Reuben Jonathan Miller

Devolving the carceral state: Race, prisoner reentry, and the micro-politics of urban poverty management

This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of prisoner reentry programming in a large Midwestern city to better understand the strategies reentry organizations employ to ‘rehabilitate’ prisoners and the ways in which those strategies articulate with larger social policy processes. Prisoner reentry is a hybrid welfare state–criminal justice institution. As the rehabilitative strategy of choice in the current age, the ascendance and proliferation of reentry services throughout low income communities of color represents the long standing collusion between social welfare and criminal justice actors to manage marginalized populations and a formal reconfiguration of the state, altering its scope, reach and consequence in the lives of the urban poor. I detail the experiences of former prisoners participating in reentry services and discuss the implications of the ascendance of prisoner reentry for race relations, punishment, and social welfare policy in the United States.

Discrimination Fully Mediates the Effects of Incarceration History on Depressive Symptoms and Psychological Distress Among African American Men

AimUsing a nationally representative sample of African American men, this study investigated the associations between lifetime history of incarceration, discrimination, and mental health (e.g., depressive symptoms and psychological distress). We hypothesized that discrimination would fully mediate the association between incarceration history and mental health outcomes among African American men.MethodsUsing a cross-sectional design, our analysis included 1271 African American men who participated in the National Survey of American Life (NSAL), 2001–2003. Incarceration history was the main independent variable. Depressive symptoms and psychological distress were the dependent variables. Everyday discrimination was the mediator. Age, education, and income were covariates. Structural equation models (SEMs) were used for data analysis.ResultsAmong African American men, incarceration history was positively associated with perceived discrimination, depressive symptoms, and psychological distress. Everyday discrimination fully mediated the associations between incarceration history and both depressive symptoms and psychological distress.ConclusionDiscrimination may play an important role in the mental health problems of African American men with a history of incarceration. These findings have public policy implications as well as clinical implications for mental health promotion of African American men. Policies that reduce preventable incarceration or at least reduce subsequent discrimination for those who have been incarcerated may enhance mental health of previously incarcerated African American men.

Carceral Citizenship: Race, Rights and Responsibility in the Age of Mass Supervision:

Scholars have shown how formal processes of legal exclusion coupled with ubiquitous criminal justice contact relegate the largely black poor targets of the carceral state to second-class citizenship. Building upon but departing from this work, we reveal how carceral expansion has not just produced new forms of second-class citizenship for poor black Americans, but an alternate citizenship category and a distinct form of political membership—what we call carceral citizenship. The criminal record does this work through a process we call translation, marking the conventional citizen and making them legible, as a carceral citizen, for governance through institutions of coercion and care. We delineate the features of carceral citizenship and discuss its implications for how we understand the role, force, and consequence of the state in the lives of the raced and criminalized poor.

Baldwin’s Mill Race, Punishment, and the Pedagogy of Repression, 1965–2015

Written in the 50th anniversary of the historic debate between author and social critic James Baldwin and the “father of American conservatism” William F. Buckley, we extract from the corpus of Baldwin’s social critique a method to grasp emergent forms of marginality in the contemporary age. Described as a mill, Baldwin shows how everyday interactions shaped the behaviors and meaning making of black Americans during the civil rights era, teaching them to repress their feelings, motivations, and desires at the threat of violence. Inspired by Baldwin, we apply this analytic to mass imprisonment and the rise of prisoner reentry as a national policy priority. Attending to the “work” of reentry in the lives of the black poor, we find that the institutional and policy arrangements that gave birth to prisoner reentry, coupled with the exclusion of the criminalized poor from full participation in the social, civic, and economic life of the city operates as a pedagogy, locating the presumed black and criminalized poor within a social hierarchy and situating them within a moral taxonomy.

Poverty, Incarceration: A Brief Introduction

Thanks in no small part to the successes of an unrelenting activist community, along with a growing contingent of engaged academics interested in questions of mass incarceration, and the fiscal constraints of a recessed economy, the gargantuan expansion of the U.S. prison system has garnered considerable attention in recent years. The prison has been theorized as a geographically bounded physical structure designed to warehouse, punish, and in previous historic moments, rehabilitate the convicted, and as a social institution with influence that reverberates throughout social life (Cohen, 1985; Garland, 2001; Wacquant, 2009; Western, 2006). Indeed, the practices of punishment have been implicated in theories of social solidarity, conflict, reproduction, and maintenance (Garland, 1990). Whether it is viewed as an instrument of domination that promotes inequality across social strata (Davis, 2001), a geographic solution to social problems in the United States (Gilmore, 2007), or a form of poverty governance, producing particular ways of being in the social world (Foucault, 1977), especially for those most affected by it, the importance of the prison in the current age, and shadow that it casts over the life worlds of the poor in particular cannot be overstated (Wacquant, 2009; Western, 2006). The guest editors of this special issue sought contributions that would help break scholarship on poverty, punishment, and the criminal justice system out of the “crime and punishment poke” (Wacquant, 2009, p. 287), bringing critical analysis of mass incarceration into dialogue with literature

