“A Program,Not the Projects”: Reentry in the Post-Public Housing Era

Abstract

Prisoner reentry is widely recognized as a hybrid project of poverty governance situated at the intersection of the welfare state and penal state. Numerous scholars have examined the devolved terrain and organizational dynamics of reentry services. Still others have emphasized the particular challenges and importance of housing to the reentry process. However, few have examined how reentry organizations secure or manage housing for their clients, particularly in an era marked by a widespread housing affordability crisis and the retrenchment of public housing in favor of privatized subsidized housing provision. In this article, we present an ethnographic case study of one particularly illustrative site: “New Beginnings,” a new and novel housing development in Syracuse, NY, codeveloped and comanaged by a prisoner reentry organization and a local housing authority. We show that, despite its ostensible mission to integrate the formerly incarcerated and provide much-needed housing to the poor, the development reproduces the stigma of criminal history, producing a sense of ambivalence among residents, who are both grateful for the quality of their new housing and resentful of ongoing forms of carceral supervision and control. In turn, formerly incarcerated residents uphold their participation in the program as a way to distinguish themselves from traditional public housing tenants, further entrenching dominant narratives about the failures of public housing. These findings reveal the complex interplay between the project of reentry and the provision of subsidized housing in the post-public housing era.

Keywords

prisoner reentry carceral state public housing poverty governance ethnography

Recent decades have witnessed a full-scale reconfiguration of poverty governance in the United States. This reconfiguration—of carceral expansion and welfare contraction into a “single policy regime” (Beckett and Western 2001) or “single organizational mesh” (Wacquant 2009) for managing the poor—is marked by the goal of discipline and by the process of devolution (Miller 2014; Soss et al. 2011). On one hand, the poor are subjected to ever-more disciplinary, and paternalist, measures, aimed at cultivating “personal responsibility.” On the other hand, services are increasingly delivered across a privatized terrain of for-profit entities and nonprofit community-based organizations. Under this neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance, the “lines between punishment and welfare institutions have become blurred” (Miller 2014, 328) and the poor are forced to navigate a dizzying range of programs and bureaucracies that fuse together coercion and care, surveillance, and support. As Stuart (2016, 254) notes in his study of policing the homeless on LA’s skid row, “punitiveness and rehabilitation are, in fact, far from antithetical. In some contexts, they are mutually dependent” (see also Hennigan and Speer 2019).

Arguably nowhere are these processes and priorities more apparent than in prisoner reentry. There is a robust body of literature documenting both the explosive growth and ground-level practices of reentry organizations (Caputo-Levine 2018; Coulotte 2019; Halushka 2019; Kaufman 2015; Mijs 2016; Miller 2014; Prior 2020). Most of this scholarship has focused on how these programs endeavor to “responsibilize” clients by molding their moral character, reshaping their social networks, and preparing them to embrace the lowest rungs of the labor market. Yet, despite the well-documented and extensive challenges that returning residents face securing housing (Couloute 2018; Geller and Curtis 2011; Gowan 2002; Herbert et al. 2015; Keene et al. 2018; LeBel 2017; Metraux and Culhane 2004; Roman and Travis 2010; Smoyer et. al. 2020; Western 2018), very little is known about how reentry programs intersect with and intervene in the provision of housing for the poor, a policy terrain that has been likewise transformed by the same forces of neoliberalism and paternalism (Hughes 2020; Rosen and Garboden 2020).

In this article, we focus on this intersection between reentry and housing. We center our analysis on “New Beginnings,” a new subsidized housing development in Syracuse, NY, codeveloped and comanaged by a prisoner reentry organization (as service provider) and a local housing authority (as property manager). New Beginnings provides a strategic case for exploring the “double” regulation of the poor in the messy terrain of the devolved state. It is a site of poverty governance where the bureaucratic entanglements of penal and social welfare policy converge with the changing nature of subsidized housing in an era marked by neoliberalism and the end of public housing. We find that, despite the facility’s mission to integrate the formerly incarcerated, these residents experience a continuation of carceral supervision, including stigmatization, rampant surveillance, and subjection to vague performance requirements for tenancy. Yet despite their critiques, residents point to these very same practices—of security and mandatory services—to distinguish themselves from the residents in surrounding public housing. In so doing, they echo the claims of the staff, replicating dominant narratives about the pathologies of the poor and the failure of public housing. These dynamics obscure the need, and undermine the push, for quality and affordable housing to which New Beginnings ostensibly aims to respond, further suppressing the imagination of alternative and more just housing futures.

Reentry and Housing

Following their release from prison, individuals face a harrowing set of challenges, including crushing poverty, rampant employment discrimination (Pager 2003), relegation to the bottom of the labor market (Peck and Theodore 2008; Purser 2021), frayed connections to family and friends (Mijs 2016; Miller 2021), and the pressures of navigating the varying demands of criminal justice and welfare state bureaucracies that Halushka (2020) terms “the runaround.” Yet, of all the challenges of reentry, scholars have especially highlighted the critical importance of housing, calling it the “foundation upon which other aspects of successful reentry rely” (Herbert et al. 2015). Western (2018, xiii) captures the centrality of this challenge, noting that while many of those reentering society after prison may not yet be home, they are all “at least trying to go homeward.”

This movement “homeward” is rife with impediments. As for all low-income individuals, the formerly incarcerated are confronted with a severe shortage of affordable housing. A broad affordability crisis and concomitant shifts in housing policies have fundamentally changed the nature of public housing in the United States, once a crucial source of low-income housing. Amidst a larger shift from New Deal to neoliberal policies at all levels of government, public housing came to be portrayed, as early as the 1970s, as a failed experiment (Bloom et al. 2015; Goetz 2013). In response, Congress began to defund public housing in favor of other housing strategies that leverage the private sector to provide housing for the poor (Vale 2013). By the 1990s, the United States began dismantling public housing projects (Chaskin and Joseph 2015). In 1999, Congress enacted the Faircloth Amendment, which stipulates that no new public housing be built in the United States beyond 1999 levels (42 USC 1437g 2010). Thus, public–private partnerships are the only way to create new subsidized units in the U.S. today, while the voucher (formerly “Section 8”) program (today the largest housing assistance program in the United States) subsidizes tenants to rent in the private market (Rosen 2020). Scholars have situated such programs for the creation and management of subsidized housing within twin trends of the neoliberalization of social policy (Goetz 2013) and the increasing financialization of housing, wherein housing is not only commodified but an object of speculation (Fields 2017; Madden and Marcuse 2016; Rolnik 2019). Indeed, some have gone as far as to say that the nature of subsidized housing today is so fundamentally changed that it marks the end of public housing as we know it (Crump 2003; Smith 2013). In addition to reducing the number of public housing units nationwide, alternative strategies cannot match public housing’s stability—by virtue of its public ownership—as a source of low-income housing (Goetz 2013; Schwarz 2006).

