denying leases to people facing criminal allegations.
The verdict was in on prisoner rehabilitation—much of the public and most policy makers believed it simply did not work. Crime could not be treated, the public thought, because criminals were born, not made. A suite of new laws provided a way to avoid the risks posed by “criminals” without having to deter crime. Employers could simply refuse to hire “ex-cons” or fire them once they learned of their convictions.
Employment discrimination was illegal. Were Yvette fired because she was black or because she was a woman, she could have filed a lawsuit against her employer. But she was fired because of her record, and there was nothing that she could do. If you are labeled criminal in this country, your life will never be the same.
MASS INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN
On any given day, there are 48,000 incarcerated children living in the United States; 17,000 are in juvenile detention; 11,000 are in “long-term secure facilities,” those training schools and reformatories that use work and school and moral teachings to turn bad boys and girls into good ones. Over 10,000 are in residential treatment for drugs or alcohol or a sex offense or for mental-health or behavioral problems, 3,400 are in group homes, and 4,500 children do time in an adult jail or prison despite what we know happens to children when we lock them away with adults.
Half of the nation’s prisoners have minor children. That’s a million parents locked up on any given day. That’s 2.7 million children who have a parent, at this very moment, sitting in a cage. Five million American children have lived this way, their parents experiencing their children’s first steps or their first words or their first real disappointments from a cell. A million fathers watch their kids “grow up through family pictures.
In the past decade and a half, 32,000 prisoners lost the right to raise their children although they were not charged with child abuse or neglect. And while nearly all of them were poor, and many were addicted, some five thousand had their parental rights revoked simply because they were incarcerated—as if their incarceration weren’t punishment enough.
Mothers are almost always the primary caregivers for their children, and incarcerated mothers were five times more likely to lose their rights than incarcerated fathers.
The child welfare system was in crisis. There were horror stories. Foster children were abused (there was a 50% increase in reported cases between 1985 and 1993) and neglected (there was a similar increase in reported cases of neglect during the same period). Because these children were hard to place, many never found a permanent home. Instead, they “aged out” of foster care as they became adults. And we know from studies of foster-care outcomes that these children had a terrible time. More than half dropped out of high school. Nearly half were arrested. Over half were unemployed. Nearly 40% became homeless. Some had children of their own much earlier than they’d expected. And many of their children ended up in foster care.
After 20 years and nearly one million adoptions, the act is vaunted as a success. But the act’s passage had deleterious consequences for the nation’s poorest families. As part of the streamlining process, the federal government set guidelines to terminate the rights of parents whose children had been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. The average prison sentence in the United States is 2.6 years, over a year beyond the 15-month guideline.
They received letters in their cells telling them their rights had been taken away. Their children were adopted. The adoptions were closed. They could never contact their children again. The Department of Corrections has no legal obligation to take the parent to family court.
Judges set bail, or don’t, without thinking twice about the children
‘I was supposed to pick up my kids,’ the mom might say. ‘I got pulled over for a taillight, and when I didn’t show up, the school called [Child Protective Services].’
Black families are more likely than white ones to be reported to child welfare agencies. They are less likely to receive the services they need to keep their children out of foster care. Their children are more likely to be removed from their homes, and once removed, they receive services inferior to those offered to white families. This is despite the fact that black families are no more likely to abuse or neglect their children than white ones. Half of all foster children in New York State are black, and they are admitted into foster care at ten times the rate of white children.
“The parent is picked up,” Amanda said. “Jail. Bail. She can’t pay. It’s tricky because no one is really tracking this.
All the people I met doing research for this book were on their way somewhere when they were arrested: To work. To the grocery store. To visit a relative. To the hospital. One woman was arrested the day before her graduation from an alternative high school in Detroit. She got into a fight with a cheating boyfriend while getting her hair done at a beauty salon. The police were called. She had a Taser and a criminal history. She spent the next few months in jail.
Sixty percent will leave an American jail without ever being convicted of a crime, but almost all of these women will be separated from their children.
Congress passed the Housing Opportunity Extension Act of 1996. The act required public-housing agencies to evict tenants for “any criminal activity” that threatened the “health, safety or right to peaceful enjoyment” of any other resident. This included any crimes committed “on or off such premises” as well as crimes committed by “any member of the tenants’ household…any guest, or other person under the tenants’ control.” Put differently, tenants could be evicted for allowing someone with a criminal record to simply visit their home.
Thousands of families have been evicted, and thousands more live under the threat, for housing relatives with criminal records. Many can’t afford the risk, so they must turn their relatives away.
By 1998, almost every public-housing authority in the nation had taken up some version of the initiative, barring people with criminal records from the premises and evicting entire families who let formerly incarcerated loved ones sleep on their couches. Exclusion became official housing policy.