Everyday Discrimination Among African American Men The Impact of Criminal Justice Contact

The present study examined the impact of criminal justice contact on experiences of everyday discrimination among a national sample of African American men. African American men have a high likelihood of being the targets of major discrimination as well as experiencing disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system. Few studies, however, examine everyday discrimination (e.g., commonplace social encounters of unfair treatment) among this group. Using data from the National Survey of American Life, we provide a descriptive assessment of different types of everyday discrimination among African American men. Specifically, we examined differences in everyday discrimination among men who have never been arrested, those who have been arrested but not incarcerated, and men who have a previous history of criminal justice intervention categorized by type of incarceration experienced (i.e., reform school, detention, jail, or prison). Study findings indicated overall high levels of reported everyday discrimination, with increased likelihood and a greater number of experiences associated with more serious forms of criminal justice contact. However, in many instances, there were no or few differences in reported everyday discrimination for African American men with and without criminal justice contact, indicating comparable levels of exposure to experiences with unfair treatment.

Stop and Frisk Online: Theorizing Everyday Racism in Digital Policing in the Use of Social Media for Identification of Criminal Conduct and Associations

Police are increasingly monitoring social media to build evidence for criminal indictments. In 2014, 103 alleged gang members residing in public housing in Harlem, New York, were arrested in what has been called “the largest gang bust in history.” The arrests came after the New York Police Department (NYPD) spent 4 years monitoring the social media communication of these suspected gang members. In this article, we explore the implications of using social media for the identification of criminal activity. We describe everyday racism in digital policing as a burgeoning conceptual framework for understanding racialized social media surveillance by law enforcement. We discuss implications for law enforcement agencies utilizing social media data for intelligence and evidence in criminal cases.

The Prisonized Old Head: Intergenerational Socialization and the Fusion of Ghetto and Prison Culture:

Over the last four decades, the United States’ criminal justice system has undergone a historic expansion, which has disproportionately impacted poor urban neighborhoods. The meteoric rise in the percentage of the urban poor either on their way to, in, or recently released from jail or prison has led a number of scholars to theorize a “fusion of ghetto and prison culture” (Wacquant 2001). The exact sources and contours of this fusion, however, remain unspecified. How, concretely, are the cultural contexts of prisons transmitted to poor urban neighborhoods? This article proposes that intergenerational socialization is a key mechanism in this process. We contend that the dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades has given rise to an unexpected and peculiar form of socialization, provided by a new social actor—what we term the “prisonized old head.” We define the prisonized old head as an individual who exhibits three particular characteristics. They are (1) older individuals with extensive experiences in, and wisdom about, the criminal justice system; who (2) informally socialize neighborhood residents to embrace the cultural schemas and routines learned inside penal spaces; to (3) navigate the daily exigencies routinely faced in the neighborhood context. Stated simply, prisonized old heads leverage ways of life developed “on the inside” as strategies for living life “on the outside.” We articulate the emergence, mechanisms, and implications of this form of socialization drawing on fieldwork data in Los Angeless’ Skid Row neighborhood—one of the premier reentry communities in the United States. We show that although this socialization may contribute to desistance and self-transformation, it can simultaneously constrain upward mobility and limit reintegration.

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class in the Wake of a National Crisis: The State of Black Boys and Men Post-Ferguson

This introduction to the special issue will ground our understanding of the current state of Black boys and men in America, nearly 2 years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Each of these articles represents the voices of scholars whose influences add clarity to the experiences and aftermath of traumatic events that threaten the safety and well-being of Black boys and men. Collectively, these articles showcase various research methods; address individual, family, and community issues; and demonstrate how race, gender, and class influence how the assorted levels of society interact with Black males. This special issue is an important contribution to raising awareness of and enacting social change for Black boys and men in our nation.

Carceral Devolution and the Transformation of Urban America

This chapter examines the ways in which prisoner reentry has transformed the urban landscape and its broader implications as the rehabilitative strategy of choice in the current age. Following broader policy trends, we find prisoner reentry to be a part of a larger process of responsibilization that offloads the responsibility of the state to ensure the social, civic, and political participation of its residents onto third-sector organizations, prisoners’ families, and former prisoners themselves. Tracing these developments, we show how reentry exhibits one way that the state has been reconfigured to manage the urban poor while embedding punishment more deeply within the social body.