Amidst this widespread housing crisis and retreat of public, market-sheltered housing, the formerly incarcerated face discrimination from public housing authorities and private landlords alike (Keene et al. 2018; LeBel 2017; Thacher 2008; Tran-Leung 2015) along with, in many cases, eligibility and occupancy restrictions when it comes to the scarce resource of housing subsidies (Keene et al. 2018). The formerly incarcerated were famously excluded from public housing by policies such as the 1996 One Strike Rule, which called for the eviction of public housing residents if anyone in the household was charged with a crime (HUD 1996). As Miller (2021, 175) summarizes it, “exclusion became official housing policy.” In 2011, HUD began to walk back its strict stance on formerly incarcerated residents, inviting public housing authorities to rethink their policies for including members of this population. Programs to do so, however, have been piecemeal at best and, much in the vein of other reentry programs, tend to put the onus on individuals to overcome structural barriers (Hamlin 2020).

Given these challenges, study after study have documented the high rates of residential mobility and housing insecurity experienced by the formerly incarcerated (Geller and Curtis 2011; Herbert et al. 2015; Roman and Travis 2010). Some have referred to this high level of instability—the bouncing back and forth between shelters, subsidized congregate housing programs, and friends’ or family members’ couches—with the illustrative metaphor of “ping pong housing” (Smoyer et al. 2020). Within this context, it should not be surprising that formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public (Couloute 2018; Metraux and Culhane 2004) or that shelters are full of people whose lives have been indelibly shaped by the criminal justice system (Snow and Anderson 1993; Stuart 2016). And, given the ongoing criminalization of homelessness, many become trapped in what Gowan (2002) theorizes as “the homelessness/incarceration nexus,” a racialized cycle of exclusion and punishment.

In positioning reentry organizations within the broader terrain of poverty management, we contribute to the growing body of critical scholarship on reentry, which examines the ways in which reentry programs remake the carceral landscape even as they “mimic a critique of mass imprisonment” (Byrd 2016; see also Middlemass and Smiley 2019). As Wacquant (2010, 605) has argued, “reentry outfits are not an antidote to, but an extension of punitive containment as government technique for managing problem categories and territories in the dualizing city.” The ethnographic literature has demonstrated a dominant “security culture” in reentry organizations, generating a client experience of extended incarceration (Prior 2020). It has also revealed that reentry programming is, overwhelmingly, a “dispositional intervention” (Miller 2014, 315) that targets the individual, i.e., his or her self-understanding, moral character, and cognitive processes (see also Caputo-Levine 2018; Halushka 2016). As Mijs (2016) has argued, reentry service providers establish a “road to reentry” (p. 292) through which clients receive both a “diagnosis of their problems and a prescription for a course of action” (p. 298). These programs teach clients to embrace “structural pasts, [but] agentic futures,” and thereby tend to foster “an inflated sense of agency in the face of barriers” to finding housing, securing employment, and achieving economic stability. They also embrace, as Coulote (2019, 90) has found, a dominant ideology of colorblindness “grounded in a hyper-meritocratic notion of social mobility” that ignores how race continues to structure lives and limit life chances post-prison. De Georgi (2017, 94) concludes that “the neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility, market competition, and self-help ultimately pervades every aspect of the reentry process as it is presently framed.” Reentry organizations, as state-supported yet typically privatized actors of contemporary poverty governance, contribute to the processes of translation and amplification that durably mark individuals as what Miller and Stuart (2017) theorize as “carceral citizens.” Carceral citizenship renders one eligible for programs, entitlements, and services not extended to the “noncriminal” but also subjects individuals to distinct sets of rules, expectations, and responsibilities that are often administered extrajudicially.

It has been nearly 20 years since Roman (2004, 162) bemoaned the fact that “basically, we have a prison reentry system that is disconnected from the housing and homeless services system.” While we have a good understanding of how reentry programs endeavor to mold “responsibilized” and “safe ex-cons” for the labor market, we still know very little about how reentry organizations work to address the housing challenges faced by returning residents, particularly in the post-public housing era. One caveat is Greene’s (2019) study on how the reentry experiences of transgender people are shaped by the racialized gender regulation in housing services. In the remainder of this article, we focus on a unique collaborative venture—New Beginnings—to examine the impact of merging the disciplinary agenda of reentry with the provision of subsidized housing.

Researching New Beginnings

New Beginnings is situated in the figurative and literal shadows of the elite private university with which we are both affiliated. Despite a geographic proximity of less than a mile, the environs of these institutions are—as would become a refrain throughout our fieldwork—worlds apart. “It’s amazing what a difference two blocks can make,” Gloria, New Beginnings’ program director, remarked during our first meeting. “It’s another world.”

Completed in 2019, New Beginnings is a striking steel and vinyl building, adorned with red and blue paneling. Surrounded by Syracuse’s remaining New Deal-era public housing developments, it sits across the street from an old steam plant and a vacant lot, which in turn abuts an abandoned viaduct. A block to the east sits the overpass of I-81, a major interstate freeway that stands as a symbolic and material dividing line in the city (Semuels 2015). Syracuse is one of the poorest cities in the country, with a median household income of around $34,000 (about half of the median household income in the United States) and the highest rates of concentrated poverty among both Blacks and Latinos (Jargowsky 2015). This neighborhood is one of the poorest and most segregated census tracts in the country, an epicenter of racialized dispossession. New Beginnings—this gleaming new housing development—marks the first phase of a major transformation that is planned for this 27-square-block area that will, ultimately, include tearing down the interstate freeway and neighboring public housing. Plans to develop a mixed-income community in the neighborhood explicitly follow the model used in other cities like Atlanta and New Orleans, where the public housing stock has been significantly diminished and largely privatized.

