Abstract
Bruce Western’s (2018) Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison provides a compelling insight into the complex process of social re-entry for 122 individuals leaving incarceration and returning to their communities in and around Boston. Following the lives of the respondents over a 12-month period upon their release from Massachusetts prisons in 2012 and 2013, the book brings forth the personalities, fortitude and wit of the subjects against a backdrop of severe economic hardship, racial inequality, trauma and mass incarceration.
Western and his research team draw us into the lives of the respondents on a personalised level through detailed accounts of their childhoods, familial backgrounds and criminal histories. We navigate with them the challenges of reintegration where differential access to resources and racialised social configurations shape their realities and trajectories in contrasting ways. Although the book engenders an intimate understanding of the vulnerability of the respondents, we also are at times confronted with feelings of disgust and condemnation towards their crimes, most often violent, which have perpetuated human suffering, and a cycle in and out of incarceration. In this way, Homeward is deeply engaging. As we walk with respondents the fine line between hope and despair in re-entry, it humanises individuals who are so often stigmatised and excluded from wider society after release from prison. The human frailty that underpins the text invites from the reader a sense of shared humanity (and thus empathy) with those defined by the criminal justice system as perpetrators – themselves victims of violent crime, of state violence and of failed social policy. These factors, Western argues, complicate their criminal culpability and the moral argument for depriving them of their liberty.
Beginning with the impetus for the re-entry study, its context and design, and supported throughout with robust scholarship by others highly regarded in the field, the book provides an incisive analysis of the reproduction of social inequality vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. Western and his team lend qualitative depth to research statistics, bringing to life texture and detail that quantitative data alone fail to provide. In this way, Western extends on his previous work in Punishment and Inequality in America (2006) by personifying his large data sets. The method provides insight into the lived experiences of respondents, as well as the complicated web of human relationships that exist within a much broader complex reality. It is this contribution to the existing scholarship that makes Homeward notable, capturing ecological interactions from a macro-sociological perspective down to the individual at the micro-level, producing a fine-grained picture of racial and economic inequality enmeshed within the ethical ambiguities of American penal policy.
Homeward tests our ability to suspend the reflex of moral judgement in response to violent crime, our perceptions of justice, and of the offender/victim dichotomy against conditions of dire poverty and intergenerational structural violence that surround incarceration in the United States. These are no less relevant to New Zealand. As the debate continues in this country around the building of a ‘mega-prison’ to house a burgeoning prison population – a phenomenon compounded by three decades of neoliberal austerity measures, and political rhetoric similar to that of the US consisting of the ‘tough-on-crime’ and ‘three-strikes-you’re-out’ mantras – Homeward provides convincing evidence for the need of the New Zealand public and its policymakers to seek solutions for crime and punishment other than increased incarceration.
Of direct relevance to New Zealand are the demographics of Western’s Boston re-entry sample: a majority of non-white individuals, in their twenties, with limited education and work history. Similarly, young Māori continue to be disproportionately represented in New Zealand prisons, and like the respondents in the research, are mostly drawn from low decile urban neighbourhoods where crime and high rates of incarceration have deepened ethnic marginalisation and undermined economic opportunity. Further, with a steadily growing and youthful population, both Māori and Pasifika communities – already over-represented in negative social indicators, including health and education statistics – become the default targets of punitive crime control policy. These communities are drawn into the orbit of a penal system which Western convincingly argues in the US, fails to bring justice and safety to the most troubled communities; instead, serving only to exacerbate crime and the social problems it is constructed to ameliorate (p. 178).
Of further significance is Western’s advocacy for a political approach that acknowledges the collective harm incarceration causes minority communities. Using the analogy of the reconciliation commissions formed in postcolonial nations to recognise historic injustices against indigenous people (akin to New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal), Western draws on the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014, 2015) to build a case for policy aimed at a ‘collective justice’, to affirm the dignity of the segment of the population disproportionately affected by high incarceration rates – including the stigma of criminality that spreads from the incarcerated, to family members and to whole communities (pp. 186–187). Western’s approach to solutions is firmly embedded in structural and social control theories of crime, being that socially integrative responses act as an antidote to violence and crime, through the restorative power of drawing the marginalised into the social compact; of the fostering of a ‘thick public safety’ through greater investment in social institutions, and the regularising of social life and social bonds that enable predictability in daily life (p. 188).
At times forbidding and grim, Homeward is both a rich portrayal, and a scientifically rigorous commentary that lays bare the harsh reality for many whose lives have been impacted by incarceration. At times, it requires the reader to draw on their own inner reserves of resilience and hope. Western’s articulation of the approaches needed to resolve the social injustices and crises caused by incarceration in deprived communities (such as his endorsement of ‘social adversity mitigation’ in sentencing, bolstered by the work of other scholars on the topic (p. 180)) whilst realistic and ultimately achievable, does little to lessen the sheer enormity of the challenges posed in the resolution of such crises. Perhaps, if anything, it emphasises the urgency with which we as a society must act. It is this urgency that makes Homeward a timely and essential read for all those interested in the current climate of criminal justice in western nations, perhaps particularly in New Zealand where the imprisonment rate is higher than that of comparable jurisdictions, including that of Australia, England/Wales and Western Europe (Walmsley, 2018).