Transforming the post-incarceration experience
Transforming the post-incarceration experience
The U.S. criminal justice system, which includes federal, state, local, and tribal entities, holds almost 2 million people, according to a 2023 report by the Prison Policy Initiative. Studies have shown that nearly half of all Americans have a family member who’s spent time in jail or prison.
But as sociologist Reuben Jonathan Miller wrote in his 2021 book, “Halfway Home: Race Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration,” the economic impact of incarceration can stretch far beyond a person’s sentence.
Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Miller about that topic when the book was published and recently checked back in with him to talk about how his research has evolved. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: As I just talked about in the introduction, we ended last time with you and your brother and the challenges that you had housing him in the “afterlife of mass incarceration.” Give us an update, would you? How’s he doing? Did you find a place for him? And what’s the latest?
Reuben Jonathan Miller: Well, we found a place for him with a wonderful organization that works to house formerly incarcerated people. He’s had some hiccups. He got re-arrested a couple of times, unfortunately. But over the last few months, he stabilized. He has a place. He’s looking for work. He kind of lost his job, the last time he went in, but we’re hopeful.
Ryssdal: Well, that’s good to hear — not the re- arrest part, but the hopeful part. And that gets me to my question about what you’ve been doing. You have been working, since the last time we spoke, on these things that you call “moral worlds” for those in a post-incarceration life. And I want you to explain, first of all, what that means, and then we can talk about it.
Miller: Sure. So I’ve been very interested, for some years now in how we respond to people who’ve committed acts of violence, largely, because I’ve been very interested in what we do with people we’ve learned to be afraid of. And so, the moral world, as I’m imagining it, are the institutions and people that that people who’ve committed acts of harm, bump into and against as they try to make a life for themselves. So I’m very interested in, for example, the role of probation officers, but also mothers, librarians, teachers, who are responding to the needs of people that we’ve learned to be afraid of.
Ryssdal: This is probably a hard question to answer, but how do we unlearn to be afraid of the people that you have been studying?
Miller: You know, it’s a great question. And I’m not sure that we begin by unlearning fear. I think we start from a position of inclusion, despite how we feel [and] that we base how we respond to people who’ve committed acts of harm, violent acts even, based on what we believe to be the right thing to do, not based on how we feel from moment to moment. And there are 100 reasons why I’m making this point, but I’m sure there’s a follow-up question, so I’ll stop —
Ryssdal: No, keep going actually, because this is the root of the work you’ve been doing, I think, right? It’s the trust that we have to have — giving them our trust, right?
Miller: That’s absolutely right. So there’s about there’s 100 years of criminological literature that supports the idea that the response to crime, the response to violence that works best, is, in fact, us allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. What we’ve done is more or less the opposite. You know, [say] someone’s committed a harmful act, we have reason to be afraid of this person, and in response to that fear, we’ve built institutions, we’ve built entire markets, labor markets, we’ve written laws and policies that push them away, that keep them far away from us. But the literature tells us that when people have access to the things they need — the material resources they need, but also communities that trust them— that’s when we see crime reduction, that’s when we see people turn from behaviors that we don’t like. So the more we run, the more we hide from the problem, the less we face it, the more of the problem we end up with. What I’m suggesting is that we figure out how to embrace people who have caused acts of harm.
Ryssdal: Give me an example. Tell me a story from your research.
Miller: Oh 100%. So there’s a drug robber, who I call Zo, who had been, you know, locked away for many things. The last time he had been locked away was because he shot someone. The person survived, thankfully, and he did, you know, 15 years, altogether. And he comes home and he needs a place to stay. He’s living at a halfway house that, in this case, the halfway house, you know, wasn’t the best, it charged its residents rent. It was charging Zo about $400 a month and he had no way to get it. So he’s taking a walk around the block — you know, nobody would hire him because he’s got this felony for a violent act — and what does he see on the corner? But [there were] “two dope boys flashing cash” is what he told me. And he said, you’re faced with this dilemma. You know, should I rob them? I need the money because I can’t be evicted. If I’m evicted. I can go back to jail because homelessness — not having an address — is a violation of parole. But he makes a decision, a very hard decision, not to. And he gets on a bus and he goes to a halfway house, a different halfway house that offers people a chance to sort of thrive in their own ways — and he knocks on the door, but they don’t have room for him. They say there’s a waiting list, but they say, ‘Tell you what, we’ll let you sleep on the couch, and if you can just ride out this wait while we’re waiting on the bed to open, then we’ll allow you in,’ and they do. They hire him as a groundskeeper. He gets promoted from groundskeeper to case manager. Ten years later, he’s a program manager, he runs the program. He’s now the executive director of that program and he hasn’t committed another crime since. But they took a chance on him. They trusted him, and it paid off.