Given the historic, systematic exclusion of the formerly incarcerated from public housing, it is crucial to understand the significance of a facility like New Beginnings where new subsidized housing is targeted to a specifically justice-involved population. As such, it marks an important departure from past housing strategies, which have purposefully excluded those with criminal backgrounds, and an attempt to overcome the persistent barrier that a criminal record can present on an already-fraught housing market. Codeveloped and comanaged by the Syracuse Housing Authority (SHA) and a nonprofit reentry organization, New Beginnings is only the second housing facility of its type in the country, blending affordable, supportive, and shelter housing in one building, along with on-site programming specifically targeted toward returning residents.¹ New Beginnings has 54 apartments total: 43 are affordable apartments for anyone with qualifying incomes and 11 are fully furnished, permanent supportive units for individuals with a history of incarceration and a long-term disability. As the name suggests, permanent supportive housing is a policy intervention aimed at housing high-need individuals who are unlikely to transition to more independent settings (Boyd et al. 2016; Parsell and Marston 2016). Additionally, the building’s east wing houses an 11-bed homeless shelter for up to three women and eight men immediately exiting prison.

Unlike traditional public housing, wherein the local public housing authority owns and operates apartment buildings that are leased to low-income tenants, New Beginnings exemplifies a subsidized facility funded through a mixture of private investment, tax credits, and other state financing programs. Some units are subsidized through project-based vouchers, a version of the housing choice voucher (HCV) program in which vouchers are tied to specific units, rather than specific renters (ibid; Rosen 2020; Vale 2019). In some other cases, tenants already enrolled in the HCV program lease a subsidized unit and then use their voucher to help pay their rent. SHA handles leasing and rent collection, and the building sits on housing authority land. However, due to its mixed financing structure, the building is not “owned” by the housing authority in the same way as traditional public housing. While tenants in permanent supportive housing all have criminal records as a precondition for their housing, the local housing authority’s relatively open policies mean that others in the building may have justice-involvement in their background as well. However, any affordable housing tenants who do have criminal records go largely unrecognized as “carceral citizens” (Miller and Stuart 2017) by the building’s management and, as we will elaborate further, are not automatically flagged for the same services nor subjected to the same responsibilities as those in permanent supportive housing or the shelter.

The data for this article was produced via participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews. We began the study in August 2019, as soon as New Beginnings opened its doors to its initial handful of residents. We were thus there during the crucial months of eligibility screening and bureaucratic finagling to get, as one reentry staff member put it, “bodies in the building.” This laborious process involved desperately trying to find eligible tenants to lease units while turning down others desperately trying to find housing. We ended the study in March 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we were already in the process of wrapping up data collection at that time, we were nevertheless forced to abruptly stop research when New York implemented a shelter-in-place order and strict social distancing measures, and our university put a hold on all in-person research involving human subjects. Still, for over six months, we were a regular presence in the building, endeavoring to understand the newly forming community at New Beginnings.

We gained access to the facility overtly, with the express permission of both organizations’ executive directors and with institutional review board approval. Given the tight security measures in the building, there would have been no other way to conduct this kind of fieldwork other than through permission of these organizational gatekeepers. Our fieldwork began with a staff-led tour of the facility prior to its opening. The first author continued the fieldwork utilizing an array of strategies. First, she spent time in the security booth in the building’s lobby. This enabled her to gain familiarity with many of the buildings’ residents as they came and went. It also afforded endless hours of conversation with the staff member on security duty that day. In addition, she attended weekly staff meetings, which provided the opportunity to hear about staff perspectives on and relationships with residents as well as the ongoing challenges of operating the facility. Finally, she attended resident meetings, which—though infrequent in number—proved to be the only formal opportunity for resident commingling during the duration of our research.

In addition to the fieldwork, we conducted a total of 23 formal interviews (Table 1). We interviewed 18 residents and 5 members of the staff: 2 from the housing authority and 3 from the reentry services provider. Amongst the latter, all were Black and several were, as is common in the field, justice-involved prior to moving into their positions in reentry services (see Lebel et al. 2015). Many of the reentry provider staff have some kind of social work degree or human services certifications. Of the residents, eight were permanent supportive housing tenants, six were affordable housing tenants, and four were shelter residents. In total, 13 of the 18 interviewed residents had criminal records of some kind. For two of these interviewees, we conducted a follow-up interview to allow them the necessary time and space to elaborate on their original comments. Nearly all of the resident interviews took place in the community room located just off the main lobby of the building. This severely underutilized space provided not only convenience, but privacy. Interviewees were offered a $25 gift card for their participation in the interview. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The transcripts and fieldnotes were iteratively and collaboratively coded using the cloud-based Atlas.ti.

Table 1.

Characteristics of Resident Interviewees.

Participant Pseudonym	Age	Race	Housing Type	Criminal Record?
Patrice	24	Black/African-American	Affordable	No
Sawyer	48	White	Permanent supportive housing	Yes
Tony	53	Black/African-American	Permanent supportive housing	Yes
Ben	33	White	Shelter	Yes
Leroy	52	Black/African-American	Affordable	Yes
Mac	50	Black/African-American	Permanent supportive housing	Yes
William	50	Black/African-American	Permanent supportive housing	Yes
Janet	62	Black/African-American	Affordable	No
Cameron and Jennifer	38 and 39	White	Permanent supportive housing	Yes
Celeste	25	White	Affordable	No
Regina	61	Black/African-American	Shelter	Yes
George	61	White	Affordable	Yes
Allen	56	White	Shelter	Yes
Hector	33	Mixed-race	Shelter	Yes
Adelso	75	Hispanic	Affordable	No
Michelle	47	White	Permanent supportive housing	Yes
Timothy	46	Hispanic	Permanent supportive housing	Yes

In the sections that follow, we show how reentry housing—however admirable its goals and genuine its desire to help integrate the formerly incarcerated back into society—can prolong the sense of punishment, but also contribute to the perpetuation of narratives about the failure of public housing as a solution for housing the poor more generally.

