Abstract
I, like many others, eagerly awaited the publication of Reuben Jonathan Miller’s first book. Having read several of his scholarly articles, I looked forward to seeing how his ideas about carceral citizenship would translate into a monograph. Halfway Home did not let me down. Skillfully employing a literary voice that speaks directly from his own experiences, Miller develops profound conceptual arguments into a jargon-free, extraordinarily engaging read.
The book draws on Miller’s observations and experiences as a volunteer chaplain at Cook County jail for five years, as well as three-and-a-half years of fieldwork in halfway houses in Chicago and multiple years engaging with 60 men and women starting on the day of their release from Detroit area prisons. Miller tells the stories of the people he has met—many of whom have become close friends—with care, compassion and immediacy. Building relationships with individuals for substantial periods of time allows him to move beyond one-dimensional tropes in which former prisoners are either miserable failures or success stories. Instead, he introduces readers to complicated people whose needs, desires, talents and challenges play out in multiple institutional contexts.
Readers come to know Ronald and Zo (among others) not as frozen in time anecdotes or “cases”, but as complex people whose lives change repeatedly over the course of the book. Throughout, Miller walks a careful line between not painting these people as saints—acknowledging the bad decisions they make—yet showing compassion and understanding as he contextualizes their actions in constantly shifting webs of restrictions, regulations, institutional requirements and structural violence. Some of the most conventionally “successful” people he follows die by the end of the book, despite years of doing all the “right” things.
Miller fittingly describes his methodology as “the gift of proximity” (p. 283ff.). His own father was incarcerated for many years; he himself was raised by his grandmother while two of his brothers were sent away from home by the courts. These experiences were not unusual: Miller explains that all of the Black people he has met who grew up poor have firsthand experience of families split by incarceration. As the primary support for his brother who was in and out of prison during the time in which Miller researched and wrote the book, Miller shares with readers his own struggles with feeling annoyed by repeated requests for money and help even while understanding how historical and structural racism shapes that world that has punished his brother for being Black and poor.
Miller has an extraordinary ability to understand and articulate multiple perspectives. His writing gives voice not only to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, but also to their children, siblings, parents, lovers, friends and grandparents. Each point of view is treated with respect and dignity; no single point of view is privileged as more important, more interesting or more “true”. Balancing multiple perspectives is especially useful as Miller moves between individual experiences and broad structural issues. Neither is privileged—each informs the other in fundamental ways.
The conceptual frame for the book is what Miller calls the “afterlife” of mass incarceration, making it clear that ghosts of incarceration live on even after individuals are released, and even after incarceration rates decline nationally. Poor and African American people continue to live in a “supervised society—a hidden social world and an alternate legal reality” (p. 8) in which 45,000 federal and state laws regulate people’s lives post-incarceration. These laws dictate where people can live and work, whether they can vote or run for office, and with whom they can socialize.
Miller particularly emphasizes the impact of housing restrictions (echoed in the title Halfway Home). For example, changes in liability laws beginning in the 1980s allowed tenants to sue landlords when they were robbed or mugged in their buildings: “Almost overnight, property owners became part of the crime-fighting machine. They responded to this new responsibility by evicting tenants with even decades-old criminal records, and denying leases to people facing criminal allegations” (p. 157). Today, family and friends may be compelled to turn away loved ones due to prohibitions on people with criminal records staying in public or subsidized housing, or because another family member’s own conditions of probation or parole disallow socializing with a person who has a felony record.
Through these and other mechanisms, entire communities are drawn into webs of criminalization, restriction, poverty and marginalization that break up families and undermine the relationships that could provide support and stability. Miller explains:
This, too, is the afterlife of slavery, which is to say it is the afterlife of mass incarceration. It is the arrests and poverty and premature death that follow the sons of Ham. It’s the separation from our homes and families. It is the precarious lives we live with too few people to come to our aid. It’s the profound sense of loneliness and the embarrassment and guilt that comes with knowing you’re alone.
(p. 74)
Throughout the book Miller systematically dismantles binary notions of “incarcerated” versus “free citizen”. There are the countless ways in which the daily, economic and emotional lives of incarcerated and non-incarcerated family members and friends are intertwined. And there is the continuum that begins with agents of juvenile control ostensibly protecting children and continues into experiences of pre-incarceration, incarceration and post-incarceration. Post-incarceration, in fact, often becomes pre-incarceration in that the system makes it nearly impossible for people not to violate conditions of parole. For example, it is commonplace for people to miss required appointments because they do not have the bus fare to get to the appointment. This kind of violation can mean a return to prison.
Some of the most compelling stories (see pp. 235–236) follow individuals who, upon release from prison, are handed a list of halfway houses and treatment facilities with an order to move into one of them within a day or two of release. The onus of “choosing” a facility is put on the individual who likely finds that facilities no longer exist, do not have room, do not accept people with their particular backgrounds or are located outside the reach of public transportation. The idea of “choice” in these instances exposes the false dichotomy between treatment and punishment. As part of “treatment”, the individual is taught to make so-called better choices. Yet in the absence of real alternatives, the process of choosing leads back to institutions of punishment.
This sort of dilemma is built into the system. Looking back, Miller explains that George W. Bush’s “Second Chance Act” passed at a time in which policymakers knew that people with criminal records struggled to find jobs and housing. Yet this Act emphasized personal transformation (and funded programs with that emphasis) rather than addressing the structural conditions that make it impossible for people to obtain decent jobs. Still today, so-called reentry programs rarely lead to good jobs or a meaningful career ladder. Rather, they focus on teaching people “how to cope with their position on the bottom of the social order” (p. 225).
Halfway Home is an extraordinarily deep and nuanced exploration of intersectionality of race and class. In future work I would like to read more of Miller’s thoughts about how gender intersects with both race and class. As much as racism drives the over-incarceration of people of color, hegemonic notions of gender define citizenship and personhood. Thus, Miller notes that the criminal legal trajectory for boys includes getting into fights, cutting class, police and incarceration while girls tend to be a bit older when first arrested, most have children and almost all have been sexually assaulted. I’d like to hear more about how these differences play out. Within the carceral landscape, gender segregation is taken for granted, and gendered “pathways into crime” are assumed to be the norm. I especially wanted to learn more about how Black men experience racialized portrayals of sexually insatiable and predatory masculinity. This is not meant as criticism—no one book can do it all. Rather, this is hope that Miller will continue to turn his compassionate and astute eye on additional pieces of the carceral landscape.
Halfway Home is a book I will assign to undergraduates, and have already recommended to friends and community activists. Indeed, if I were asked to suggest one book as an introduction to race and incarceration, this is the book I would choose. It is beautifully written, accessible and compellingly personal. Yet it is not simplistic: veterans in the field will gain new insights from the ways in which Miller weaves together law and policy, the history of racial constructions, neighborhood dynamics in Chicago and Detroit, and the politics of punishment and control.