Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities
Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities
Reentry, Race, and Politics
Anthony C. Thompson
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2008 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thompson, Anthony C.
Releasing prisoners, redeeming communities : reentry, race, and
politics / Anthony C. Thompson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8147-8303-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8147-8303-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Ex-convicts—United States. 2. Criminals—Rehabilitation—
United States. 3. Minorites—United States—Social conditions.
I. Title.
HV9275.T56 2008
365’.6470973—dc22 2007043248
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For My Parents, Elena and Leo Hopkins and Teddi and Billy Taylor. You have taught me a great deal about love, faith, and redemption.
Contents
2 Media Influence on Public Perceptions of Prison Life
3 Women: The Afterthought in Reentry Planning
7 Reentry and the Political Process
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund at the New York University School of Law as well as the continued support from a number of colleagues, especially Professor Deborah Schenck, who has been a great support in this project. I would like to thank Susan Hodges and Damaris Marrero for their impeccable administrative support. I would like to thank Michael Chen, Tom Leith, Tara Mikkilineni, Cynthia Pong, and Andrew Stanner for their research assistance. I would also like to thank Jenna Johnson for her edits of an early draft. I would like to thank Oscar Bobrow and Jennifer Gonnerman for their comments on an earlier draft. I want to thank my editor, Debbie Gershenowitz, for identifying the importance of the issue and for her insightful editorial assistance. Finally, I want to especially thank Kim Taylor-Thompson for her support and substantive assistance in this effort.
Introduction
Reentry is a term few people outside the criminal justice system know. Some individuals and communities have experienced firsthand the consequences of our national failure to facilitate meaningful reintegration of recently released prisoners. Far too few individuals can either articulate or imagine the benefits of a comprehensive approach to reentry. This is due largely to the fact that this country has never devoted the time, care, or attention necessary to create such an approach. Instead, our efforts to address reentry have, at best, remained an afterthought and, at worst, have been dismissed as someone else’s concern. What has led our choice as a nation to ignore this crisis is the pervasive interplay of race, power, and politics that infuse and confuse our attitudes about crime.
So permit me to begin with a definition to ground our discussions. Reentry is the process by which individuals return to communities from prison or jail custody. The focus of this book is the way that race, power, and politics all conspire to make reintegration more difficult, if not impossible. In conversations, studies, and reports, we often discuss crime statistics, drug use, and incarceration rates. In addition, significant attention has been paid to prison conditions and to the philosophy and approach to incarceration. Whether we are talking about rehabilitation, retribution, or incapacitation, we have spent precious little time considering what happens when individuals leave custody. We rarely consider, for example, the obstacles for men and women who have been separated from family and community for significant periods of time. Alternatively, we have also failed to examine in depth the communities themselves. The cycle of poverty, incarceration, and frequent removal of large numbers of people to jail and prison generate instability in the fabric of the community. Racial and ethnic bias, the War on Drugs, and the portrayal of young men of color as predators all conspire to blur our focus on the issue.
The United States is in the midst of the largest multiyear discharge of prisoners from state and federal custody in the history of its prison system. This release is a direct consequence of the explosion in incarceration that this country experienced and endorsed over the last two decades. The repercussions of this massive release effort are only now beginning to be felt. Staggering numbers of ex-offenders, having completed their sentences, are returning to the communities from which they originally came.1 In 2001 alone, corrections officials discharged over six hundred thousand individuals, with most returning to the core communities of their incarceration.2 As a result of the War on Drugs and the almost single-minded focus in the 1980s and 1990s on targeting, denouncing,