Findings

When asked about seeing their units for the first time, residents reported feeling ecstatic and overcome with emotion. Every resident we interviewed had a tumultuous housing trajectory, marked by homelessness, incarceration, involuntary doubling up, and/or substandard housing conditions. Consequently, every resident we interviewed reported that New Beginnings was by far the nicest place they had ever lived. “It reminded me of a hotel, honestly, when I first walked in,” explained Patrice, a 24-year-old Black woman who had moved into the facility after living with her sister in the notorious public housing development down the street. “This is just mad fancy. . .. And the fact that everything is brand new, there’s no cracks or bugs!”

This feeling of awe of having landed in a “mad fancy” building was especially pronounced among those returning from prison. Sawyer, a 48-year-old white man who had been in and out of prison and rehab facilities and now resided in a two-bedroom unit, explained: “It was the hype around town, such a beautiful place, yeah, everybody noticed it, so everybody was applying. . .. I’m still overjoyed, ecstatic.” It took Sawyer some time to get over his sense of disbelief. “I was so blown away by it that it took me a couple of days to really even open a box. I just sat there and felt peace, and took naps, and came outside and looked around.”

Tony, a 53-year-old Black man who has spent decades cycling between prison, rehab facilities, and couch-surfing, shared Sawyer’s sense of disbelief and unending gratitude, exclaiming, “my apartment is lovely. I love it. I love coming there and you know I can just set it up the way that I want to and just be me, you know what I mean? I haven’t had my own place in a long time. And it’s a breath of fresh air. . .. I’m so blessed.”

Ben, a white, 33-year-old shelter resident, also reported feeling “blessed.” “I don’t really even know another word to use to describe it,” he explained. “That’s how lucky I feel to be here.” Upon first hearing that he had a spot in the shelter, he said, “I was completely taken aback. I was crying. I was touched. I was moved beyond words. . .. I’ve been living out of a backpack for more than half my life. So, basically, I’ve never made it to this stage.” He reported feeling “more strongly about this place than I do anything else in my life right now.”

It would be hard to overstate the relief residents feel at having secured a spot in such a beautiful new facility. And yet, as they settled into their new homes, many formerly incarcerated tenants came to feel—as we document in subsequent sections—that New Beginnings extended the experience of carceral supervision. It did so in three ways: by reproducing the stigma associated with a criminal record, by replicating some aspects of the prison environment including pervasive surveillance, and by subjecting tenants to disciplinary performance requirements that engendered a sense of ongoing precarity. Nevertheless, at each turn, we found residents eager to embrace these same features as a means of distinguishing their community from neighboring public housing. In doing so, staff and residents tended to perpetuate narratives about the pathologies of the poor and the failure of public housing, obscuring the widespread need for quality and affordable housing to which New Beginnings ostensibly aims to respond.

Second Chance Housing

Despite the fact that only a portion of its residents are formerly incarcerated, New Beginnings is almost universally portrayed and discussed as a housing development for returning residents. Shortly after its opening, for example, an article in the local paper described New Beginnings as a one-of-a-kind apartment complex, designed to help the formerly incarcerated reenter the community. During the well-attended ribbon cutting ceremony, speakers remarked that “together we can help reduce recidivism” and that New Beginnings is a “shining example” of what happens when deserving people get a “second chance.” Thus, the facility is lauded not as a source of much-needed affordable housing for poor and working-class residents of Syracuse, a city grappling with a severe crisis of substandard housing. Instead, it is promoted as a receiving community for those with criminal backgrounds—a place where they can start anew and a “beacon of hope” that will “change lives.” Tenants and staff tend to echo these public narratives, noting that New Beginnings “is a place for folks trying to get help,” in the words of one resident, and “is a wonderful opportunity for people to get back on track,” according to a staff member.

This framing is so dominant that it led some affordable housing residents—who may or may not have had a history of incarceration—to question how they managed to secure a unit in such a coveted facility in the first place. Leroy, a 52-year-old Black man living in affordable housing raised that concern, saying, “How the hell did I get in here? I’m not a convict!” Upon learning more about the origins and purpose of the building, he simply said, “[If] that’s what they wanna do to those who just get out of prison? Whatever. I’m not gonna yay it or nay it. It is what it is. . .. It’s not for me to have an opinion about what this building was built for because I personally don’t care. You’re building it for them? Okay, fine.” Leroy himself has an old criminal record but sees the reentry components of the facility as separate from his life and needs.

And yet, despite the facility’s focus on reintegrating the formerly incarcerated, many residents expressed the view that New Beginnings actually reinforced their stigmatized identity as a carceral subject and reified their subordinate social status. Take, for instance, the experience of Mac, a 50-year-old Black man who resides in a one-bedroom permanent supportive housing unit. Mac often feels singled out and distinguished from other tenants by virtue of his criminal justice involvement. Soon after moving into the building, he submitted a maintenance request to fix some patchy paintwork on one of his walls, explaining the following:

When I told the [maintenance] man about [the problem], he walked outside the door and he said, “He just came out of jail, what the fuck [does] he care? It ain’t his apartment.” So that right there hurt my feelings because I have an issue and he feels like because I’m just getting an apartment and everything in it, I shouldn’t care how it looks. So that right there bothered me.

Mac also explained that because staff know which apartments were affordable versus permanent supportive housing, they would respond more slowly to the permanent supportive housing tenants. “I’m saying, because it’s supportive housing, it doesn’t matter for us,” he said. In addition to feeling stigmatized by staff, Mac also feels stigmatized by other tenants. Upon moving in, the resident in the neighboring apartment informed him that there were “prisoners” living in the building. Mac explained the following:

My neighbor said, “You know we’ve got prisoners living in here who just got out of jail?” I said, “Where they at?!” He said, “We don’t know, but they be in here somewhere.” So I’m saying: they really don’t know! So they be telling me about the people moving in— he say, “They got 'em around here somewhere, we just don’t know where they at.”

Although Mac found this particular exchange humorous, his account speaks to the enduring stigma that residents face in the facility despite its ostensible goal of integration.

