Bruce Western,Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison

Bruce Western’s Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison examines the lives of a group of individuals immediately following release from prison. The book grew out of the Boston Reentry Study, and is based on multiple interviews with 122 men and women throughout their first year after release from state prisons in Massachusetts. It represents an attempt to explore – and represent – what happens in the lives of these individuals. In addition to the empirical questions this entails, Western endeavors to center the book within an “ethical framework” that addresses both empirical and ethical issues. As he notes, researchers and policymakers routinely focus on the question of ‘what works’, but he seeks to integrate this with questions about ‘what is right’. For instance, when does punishment end and what does society owe to people who have been incarcerated?

This book – as expected given Western’s impressive oeuvre – is well researched, well thought-out, and well written. It introduces and unpacks a number of important themes, and it raises interesting questions and issues for further consideration. It is in conversation with, and contributes to, the existing body of scholarly work on reentry and post-prison experiences. Yet, Western’s book appears to be oriented towards a wider and more general audience, including academics new to these topics, policy makers, and the general public. At the same time, for a variety of reasons this book should be of interest to scholars of punishment. Some of the themes (e.g., difficulty in finding employment, educational deficits, histories of substance abuse) will be familiar, yet a number of things set this book apart. It continues and deepens the author’s long-standing interest in exploring the ways in which punishment both reflects and furthers inequality. Further, the book diverges from some of the existing reentry scholarship in ways that are refreshing and analytically promising.

First, Homeward is based on impressively rich, in-depth qualitative data. While drawing from survey research, the book relies primarily on interview data as Western aims to, as he puts it, tell the stories behind the numbers. To achieve this, Western and a team of research assistants conducted a series of five interviews with individuals at various points during their first year following imprisonment. They also conducted interviews with some family members. In the process, they achieved an impressive response rate (94%) while gaining data that are rich, detailed, and often quite intimate.

Another noteworthy aspect of this book is its nuanced engagement with the topics of violence and human frailty. In relation to violence, Western calls for complicating the categories of perpetrator, victim, and witness, as research participants tended to cycle through these positionalities over time, sometimes occupying several roles simultaneously. The prevalence of violence in respondents’ lives leads Western to conceptualize it as another form of deprivation. Further, this book challenges narratives emphasizing personal responsibility; Western insists on the need to attend to the social context in which violence, trauma and criminalization unfold.

Human frailty emerges as a central theme. Frailty, Western contends, is produced at the intersections and accumulations of economic hardships (e.g., poverty, unemployment) and physical and mental health issues (e.g., disability, addiction, mental illness). He notes that in a considerable amount of work, the demographics of those enmeshed in punishment get reduced to markers of age, race and education, yet this tends to overlook, and hence sanitize, realities and disadvantages related to poor health, mental illness, and past trauma and abuse.

In fact, Homeward benefits from its turn towards an intersectional approach (although this term is not utilized), as it attends to the interactions between class and race and, to a lesser degree, gender. For instance, in looking at the links between class and racial inequality, Western notes that the structural racism that is “built into the structure of neighborhoods and labor markets” (17) impacts individuals post-release. And Western attends to ways in which poverty, race and racism interact with – and often exacerbate – other issues, including mental health, physical health, addiction and trauma.

Moreover, Homeward calls attention to the ways in which reentry is gendered. (Of the 122 individuals interviewed, 15 were women.) For instance, Western contends that women faced greater urgency, and hence challenges, in repairing relationships than did men, and that they more commonly suffered from PTSD. Importantly, the book also highlights gendered imbalances in reentry support. A considerably larger amount of support (social, financial, and housing) comes from women; from mothers, grandmothers, sisters and partners.

Lastly, Western’s commitment to an ethical framework – attending not only to questions of efficacy but also questions of moral obligation and propriety – is notable and will hopefully spur more conversation about the ethics of research and representation (e.g., see Bell, 2020). For instance, Western incriminates some of his own previous work as failing to adequately explore the lives of the individuals behind data. An especially important and welcome contribution of this book is Western’s critique of how recidivism has become something of a be-all, end-all measure for correctional success. As Western notes, avoiding recidivism is frequently equated with successful reintegration; it has come to serve as a signal, if not proxy, for rehabilitation, quality of life, and efficacious state intervention. We need more capacious and nuanced ways to talk about post-prison experiences and outcomes. ¹ Moving in this direction, Western calls for a less reductive, more qualitatively-informed conception of reintegration that evaluates “the attainment of a basic level of well-being consistent with community membership” (35) and that attends to questions of dignity, fulfillment, and the achievement of goals.

In this way, Homeward attempts to disrupt some of the cultural logics that undergird the United States’ extensive carceral continuum. In particular, Western takes aim at the reductive logic of individual responsibility. For instance, he contends that “human frailty, combined with histories of trauma and victimization, complicates the moral status of those who are sent to prison.” (49). Further, throughout the book Western is challenging the tacit acceptance of categorical distinctions between criminal and law-abiding citizen, between dangerous and not dangerous ‘offender’, between deserving and not deserving human.

These disruptions are most welcome. Yet they cannot overcome an important – and vexing – issue facing scholars of punishment. Especially within work on reentry, a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to documenting the inequalities, social deficits, marginality, and suffering of the formerly incarcerated. (In fact, Loic Wacquant (2002: 392) contends that work showing the deleterious effects of penality has become something of a “mini-cottage industry”.) This intensive focus raises a question: alongside documenting individuals’ difficulties and vulnerabilities, how we do also recognize and make room for their dignity, resilience, agency and amplitude? This question is both analytic and political. Documenting the struggles, vulnerabilities, and deficits faced by penal subjects is, of course, crucial. Yet, it simultaneously runs the risk of reproducing discourses and logics that legitimize mass criminalization and punishment by, for instance, reifying a conception of justice-involved people as defective and/or lacking subjects in need of state (i.e., penal) intervention (Werth and Ballestero, 2017). Put differently, efforts to humanize individuals – by documenting their marginality and deficits – may inadvertently contribute to pathologizing them.

Western’s important, well-researched book delves into the lived realities, challenges and suffering of individuals following release from prison, while providing a window to reflect on the conditions that allow for hyper-criminalization and incarceration. Further, Homeward should spur important conversations about the analytic, political and ethical challenges involved in exploring how individuals not only experience but navigate punishment and its aftereffects.