Abstract
In The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance, Andrea Leverentz brings to life the predicament women experience following their prison release. Confronted with competing messages from various individuals and institutions, former prisoners must learn to negotiate conflicting messages about who they are, who they should be, and how they should live their lives. Leverentz draws on narrative accounts of 49 current and former residents of Mercy Home, the pseudonym she gave to a halfway house in Chicago, to illustrate how women define their lives as they reenter society and attempt to desist from crime. Her sample consists largely of African American women from low-income neighborhoods, who she interviewed multiple times over the course of a year, as well as 26 members of their social networks (i.e. family members, romantic partners, friends, co-workers). She argues that women’s narratives were influenced by their experiences at the halfway house that infused them with self-help and 12-step rhetoric. On the one hand, women’s involvement in such programs proved advantageous because it promoted a sense of self-efficacy and relationships, encouraged them to take responsibility for their past behaviors, and allowed them to move forward with their lives. On the other hand, she observes that 12-step narratives fail to consider women’s structural realities. Women were taught to work hard and be persistent, implying that they controlled their reentry success. However, self-help messages typically conflicted with women’s structural position, as they faced institutional barriers and invisible punishment (i.e. employment restrictions, stigma) associated with having a criminal record, which affected their reentry and desistance process.
Leverentz further chronicles how women’s social identities as a mother, sister, daughter, girlfriend or wife, and friend often conflicted with their sense of self as defined by self-help and 12-step messages they received from the halfway house programs. While motherhood and family were central to women’s identity, at times, familial obligations conflicted with their recovery and desistance attempts. Some family members expected women to maintain familial roles even when these role expectations conflicted with their attempts to desist from crime. Moreover, Leverentz found that women constantly negotiated their familial relationships due to problematic dynamics that conflicted with recovery narratives suggested by the programs. For example, they typically kept regular contact with family members who were involved in criminal behavior even though they were told to avoid such associations. In contrast to problematic familial relationships, women in the study often cut ties with romantic partners and friends to focus on their own recovery and desistance efforts.
Leverentz notes that most women in her study internalized the goals of finding employment and securing stable housing, which they ascribed to the broader cultural narratives of success. Though women accepted these goals, they often faced barriers to attaining financial independence, higher education, and a home in a quiet neighborhood. Hence, former prisoners modified the messages they received in such a way that fit with the structural realities of their lives. For instance, given the limited options of where women could live, it was not always practical for them to avoid people, places, and things related to their criminality (a trope often cited in self-help programs); thus, many emphasized that neighborhood settings did not matter as much as how one defines her role within the neighborhood. By reframing their environment as less important than their individual agency, women emphasized control over the desistance process.
Leverentz is to be commended for her book, as she provides a means of bridging the agency/structure divide in a way that allows theorists to go beyond constructing desistance solely as a result of willpower. She recognizes desistance as situated action allowing for acknowledgement of agency, but does so in a way thoroughly grounded in the contexts of structural inequalities, such as gender, race, class, and age. Moreover, two-thirds of the sample were interviewed four times over the course of the year and the remainder between one and three times. This methodological design proves valuable because it increases the reliability of the findings and offers a longitudinal narrative study that tracks women’s change over time. Also, by interviewing members of women’s social networks twice, Leverentz captures changes in their relationship over time.
Nevertheless, Leverentz fails to document the number of women’s networks that were interviewed in or near the presence of the respondent. For example, the author admits that when questioning an adult child as to whether her mother changed post-incarceration, the mother joined the conversation from the next room to dispute her daughter’s response (p. 109). The presence of former prisoners in or near the room where the interview was taking place with members of social networks can bias results that are more favorable toward the women. Moreover, even though desistance is a process, Leverentz fails to mention the number of women in her study who actually reoffended and whether there were any changes in their offending patterns (i.e. in terms of frequency, seriousness, and length). Although Leverentz documents that some did struggle with relapse within one to two years of their release from prison, it would have been helpful to know how many had extended periods of involvement in criminal activity and how many maintained desistance.
Because social context shaped women’s pathways into and out of crime, Leverentz calls for changes in policies to support former prisoners’ efforts to reintegrate. She argues that focusing on individual pathology simply “distract[s] us from the ways in which social policies and stigma inhibit desistance” (p. 182). She recommends fostering desistance narratives, helping desisters as they manage complex relationships, publicly acknowledging their desistance efforts with ceremonies, and limiting the use of criminal background checks. Overall, Leverentz’s book offers insight into women’s experiences post-incarceration and how they negotiate messages about returning to the community. The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma is a must read for students, researchers, and practitioners interested in gender, prisoner reentry, and social justice.