Indeed, some residents resented the monolithic depictions of their housing community, which made it impossible to escape the stigma stemming from their history of carceral confinement. William, also a 50-year-old Black man, lives in a three-bedroom supportive housing unit which he shares, on alternate weekends, with his children. “Remember the ribbon cutting?” he asked during our interview. “All they did was talk about ‘We’re criminals, we’re criminals.’ ‘Second chances for people.’ Like this whole building’s for just people who haven’t gotten a second chance.” William, who had just served a short stint in jail some time before moving into New Beginnings, clearly resented this simplistic framing of his personhood and resented being “lumped” in with others who had more significant prison stays for more serious offenses. As he explained:

I did some shit, I got misdemeanors, but I didn’t—I’m not no drug addict. . .who’s lost all his kids and might get all the kids back. I’m not him. And I’m not the person who went to jail for fucking four years in the state penitentiary and then they got out. I’m not them. I’m just a guy who’s got his kids. . .that’s all. So I don’t like the lump.

As William’s comments reveal, the popular and monolithic framing of New Beginnings—as a housing development for the formerly incarcerated—makes it difficult for residents to shed the stigma of their criminal justice involvement and, in fact, integrate back into the community.

This challenge isn’t just exacerbated by the public framing and discourse surrounding the facility, but also by the very ways in which residents are sorted and managed in the building. Via their comments and practices, staff members reproduce the often-arbitrary division between the formerly incarcerated tenants (mostly in permanent supportive housing and the shelter) and the presumably, but not necessarily, non-justice-involved residents living in affordable housing. On the one hand, staff members performatively insisted that New Beginnings constituted an integrated community. For example, during one meeting, a reentry program staff member named Kim referenced the importance of not creating a “caste system” between different types of occupants within the building. Yet, on the other hand, these same staff members would regularly and frequently refer to “our people,” meaning residents receiving reentry services and, hence, formerly incarcerated, as opposed to “their people,” meaning SHA’s affordable housing residents. While giving a tour of the building, a counselor named Jacob, for example, pointed out, “next is the computer room, which again, is for everyone. . .for our people and their people.” Tenants receiving services from the reentry provider frequently mirrored this language as well, contrasting themselves, “[reentry provider] people,” with what they would refer to as the “regular people” in the building.

The framing of New Beginnings as “second chance” housing not only renders it difficult for tenants to shed the stigma associated with their criminal justice histories. But, of equal concern, it limits perceptions of what New Beginnings is and who it is for. Indeed, the majority of residents chose to live at New Beginnings because it was a source of affordable, quality housing in a city grappling with extreme poverty and an aging housing stock. The depiction of New Beginnings as exceptional by dint of its justice-involved population tended not only to homogenize the diversity of experiences amongst its residents and to reinforce false assumptions that those with criminal backgrounds do not live elsewhere in our communities; it also downplayed the urgent need for quality, affordable housing for the poor throughout Syracuse. New Beginnings was publicized to the Syracuse community as a space for the formerly incarcerated—a liminal carceral space for a special population—rather than as an affordable housing complex for all. Meanwhile, the many affordable housing residents who may—but largely do not—have histories of justice involvement become written out of the public narrative entirely. In a city where affordable housing is in short supply, these discourses give short shrift to the multiple reasons that high-quality, affordable, supportive housing is needed.

Secured or Surveilled?

In addition to reinscribing the stigma of a criminal history, New Beginnings embraces extensive surveillance and security practices that are, on one hand, lauded for contributing to a sense of resident safety, but, on the other hand, denounced for being punitive. Given such security measures, it was common in the course of our interviews to hear residents—depending on their perspective—reference the building as either a gated community or a prison.

The building has two entrances: one from the front, off the street, and one from the back, off of the parking lot. To access the building, residents and staff must use an electronic key fob that unlocks either set of double doors, which open into a spacious, if sterile, lobby. The lobby houses a security booth—euphemistically referred to as “door receptionist.” During the day, an SHA receptionist sits behind the desk while trained security or resident volunteers work the evening shift. Whoever sits in the booth has to buzz people in when they ring one of the intercoms (complete with video) and ensure that any nonresidents—including guests accompanied by a resident—sign in. To sign in, visitors must show a photo ID. Whoever is working security also monitors the extensive array of surveillance cameras that monitor the property’s interior and exterior public spaces 24/7. Cameras show who is walking up to the building, walking down its halls, or lingering in the lobby and are recorded, so staff can watch on playback. Aside from the main entrance, exterior doors are alarmed and will ring if someone exits where they should not. Additionally, the interior door to the shelter is alarmed, so if a resident or visitor exits without swiping a key fob, they set off the alarm while they’re still in the building.

William acknowledged the feeling of safety in the building but was nevertheless frustrated by the fact that “it’s a prison right now.” As he explained the following:

I have to go through that front door to get into my house. I have to go [through] the other door to get in my house. And I have to use keys and lock to get in and out of my house. And if I come to the front door and I tell you “This is my friend,” my friend shouldn’t have to have ID. There’s no reason for you to know who the fuck that is. That’s too much information. My home is my home. Now you’re invading my privacy way too much.

For William, the security measures in place violated his privacy, rendering the building far more like a prison than like a home.

Janet, a 62-year-old Black woman who resides in a two-bedroom affordable housing unit with her severely disabled son, similarly commented that her family members believe that she “lives in a prison,” given all the surveillance cameras and the rules about checking in and checking out of the building. She herself prefers to think of it as her “gated community,” explaining that she moved into the building because she “thought it was going to be more like a safe haven.”

The residents most heavily surveilled are, undoubtedly, those residing in the shelter. And, some residents in the building—even ones who themselves had long grappled with homelessness and incarceration—broadly support strong security measures. Just prior to the shelter’s opening, Cameron, a 38-year-old white man living in supportive housing, commented the following:

I’m just a little concerned about people getting out of jail, you know, once they open the [shelter]. If they’re going to act accordingly, like, are they going to follow the rules or are they going to try to pass by it and act foolish? Who knows? People coming out of jail, they may want to stay clean and do the right thing, or I know of people that get right out and end up doing the same thing over again. I mean, it took me a while to get straight, too.

Similarly, Celeste, a 25-year-old white woman living in an affordable housing unit, expressed her wariness about the shelter opening, saying “I think [the shelter] is a great idea, but I don’t know if I necessarily feel safe with it being under my head every night if that makes sense. . .just the idea of it kind of sketches me out. . .. I’m nervous about it.”