Ryssdal: So, that organization obviously has done an amazing thing for this guy. I wonder though, if the key moment in that whole thing, was in him standing there in the street corner, and saying, ‘No, I’m not going to rob these guys. I need to do something else.’ And I guess my question is, how do we get to get more people in his situation, in those situations, to make that decision, right? Because that’s the linchpin.
Miller: Well, he had to see an alternative in that moment. He remembered this organization. And what I didn’t mention was that he heard about it in prison. So what the organization did was they sent people on the inside to talk about the kinds of programs that they offered. He saw opportunity is what I’m trying to say.
Ryssdal: Yeah, this is gonna sound flip, but it’s marketing by this halfway house, right?
Miller: 100%, but the kind of marketing really matters. So it is marketing, but it’s the kind of marketing I says, “There’s a place for you here. We don’t care what you did. We understand you made a mistake, but we believe you can change.”
Ryssdal: Yeah, yeah. Oh, totally. It does occur to me, though, that taking that chance — and look, halfway houses are in that line of work — but many companies in businesses and people in this economy are not. It’s not without risk, taking that chance on a person.
Miller: There’s absolutely risk involved. And this is why vulnerability is necessary. And this is why I think we have to move away from the fear-based responses that we’ve had for so long. Because what’s required to move past any sort of conflict, it kind of doesn’t matter where you look in the world — you know there are all these stories of people who receive, for example, former child soldiers — and the thing that gets the child soldier from engaging in the action of harming other people, is that moment of embrace where someone says, “I know you’ve caused harm, but there’s a place for you here.” But to the point about risk, there is a risk because people could, for example, mess up. I mean, so right now, for example, I just left this morning, an organization called Chicago CRED. The entire basis of this program, it was founded by Arne Duncan —
Ryssdal: Oh, former Secretary of Education.
Miller: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And the entire basis of this program is that if people are given opportunities — you know, access to employment, therapy that they might need, the kind of counseling that they might need, and the training both the hard skills and the soft skills to be productive in the economy — once given the opportunity, they’ll take it and they’ll thrive. And I was just talking to them about their job placement and the job placement is fantastic. It’s, you know, it’s in the last year, they had something like 150 or 160 people, they placed two-thirds of them and either part-time or full-time jobs, and those people are able to keep their jobs.
Ryssdal: So if part of your calling and doing this work — because clearly, it’s a calling for you, as we talked about in the first interview — if part of your calling in this work is to proselytize for people who are formerly incarcerated and to carry their burden to the non incarcerated public, which is most of us. If you could get — I was gonna say President Biden but really is not a federal thing, right? It’s a it’s a state thing — if you could get all 50 governors in sequence on the phone, what would the message be?
Miller: OK, so I think the message is that the 50 governors and President Biden have to take inclusion seriously — it’s not a buzzword. And we have to ask what full democratic participation looks like. What does it mean to be able to fully operate in the political economy and culture? This is one of the reasons why I’m focusing on violence now because it’s such a hot issue, it’s so hard to get our head around what to do with somebody who’s hurt someone. But they’ll only change if they’re given the opportunity to change and that opportunity to change should include the opportunity to thrive. It can’t just be the job at McDonald’s. I mean, McDonald’s is wonderful, you know, McDonald’s should hire people who have records… I might stop at McDonald’s after this interview. But that can’t be — their horizon can’t just be based on the service industry. Folks need to lead. Think of them as any other human being, just one who’s made a mistake. That would be my message to them.
Ryssdal: What you are asking for here, not unreasonably at all, is for the non-incarcerated public and people who are not familiar with the stresses and strains and the costs and the burdens of carceral America, you are asking for a certain amount of grace from the wider population. And I guess I wonder what gives you hope that you will get that grace?
Miller: Well, two things. You know, one is the fact that [about] half of American families have a loved one who’s done time. The fact that something like a third of American adults have a criminal record of some sort. And while 49% of Black boys have been arrested before they turn to age 23, 38% of white boys in this country — and I say “boys” — will be arrested before they turn the age of 23. And so I think that’s forcing us to wrestle with this problem, head-on. And I think the place to start is the hard place. I think that the mistake we’ve made is we’ve been tinkering around the edges because we’ve been trying to find the most sympathetic figure that we can help — the nonviolent, non-serious, nonsexual offender. And while it makes a lot of sense, because it’s the easiest thing to do politically, the truth of the matter is, most people make mistakes and they make bad ones. So when we look inside the jail or prison, about half of the folks who are locked away are locked away for a crime of violence. I also think that the real measure of one’s moral compass is about how you respond to people that you don’t like. What needs to happen is people have to pretend as if they believe that these folks are human beings, and they deserve a human community that responds to them. Pretend as if you believe it, and start from that place. That’s the place to legislate from. That’s the place to think about your hiring practices, even if you’re a little afraid yourself. It’s about doing the right thing, not being motivated by how something feels in the moment.
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