If a landlord has decent housing to provide, they probably won’t even rent to someone with a criminal record…But there are plenty of landlords who do, [and they] rent to people with extensive records or people [they know who are involved in] criminal activities…But often times those places aren’t fit for people to really live in. I had heard as much from dozens of previously incarcerated people, that it was nearly impossible for them to find a place to live regardless of their credit or income. And they told me the conditions in the apartments they found were unbearable. Vermin. Rusty water. Broken appliances. Lights and electric sockets that didn’t work. Some places were dangerous in other ways. They were next to crack houses, or they were in neighborhoods where the police rode through to make arrests but didn’t have a real presence otherwise. The schools were the worst in their districts. Nothing ever worked. The landlords abused their rights, and the tenants had little or no recourse.
With so much at risk, sometimes telling a mother to evict her child was the best legal advice she could give.
The people the government has incarcerated, cut off from their family and friends, are twice as likely to die from any cause than anyone else in this country. They are three times as likely to die from heart disease and four times as likely to die from cancer. They are most likely to die within the first few years of their release. If you consider death by drug overdose, incarcerated people are 129 times more likely to die within just two weeks of their release than members of the general population. For every year someone spends in prison, he loses two full years of life expectancy.
And the health care in prison is poor—when health care is provided at all. Most inmates have a history of drug addiction. Some have tuberculosis and hepatitis and HIV and all of the various illnesses that circulate in places like prisons.
Men in prison experience a kind of death. To be cut off from family for years—to be too far away for regular visits. To watch so many of your closest relationships fray and then dissolve. To see your children grow up through family pictures. To be hungry for days at a time because the food you eat is never enough, and there is nothing that you can do about it. To be isolated. To be in a place with thousands of men but to somehow feel alone. This is what it means to be socially dead. To be subjected to violence and humiliation. To be shackled, one to another, during daily routines, your ability to work and provide for yourself taken away. To move in a coffle down long hallways like animals for “feeding time” or “meds.” To be marched away from your lover and your children every time visitation ends. To be cut off from the human community or to have no community at all—at least, no community that might be valued by members of a free society.
Prisoners might haunt a neighborhood after release, unable to find work or secure a home, unable to participate in the politics of the city in the ways most people find meaningful. To have no say over where or how often you connect with people you love. To be made a “nonperson,” in the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson, who gave us the term social death. To be at once a part of the wider world, through labor or punishment or as a social problem of national concern, yet to be kept just outside of it.
A halfway house has a lot of rules
The halfway house was in a foreign land. Zo was nervous, but he had to go. It was a condition of his release. Zo knocked on the door wearing khakis, his prison-issued oversize button-down white short-sleeved shirt, and black plastic boots, the kind that gave most men blisters. The man who opened the door took Zo’s paperwork to another office, showed him his rack, and went over the rules: You can smoke outside. No drugs. No drinking. No guests. No pets. You must sign up for food stamps right away and turn over your Link Card (a debit card for food stamps issued by the State of Illinois) to the house manager; he would use it to buy groceries for Zo and the 15 other men who lived in the house. No food in the rooms. Get your own toiletries. Check in with your parole officer once a week. Stay sober. You have to leave each morning and piss in a cup when you return at night. Curfew is eight p.m. You have to get a job. The IDOC covered the first thirty days’ rent, but it was four hundred dollars a month after that. Rent must be paid on time. This was a halfway house (the kind of place my grandmother would have called a flophouse). There were no five-day eviction notices. You could be put out any day of the week for any reason.
The 30 days went by fast. Zo had lost most of his family connections. His mother was dead. His younger brothers were in no position to help. He had never been in a romantic relationship, at least nothing long term, so there was no warm bed to sleep in at night. He hadn’t been called for a job interview. Even if he found a job, he wouldn’t get a paycheck for at least two weeks, and it probably still wouldn’t cover the rent. Where would he get the 400 dollars? Zo faced eviction. He had been to many different kinds of prisons—to juvie, to jail, to penitentiaries downstate—but he had never been homeless. Worse still, homelessness was a violation of parole.
Nearly all day-labor agencies in the city were in Latino neighborhoods with high concentrations of immigrants, and many of Chicago’s restaurants, meatpacking floors, and waste-disposal and construction sites were staffed with undocumented workers. You can’t talk about day labor in Chicago without acknowledging that day-labor agencies seem to prefer to hire Latinos.
Reentry programs don’t seek to remove the barriers formerly incarcerated people face. They can’t. Criminal records are stored in electronic databases. Anyone with 30 dollars and a debit card can pull them up. Some are even free to the public. In Chicago, there are over 700 policies that keep people with criminal records unemployed. More than 50 bar them from housing. There’s very little social-service agencies can do.
In criminal justice parlance, the reentry program tries to make “criminals” into “productive citizens.” They can’t change the reality these people face, so they try to change how the people who face those realities see, understand, and respond to them.