In addition to the measures described earlier, the shelter residents have a strict curfew, take a breathalyzer test every time they enter the building, and are randomly drug tested.² Once, a resident assistant working a late evening shift in the newly opened shelter, noted: “We don’t want it to feel like a prison, because it isn’t a prison. But there are just those certain precautions that we need to take.” In the lead-up to the shelter’s opening, for example, staff discovered that there were holes in the headboards of the brand-new shelter beds. Worried that the residents would try to stuff illicit drugs into the holes, they worked together to flip the headboards so that the holes were no longer visible. Additionally, staff put a lock on the freezer in the communal kitchen—where residents were supposed to cook together as a prosocial, community-building activity—after one of the shelter residents stole all of the meat and tried to sell it on the street.

In one especially revealing moment, a representative of the reentry organization led guests on a tour of the facility. Upon entering the shelter, he pointed up and announced, “It’s very important to note the cameras because they actually want to be monitored.” For the one female resident of the shelter at the time of our research—Regina, a 61-year-old Black victim of domestic violence just out from a 10-year stint in prison—this was the case. “I’m glad they got the surveillance,” she confirmed. But for other shelter residents, this was far from accurate. “There’s cameras everywhere,” Ben remarked. “I feel like our things are very secured.” But he went on to acknowledge that he hasn’t “been feeling that well with the topic we’re even talking about, with privacy and security and all that stuff. . .. It’s very blurred for me right now. . .. I don’t know whether the stuff that’s in place that I’m recognizing is there so much to protect me or whether it’s there to observe me.” In other words, Ben was starting to recognize that the measures in place were as much about disciplining him as they were about ensuring his safety. Ben acknowledged that he’s being constantly watched and that his behavior is being constantly scrutinized. In general, he finds the security systems in place to be “a little much,” explaining “I have to swipe my fob key three different times to get from my bedroom to outside there to have a cigarette. I’m saying to myself sometimes, wow, this is frustrating.”

Toward the end of our interview, Ben shared something that had been on his mind, acknowledging “it’s so ridiculous that I’m still even holding onto it and thinking about it.” He went on to explain that he had bought an anniversary gift for his wife—who was still behind bars—and that it got destroyed by a member of the staff during a routine “search” of his things. It was a notebook, “all handmade and stitched together real nice with like banana leaves and twigs and sticks. It’s nothing with nothing, ok? But it was $25 and it was really cool, really special and they ripped it apart.” Ben pressed on, explaining that at the end of the day, that kind of punitive surveillance is “overkill.” “They have the right to go through whatever they want. I signed all those waivers. I get it, I’m up shit’s creek. But why would you purposefully destroy something like that, that was left out in the open? It wasn’t stashed.” Worse still, Ben said that when he brought it to their attention, he was simply shut down. “It was almost like, wow, dude, you were cut such a big break. . .now you’re gonna bring this up and talk about this?”

While these surveillance and security measures were undoubtedly used to discipline residents in the building, they were most often discussed and justified in reference to the perceived threats from beyond. Indeed, staff and residents alike were quick to point out—as did George, a 61-year-old white man residing in an affordable housing unit—that New Beginnings is a “great place to live, [but] not a great neighborhood to be in.” He explained, “We live at the edge of this nightmare that Syracuse brought upon itself,” referring to the nearby public housing projects, particularly the Pioneer Homes, which many refer to as “the Bricks.” Notorious in the city as a locus of violence, particularly gang violence, Pioneer Homes is one of the oldest public housing properties in New York State. Its low-slung, brick, townhouse-style apartments take up a significant portion of the immediate surrounding neighborhood. This general disdain for, and wariness of, public housing was echoed by many New Beginnings residents we spoke to. Several residents expressed their displeasure at the building’s location and particularly, its proximity to public housing. These views are epitomized by one supportive housing resident, Timothy, who said, “I would have probably not put it here. I don’t know. Because this area—not this area particularly, but you go a few blocks that way or a few blocks that way, you’ve got the Bricks.” Celeste matter-of-factly explained, “I wouldn’t walk around here if you paid me a million dollars.” Mac similarly stated, “I don’t like the neighborhood, because [of] the gangs on the other side. . .I wish they would have put it anywhere else but here, but they did.”

Despite the fact that New Beginnings, like its neighboring public housing, is a subsidized development operated by the housing authority where many of its low-income residents have a history of justice system involvement, tenants at New Beginnings are quick to explain that while their building might be in the neighborhood, it isn’t of the neighborhood. They cited the building’s security system as a distinguishing feature, as a key component of the community’s success, and as a necessary guard against what they perceive as the failures of public housing. When asked what would help prevent New Beginnings from falling into what he saw as the abject failures of public housing, George said simply, “You’ve got security here,” before detailing the extensive procedures involved in merely accessing the lobby. Allen, a 56-year-old white shelter resident, noted that “It can get a little sketchy around here at night. . .You don’t know if you’re going to be the next drive-by victim.” Nevertheless, he said he felt safe in the building as a result of the security: “Everything is locked up. You need your key fob to get in or out. And the staff, they’re like ten feet from the door.” Even Patrice, an affordable housing tenant who grew up in the neighboring Pioneer Homes, where she was living with her sister before she moved into New Beginnings, said the security made she and her parents feel at ease about her new home. “I feel safe here,” she said, explaining that her mom “came down here to see what was going on and she was like ‘well, it looks like a hotel in here and they’ve got security and all that.’” Gloria herself insisted, “you have locked doors here for a reason.” She clarified, “we’re not a locked facility because people with criminal justice involvement live here. We’re in a secure apartment building, because you want to keep your tenants safe from the community. On the left side of us is drugs, gangs. In front of us is this. Behind us is that.”

Thus, New Beginnings’ extensive surveillance systems were complex and often duplicitous, making some residents feel more secure from perceived threats internal and external, while making others feel subject to constant monitoring and carceral control. In emphasizing the need to secure themselves from their public housing neighbors, the residents and staff ironically distinguished their facility—a subsidized, housing authority-run development that housed many returning residents—from traditional public housing, reinforcing stereotypes of public housing as a failed policy and of its residents as dangerous and criminal.

