Abstract
In Homeward: Life in the Year after Prison, Bruce Western critically and thoughtfully engages the empirical alongside the ethical in this qualitative study of reentry in the United States. This book is a major methodological departure from Western’s previous work focused on statistical analysis of large-scale data sets, something he acknowledges early. Quantitative sociological research on experiences within the criminal justice system has often filtered out the complex and messy lives of individuals living in America’s experiment with mass incarceration. This filtering out, Western argues, has led to major shortcomings in data analysis and theory development. Overlooked have been the experiences of violence, victimization, severe material hardship, and addiction that coexist within the lives of those incarcerated; filtered out has been the complicated texture of life that occurs in the transition from community to prison and then back homeward to families and communities after release. In short, these underlying traumas, “hazards of biography, health and ability, and the truly grim conditions of American poverty” (p. 3), that exist among the incarcerated population have been poorly addressed in empirical work.
Western takes up this task and seems to effortlessly provide us with vivid “on-the-ground” pictures of this complicated texture for the lives of 122 men and women leaving Massachusetts state prisons and reentering various neighborhoods across Boston. However, Homeward does not stop at rich description. Western also challenges us to morally and ethically question the purpose of both punishment and justice in our current American context. In capturing reentry narratives and the extent of hardship experienced prior to, during, and following incarceration, Western calls on readers to reckon with the moral and ethical question of when punishment ends and justice begins for the formerly incarcerated. Western notes, “the ethics of punishment must confront the real lives of those who are incarcerated” (p. xiv), and those real lives, situated within a comprehensive and critical review of existing research and policy, are indeed what one confronts when reading Homeward.
Housed within the eleven chapters that make up Homeward are several key methodological innovations and substantive contributions. Each undoubtedly enhances the study of reentry as social integration and our understanding of the processes former inmates go through trying to find their footing in society in the first days, weeks, and months after release. To start, Western’s data is unparalleled. The Boston Reentry Study (BRS) qualitatively documents the journeys of a diverse cohort of men and women headed homeward after leaving their cells within the Massachusetts state prison system in 2012–2013 and returning to neighborhoods around Boston. Western and his research team interviewed these 107 men and 15 women five times over the course of their first year after release. The first interviews took place while individuals were still incarcerated, a week prior to their release. Then once released, interviews were conducted approximately two weeks, two months, six months, and twelve months after release. Interviews covered a range of topics including housing, family, employment, health, drug use, crime, and social background, and the BRS research team was able to complete 94 percent of all scheduled interviews—maintaining incredibly high response rates for what is generally seen as a notoriously difficult population to follow.
Possibly given the notoriously vulnerable nature of the BRS population, Western, somewhat unorthodoxly, outlines his study methods early on in the book (Chapter 2), disclosing participant selection, research design, data collection strategies, ethical struggles, safety precautions, consent considerations, and confidentiality complexities up front as part of the main text and not relegated to a methodological appendix. I found this choice of placement refreshing! Western and his research team followed BRS participants through unstable housing, shifting addresses, and stints in homeless shelters; through rehab, efforts to gain employment, and stretches of joblessness; and, for some, through struggles with drugs, alcohol, and new experiences with violence, victimization, mental illness, and recidivism. Knowing up front the ways the BRS team addressed the ethical and empirical challenges that arose during data collection helped to validate the realities and complexities of the highlighted narratives.
Moreover, the BRS team did not stop with the individual, but also connected with participants’ extended family members, collected life histories, secured access to participants’ police and court records, tracked respondents if re-incarcerated, and overall seemed to experience an unprecedented level of buy-in from the Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to conduct the study. In sum, it is clear that much thought and work went into the collection of the BRS data to be able to paint such a fine-grained and multi-perspective picture of the complicated, contextual, conflicted, and courageous lives of the BRS respondents, and it seems very few people outside of Bruce Western (and his talented and committed research team) could have pulled this off.
Substantively, Homeward makes necessary and timely contributions to discussions of violence and justice and to literatures spanning criminal justice reform, poverty and policy, and the state of race relations in the United States. In seeking to examine factors that condition successful prisoner reentry and those that impede progress, Western presents what he calls a “humanizing social analysis” (p. 25) by placing people within their social contexts, revealing individuals’ creativity, full humanity, agency, and loving relationships alongside their experiences of stigma, trauma, crime, violence, discrimination, and human frailty.
