Graduate Student, Sociology
PhD Candidate
Thesis Title: Halfway Home: Race, Rights, Rituals, and the Micro Politics of Prisoner Reentry on Chicago’s West Side
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Phil Nyden
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About
Halfway Home is an ethnographic and qualitative historic examination of former prisoners’ experiences with faith based, community reentry programming in their transition home from state and federal prison. The project examines several important but understudied questions at the intersection of socio-legal studies, punishment theory, and urban ethnography: 1) Given the historic expansion of the criminal justice system and the proliferation of faith based programming in low income, inner city communities, how do former prisoners experience the various processes of community reintegration and with whom do they experience them with? 2) What strategies do faith based actors employ to facilitate ex-offender reintegration and what role do they play in their service communities? 3) Given the reliance of the state on community based organizations to attenuate complex social problems ranging from addiction, to unemployment and recidivism, in what ways does reentry programming speak to penal change and larger shifts in the political sphere; and 4) What are former prisoners’ perspectives on the salience of race, gender, geography, and class to their reintegration processes and outcomes, engagement with arms of the penal state, and their subsequent prospects in the labor market, arguably the primary focus of reentry efforts? Using participant observation, archival and historic analysis, and semi structured interviews, this project explores ex-offender community reintegration from the perspective of those most affected by the phenomena, locating the processes and outcomes of prisoner reentry within the macro social, historic and economic context of U.S. punishment practices.