“Mandatory Voluntary”: Disciplinary Service Provision

In addition to feeling stigmatized and surveilled, the formerly incarcerated residents in the shelter and permanent supportive housing units are also subjected to vague participation requirements amounting to up to 35 hours per week of “constructive programming.” This includes on-site case management (e.g., check-ins, group meetings) as well as outsourced recovery or mental health services, although as many interviewees told us, the specific content of their services remained largely undefined. Gloria insisted that most if not all of New Beginnings’ tenants would benefit by participating in services. “You have the affordable [housing] people that need services, [but] just don’t know they need services. Then you have the permanent supportive housing [tenants] that are receiving services or are readjusting. . .. The [shelter] people, they’re just learning how to live again.” Nevertheless, due to the nature of the partnership between SHA and the reentry service provider—and thus the arbitrary bureaucratic distinctions among residents—it was only the permanent supportive housing and shelter residents whose participation in services was mandated as a necessary, if vague, requirement for continued tenancy. Again, it was only certain sectors of residents who were hailed as carceral citizens and thus, singled out for special services (Miller and Stuart 2017).

This arrangement, unsurprisingly, led some of the affordable housing tenants to resent their neighbors, whom they perceived as being given access to services to which they themselves, regardless of their level of need, were denied. As single mother Celeste described the following:

I feel like it’s weird that people who were incarcerated or people who were on drugs get more help than people who have never been in trouble or who have tried to sustain themselves but just they don’t make enough money to. It’s kind of my bitter feelings about that, but at the end of the day what are you going to do?

At the same time, permanent supportive housing and shelter residents spoke about having to submit to services they did not want or need in order to maintain their eligibility for housing. This resonates with Gowan and Whetstone’s (2012) finding about those who submit to “strong-arm” drug rehabilitation programs—and the designation of “criminal addict”—to avoid incarceration, irrespective of their history of drug use or diagnosis of chemical dependency. Because having a long-term disability is a condition for living in permanent supportive housing, Mac explained that a lot of residents are enrolled in extraneous mental health services. “And nobody can tell if you’re crazy or not, because you can go there and talk about ducks, and they think you’re a sick patient. So, [they’re] making you take on services that you don’t need to keep your apartment.” Thus, while some affordable housing tenants resented supportive housing tenants for receiving services they too might like to access, some supportive housing tenants utilized services they did not need in order to uphold the terms of their tenancy.

For many of these tenants, the biggest issue was that they were unsure as to the exact terms of the requirements. Without clear guidelines as to what constituted adequate participation, tenants tended to view any and all requests as obligations of tenancy. At the start of the first group meeting for the residents in permanent supportive housing, Gloria welcomed everyone. She waited a few minutes, indicating that she was uncertain as to how many residents would show up, since the meeting was “voluntary.” This prompted Tony to shake his head and mutter, “Yeah, mandatory voluntary.” Sure enough, Gloria then qualified her statement, revealing that however “voluntary” the meeting might have been, there were nevertheless behavioral expectations. “The one thing I don’t want to do is. . .send the message that tardiness is okay.” Later on, in our interview, Tony explained his understanding of what is expected of him to maintain his housing, even admitting that—despite all our assurances to the contrary—he viewed participating in the interview itself as “mandatory voluntary:”³

Participate! Any time they have any kind of meetings or anything like that. I need to participate in everything that they have. Just like this with this, with me and you. Participate, you know? Just let other people know, share [that] I’m grateful for this, so anything that I can do to participate in, to show my gratitude, I do it, you know?

Sawyer, like Tony, was unclear as to what was expected of him, using the terms “voluntary” and “requirement” in practically the same breath: “I mean, I think everything’s voluntary. But I think part of it is a requirement through the program, through the supportive housing, that you need to meet one-on-one so they know where you’re at, where you’re going, what’s going on.”

Interviews with residents in permanent supportive housing units revealed that they experienced their leases as something far more precarious than the notion of “permanent” housing would suggest. All understood that they had to regularly meet with their case manager to check in and report on their progress, as well as allow their case managers weekly access to their apartment to check on their housekeeping. Several described being unsure of the exact requirements and worrying that they wouldn’t be recertified. As Mac put it, “If you don’t participate. . .when it’s time to re-certify, they might tell you since you didn’t report in with none of the services, you don’t qualify for housing anymore.”

Still, accepting services and fulfilling vague requirements for “participation” became a burden that often felt punitive. Ben confirmed that he was required to engage in 35 hours per week of “positive time.” “So, that’s a logged accountability of how I spend my day.” The exact content of that time, however, went largely unspecified: As Ben admitted, it’s all “loosely defined. . .we are expected, and are held at a higher level than a regular flophouse. That was a word that was explained. We’re not a flophouse. We are not this. We’re not that. So, my response is well, then, what are we? Let’s define what we are!” With the help of his case manager, Ben was working on securing for himself a reliable, safe, independent routine. “It’s like body-building, but it’s life-building.” But Ben was clearly feeling uneasy about the paternalist mandates of participating in the program. “It’s very much at what expense? At what cost? At what emotional and mental cost is the signing out? Is the peeing in cups? You get what I’m saying?”

William similarly resented what the reentry organization required of him in order to maintain his permanent supportive housing tenancy. As far as he understood them, the terms of his tenancy included weekly meetings with his case manager and regular apartment checks, as well as what he saw as an implicit duty to represent the building at public events. While he chafed against each of these forms of participation, feeling them to be unnecessary and burdensome, he also detailed significant needs that were not being met by existing services: difficulty affording food and utility bills, furnishing his apartment to sufficiently sleep his custodial children on the weekends, and getting his kids to school across town without a car. He described a desire for tutoring services and wanted access to the computer room, one of the common spaces locked behind the shelter doors despite promises to the contrary.

William refused the program staff’s request to inspect his apartment every week for the first 90 days of his lease, but his refusal made him feel insecure about his tenancy given the vague expectations of participation. Indeed, in staff meetings, managers referred to William’s “bad attitude,” noting they were not sure if “he was going to make it” in the program. As William and other interviewees pointed out, there were tenants living in affordable housing who had severe needs, including a woman who had suffered oxygen deprivation at birth that left her barely able to care for herself. Now middle-aged, she lives with a pet bird and smoked heavily in her apartment (the entire building is non-smoking), so multiple interviewees complained about the stench of bird shit and cigarette smoke emanating from her unit. As William pointed out, no one was checking on this woman’s apartment weekly, nor arranging to get her cleaning help. Another tenant, Janet, lives in affordable housing with her grown son who was left severely disabled and requires nursing assistance after being shot in the spine as a teenager. While Janet had arranged for aides to come in and help with his medical care, she and her son got no assistance from the in-house social service providers. These tensions not only underscore the “bureaucratic absurdities” of poverty governance (Wacquant 2010), but also shed light on residents’ resentment about the paternalistic demands of participation.

