Ezra's Bookshelf

Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

by Reuben Jonathan Miller · 352 pages · ~6.5 hrs

Society & CultureLaw & Justice

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Life after prison is itself a form of punishment, argues sociologist Reuben Jonathan Miller, and Halfway Home documents the obstacles that people with criminal records face as they try to rebuild their lives. Miller, whose own brother has been incarcerated, spent years conducting fieldwork in Chicago and Detroit, accompanying formerly incarcerated people through their daily struggles. Parole conditions constrain where they can live, whom they can see, what jobs they can take. Background checks exclude them from housing, employment, and licensing. They carry what Miller calls supervised freedom, a status that makes them permanent subjects of state surveillance. The book introduces readers to individuals trying to navigate this system: men returning to neighborhoods transformed by gentrification, women barred from the careers they trained for in prison, families bankrupted by fines and fees that accumulate through incarceration. Miller shows how the carceral state extends beyond prison walls into the lives of millions who have technically served their sentences. He connects individual stories to policy analysis, explaining how mass incarceration became mass supervision, and how both depend on assumptions about race and worthiness that structure American life. The book argues that criminal justice reform must address reentry, not just sentencing, if it is to meaningfully reduce the population living under state control.

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