The U.S. Prison Industrial Complex has been highly debated over the years. With 25% of the world’s prison population residing in U.S. prisons, it is the most incarcerated country in the world. While the prison system has received substantial amount of press coverage, lesser attention has been given to the reentry process that formerly incarcerated experience as they return to life in society. The U.S. sees approximately 641,000 returning citizens each year where they face structural and societal challenges to assimilating back into society. On a structural level, returning citizens face legal restrictions that hinder them from becoming self-reliant i.e. securing housing, gaining employment, accessing education, seeking medical treatment. Beyond the structural barriers to reentry, more pressing still is the profound disorientation returning citizens experience in navigating everyday life. Viewed as “sub-citizens”, many struggle to overcome the social stigma attached to having spent time in prisons and to keep up with advances in technology.
Metrics assessing reentry remain limited. Policymakers default to recidivism however, it is a blanketed and binary indicator of reentry health. It does not account for differences in the definitions and measurements of recidivism in different states, the hyper-policing of communities of color, and focuses on failures rather than tracking improvements in behavior. More than semantics, the re-framing of metrics is important in directing governmental and community resources to programs that rebuild lives instead of imposing monitoring and punishment measures. Further, recidivism as a metric highlights the philosophical underpinnings of the justice system; one focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation. If a justice system seeks to provide correctional support to returning citizens and the incarcerated, it needs metrics to assess the impacts of its social programs.
My work will focus on:
- Destigmatizing and rehumanizing of returning citizens and their value in society
- Developing new metrics to assess re-entry
- Pushing for a shift from a punitive to rehabilitative justice system
The project might culminate in a video zine and/or development of a new set of metrics to assess the successes of reentry.