Nevertheless, despite these complaints, residents and staff alike pointed to the on-site services and participation requirements to distinguish New Beginnings from the traditional public housing developments that neighbored the facility. “This is not public housing,” Gloria, the program director, would frequently insist, noting instead that it was a program. Tenants would draw the same distinction. As Sawyer, explained the following:

I think it’s important that [the broader community] know that [New Beginnings] isn’t just like another housing project. This is a program. That there are goals. . .different things from reunification with families, and substance abuse treatment, and mental health treatment, and hopes to help you grow. And you’re not just dumped in here into an apartment and handed your PA check every month, and your food stamps, and there it is, and here’s your house, and make the best of it of what you can.

Cameron’s girlfriend, Jennifer, insisted that New Beginnings “is not just an SHA house like what everybody thinks of most of the housing apartments. Like, you go on the east side and there’s a lot of issues, whereas this is different. A lot of people are trying to do good and just needed that boost to be able to get a place and be safe.” Tony, too, explained, “[New Beginnings] is a program that helps, a place that can help people that’s struggling. You know? Whether it’s mental health or addiction and can help you get on your feet and you know, it has services. . .. If you want to achieve something, [New Beginnings] can help you do that.” These residents, who live in heavily subsidized permanent supportive housing units, felt it necessary to distinguish New Beginnings from traditional public housing, despite the fact that the housing authority is a key partner in their own building, where a majority of tenants receive project-based or tenant-based subsidies and the housing authority handles leasing, maintenance, some security staffing, and a host of other functions.

Crucially, for these residents, New Beginnings is a program, not a project, where tenants—at least those in the shelter and permanent supportive housing units—are expected to access services in an attempt to transform their lives, rather than being left to their own devices, collecting their welfare check every month. Despite the professed fear of their neighbors, many residents are from the neighborhood; some even grew up in Pioneer Homes. Seen from the outside, the distinction falls apart, but for these tenants and staff, distinguishing New Beginnings from the stigmatized image of dysfunctional public housing projects was meaningful. In doing so, they reinscribe a narrative of poverty as pathological, and of public housing as enabling dependency, all while suppressing another narrative: that of housing as a human right.

Conclusion

New Beginnings is an illustrative site of collaborative poverty governance, wherein the disciplinary and dispositional project of prisoner reentry intersects with the privatized terrain of subsidized housing for the poor. Given the extensive challenges that the formerly incarcerated face when it comes to finding housing—fueled not only by the generalized crisis of affordability, but by their historic exclusion from public housing and widespread discrimination in the private rental market—New Beginnings can be regarded as a remarkable achievement, offering residents, irrespective of their justice-involvement, a clean, affordable, and beautiful place to call home.

And yet, through our research, we found that the experience of the formerly incarcerated residents in the building is one of considerable ambivalence. Through bureaucratic sorting practices, some but not all of New Beginnings’ formerly incarcerated tenants are hailed as “carceral citizens,” with all of the contradictions that category implies (Miller and Stuart 2017). Residents express unequivocal gratitude for the housing and yet searing resentment about their ongoing subjection to carceral techniques of surveillance and control. They resent being singled out and stigmatized as reentry clients (and, hence, people with criminal records) and yet embrace that same positionality—their participation in a reentry program—when distinguishing themselves from other poor residents in the neighboring community. These findings echo those of other scholars who have shown that carceral confinement and the emergence of mass supervision generate experiences of “sociological ambivalence” (Comfort 2008). Our findings from New Beginnings show that this ambivalence—of feeling both helped and harmed— extends across the increasingly punitive terrain of present-day poverty governance.

Ultimately, the divisions drawn within New Beginnings tend to be overshadowed by the boundary drawn between New Beginnings, a program, and the surrounding housing developments, or projects. At every turn, residents and staff alike distinguish New Beginnings from the traditional public housing with which it is surrounded. Framing the latter as a haven of vice, criminality, and dependency, they reinforce damaging narratives about both the pathologies of the poor and the failures of public housing. It is this last point that is of particular concern to us, for New Beginnings—framed as a welcoming home for returning citizens and an interventionist “program” of reentry and rehabilitation—is poised to serve as a foil against which the destruction of these remaining “projects” will be justified.

This study contributes to broader efforts to understand the organizational terrain of contemporary poverty governance (Marwell and Morrissey 2020; Siliunas et al. 2019). In line with relational inequality theory, it is at the level of organizations—like New Beginnings—that policies are made manifest, resources are distributed, and categorizations and hierarchies, such as that of “carceral citizenship” (Miller and Stuart 2017), get codified (Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019). Indeed, as this case study of one organization has illustrated, “each organization is an inequality regime” (ibid, 19). Further, situated as it is at the crosshairs of mass incarceration and public housing redevelopment and like all agencies of poverty management in the U.S. today, New Beginnings is, inescapably, a deeply racialized organization, both produced by, and productive of, racialized inequality (Ray 2019).

Given the increasingly blurry lines and devolved terrain of neoliberal paternalist poverty management, it is important to investigate these sorts of experimental, organizational interventions that fuse together coercion and care, surveillance, and support. New Beginnings may be one of the first facilities of its kind in the country, but it assuredly will not be the last. It is thus increasingly important for scholars of punishment to engage with critical housing scholarship and vice versa. Dismantling the carceral state will necessarily require finding safe, affordable housing for the formerly incarcerated. Meanwhile, to advance struggles for housing justice, subsidized housing programs must continue to confront their exclusionary histories toward the justice-involved. However, housing should not come at the expense of freedom, nor should reentry programs work against the broader provision of stable forms of subsidized housing, like public housing has been for many.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Summer Project Assistantship Award from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

ORCID iDs

Madeleine Hamlin

Gretchen Purser

Notes

Author Biographies

Madeleine Hamlin is a PhD Candidate in the department of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where she also earned her MPA. She studies the intersection of housing and carceral geographies in US cities.

Gretchen Purser is an Associate Professor in the department of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on low-wage labor, housing, and poverty governance.

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