Organizing Reentry: How Racial Colorblindness Structures the Post-imprisonment Terrain

Abstract

Over 600,000 people are released from federal and state prisons each year, up from about 160,000 in 1980. As such, the reentry literature is framed around these individuals and the personal barriers to reintegration they face. Less work, however, explicitly investigates the role reentry professionals and organizations play in actively shaping the reentry terrain. Using ethnographic observations, document analysis, and interviews with both criminal justice professionals and ex-prisoners, this chapter examines how an organizational field constructs reentry as a racially colorblind process. Although race and racism shape criminal justice, labor market, and other institutional experiences, I find that the positioning of reentry as meritocracy operates to both explain and justify the inequalities experienced by ex-prisoners.