Western’s attention to, and articulation of, the conditions of human frailty (Chapter 4) and histories of violence (Chapter 5) among the BRS participants are what I found most original. Human frailty—defined by Western as vulnerabilities of the mind (e.g., mental illness and drug addiction) and body (e.g., severe and chronic physical health problems)—was persistent over the life course of BRS respondents. Often rooted in history, these experiences with human frailty highlighted the sheer depth of poverty, policy failures, and histories of abuse and discrimination respondents carried with them as they made genuine efforts to reenter society. As Western notes, this level of frailty is marginalizing, even among the socially marginalized, and presents a profound paradox for the project of prisoner rehabilitation and social integration that public policy seems unprepared to tackle.
The careful attention to the complexities of contextual violence in the lives of BRS respondents also stands out as a new and welcome contribution and should be seen in conversation with recent works by Alex Kotlowitz (2019), Danielle Sered (2019), and Lisa Miller (2015). Through the 40 life histories collected, it is clear that BRS respondents were not just perpetrators of crime and violence—as their criminal records would suggest—but also regularly circulated through the roles of victim, offender, participant, and witness to abuse, violence, and crime across their lifetimes. In vivid detail, the experiences of violence shared by BRS respondents were born from contexts of disadvantage and discrimination, highlighting moral ambiguity around questions of who is the victim, who is the perpetrator, and who deserves to be punished. Serious violence—defined by Western as events that instill fear or inflict bodily injury—was present daily across respondents’ social contexts (neighborhoods, schools, families, and correctional facilities). The narratives that Western shares show that individuals take part in various roles (victim, witness, participant, offender) with regard to violence across their lifetimes, never neatly being divided between the criminal justice system’s static statuses of offender or victim. Instead of focusing on doling out harsh punishments to individuals we view as offenders, Western powerfully suggests that future criminal justice policy aimed at reducing mass incarceration needs to acknowledge violence as a product of poverty, racial discrimination, and reductions in informal social control and work to abate violent contexts.
Outside the illuminating chapters on human frailty and violence, there are a few places I would have hoped to see more development. Western is definitely inclusive in discussing the wide range of social experiences and statuses that intersect and inform the reentry experience. These include the initial adjustment period (“Transitions,” Chapter 3), the struggle to find work and make ends meet (Chapter 6, “Income”), the importance of family, especially female kin and the gendered nature of available support networks (Chapter 7, “Family”), experiences with recidivism and the paradoxes of parole (Chapter 8, “Back to Jail”), the unique experiences of reentry for women (Chapter 9, “Women”), and the racialized experiences and raced nature of mass incarceration (Chapter 10, “Race and Racism”). It would have been a significant oversight had the book skipped any one of these topics, and yet in attempts to cover them all, sometimes chapters fell short in their ability to thoroughly discuss, dissect, and highlight the complexities of each in depth. Given the richness of the BRS data, I imagine each of these chapters could produce stand-alone pieces—some of which have already been published as journal articles or popular media pieces (e.g., Western 2015; Western et al. 2015; Western 2016; Western et al. 2016; Western and Smith 2018; Western and Sirois 2019), with perhaps more to come. I would love to see more attention paid to the paradoxes and precarities of being on parole, the significant role of female kin in working to maintain social and economic stability for their returning family members, and the ways the experiences and burdens of incarceration are disproportionally distributed across minority families and communities, drawing entire kin networks into the orbit of a racialized prison system.
The final chapter of Homeward (Chapter 11, “Criminal Justice as Social Justice”) offers up aspects of what a reimagined criminal justice system might look like if the United States began to view justice in new ways. These new ways could reflect the customs of the Ethiopian village shared by Western in the book’s preface (pp. xiii–xvi) or the concepts of social adversity mitigation, thick public safety, and reparations that Western raises and reflects on in the conclusion. This research-based engagement with social justice—one that brings empirical evidence to bear on the need for restorative social policies that encourage community membership, social inclusion, and a deep recognition of history and human dignity—is a refreshing and illustrative read for citizens and scholars alike.
Finally, I think this book provides an example of how our discipline can work to serve the mission of both social justice and empirical social analyses. An underlying tension continues to plague sociology, one that pits “detached, neutral” social analysis (seen as rigorous and thus more empirical) against “engaged, applied” work in the service of addressing social problems and translating them to the public. This tension isn’t new (see Feagin 2001 for one of many discussions), but it has once again become salient, often falling uncomfortably along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and social status—as scholars of color, female scholars, first-gen scholars, non-binary scholars, and those at less-elite institutions grapple with engaging in socially conscious work that simultaneously receives the recognition it deserves in the discipline. While not a panacea, by providing an example of what sociological research in the service of a “humanizing social analysis” looks like, Western contributes to a line of work historically exemplified by scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams that shows us these disciplinary missions can coexist. Thus, Homeward helps us recognize the power of our discipline for engaging in scientific empirical research in the service of humanity and social justice, and it gives us an imperative to conduct work that speaks directly to the important social problems and policy questions of our day.