The focus on employability comes out of efforts by policy makers to enhance what economists call “human capital”—the skills, competencies, and qualities associated with a healthy workforce. Human capital has two sides. One has to do with the education and training an employee uses to complete a task. The other has to do with “noncognitive skills,” attributes like mental toughness, trustworthiness, and grit. To reduce the poverty and address the cycles of unemployment that formerly incarcerated people face, policy makers seek to enhance their personal qualities, making them more desirable job candidates.
The goals of the Second Chance Act couldn’t have been stated any more clearly: 165 million dollars to teach men how to shake hands and tie ties, but nothing to help secure their long-term employment. There was funding for case managers who might find a man or a woman just released from a cage a place to live, but there was no money allotted for affordable housing.
The problem of reentry is not simply a problem of behavior. There are rules that formerly incarcerated people must follow that other people just don’t have to. There are laws that regulate their lives that do not apply to anyone else, that puts them in a zoo whether they deserved to be or not.
There is no question about the need for reentry programs. They relieve real human suffering in real time. But the problem of mass incarceration is ultimately a problem of citizenship. As long as formerly incarcerated people are legally excluded from the labor and housing markets, investing in their human capital won’t do much to improve their lives. Reentry organizations can’t erase their records or change their social situations.
If you live with someone on parole, you are subject to the things that person is subject to—random checks at ungodly hours, phone calls, the threat of a raid. This was not only a point of discomfort. There were videos floating around the internet of police shooting the wrong person or raiding the wrong house or killing black people every day going about their normal routines.
If I allowed my brother Jeremiah to live with me, my family could be evicted. Renting the unit from my homeowner friend was the only real option. I didn’t know it then, because I didn’t have the words, but I was drawn into the economy of favors. I had to overlook my friend renting the basement to that handyman; there was nowhere else I could turn for help. I had to leverage my reputation to get the parole board to believe in the plan or Jeremiah would spend more time in prison. I had to indulge the parole officer, sitting through ridicule, so that he would approve the placement. All of these arrangements could dissolve on a whim. Any of the people I turned to for help could have said no without so much as an explanation.
After a three-hour visit, and after I’d endured bad jokes and threats for more time than I spend with most people, the officer denied Jeremiah the placement I’d found him. I called the officer to find out why. I got his voice mail. He replied with a text message a few days later. The unit had dogs, he texted. Not allowed by section 12 of Illinois Criminal Statute 720: Possession of unsterilized or vicious dogs by felons prohibited.
I discussed how demands that can’t be legally required of others, like peeing in a cup or attending an anger-management class, can be required of you. I discussed how the laws and policies that made you dependent on others also made you among the least desirable candidates for help, that the people you turned to in your time of need could be punished if they helped you.
And I talked about what it meant for everyday activities that were legal for everyone else, like drinking or crossing state lines or spending time with whomever you wanted, to be illegal for you. I called this “carceral citizenship” and said the emergence of an economy of favors changed how people relate to one another in this new supervised society. It introduced a new power dynamic. Relationships, for formerly incarcerated people, now began from a position of need. You need the apartment or the job with the boss who mistreats you or the relationship with the lover you no longer care for because you have nowhere else to go.
I asked about Jeremiah’s curfew. The agent said on normal days he would need to be back by three o’clock, but he would let him stay out today until six since I had driven all the way from Chicago. Then the agent showed me his computer screen. Three people would be monitoring Jeremiah’s movements. The agent would be watching, someone from MDOC headquarters in Lansing would be watching through a GPS satellite, and someone from the private company that MDOC contracted to provide the satellite images would be watching. “We can even tell which direction he’s facing in the car”.
Jeremiah had a good relationship with the job coordinator at a trucking company. They found him a job right away, but then I got a call from him one night. He told me he couldn’t take the job as a driver because felons couldn’t cross state lines. Even if he got a job as a local driver, he had a curfew and his travel had to be approved. There was no way the parole supervisor would sign off on the new job, even if his parole agent went to bat for him. I’d worried about this when he signed up for the program, but if they knew this would be a problem, why did they send him to truck-driving school? What did they think would happen? A man who had been homeless. A man who just got out of prison. A man who would have a terrible time finding work otherwise. What good would a truck driver’s license do?
The agent found him a job working the second shift at a tortilla factory, but he hated every minute of every day. He was fired a few weeks later. The job was too demanding. “They changed my shift, and I couldn’t keep up,” he said. This too is the afterlife of mass incarceration—to be separated from your hopes and any real idea of freedom. Millions of people are unable to decide for themselves where they will work or live or spend time. Millions more can’t find a job or housing at all.
He had already been re-arrested four times. Once he’d stayed in jail for three days. Twice for ten. Once for 30. This time he was being sent to a 90-day residential drug-treatment program in a small town in western Michigan. They didn’t tell him it was 90 days. They never told him how long he would have to stay. And he didn’t know this at the time either, but his two-year parole would start all over when he was eventually released. Jeremiah was arrested twice more over the next four months. He was sent to another drug-treatment program, this time in Detroit. He did 90 days there, telling me he thought he’d gotten something out of the program.