Miller R, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Abstract

I first met Reuben Miller in Chicago in November 2012, at the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology, but we abandoned the conference that day. Instead, he took me around the westside reentry projects in which he had recently undertaken the fieldwork for his PhD research. When I got back toGlasgow, I wrote a blog-post about that experience. Having recounted a little about my impressions of the projects we visited, I wrote about the conversations that we shared. In particular, I recalled how frustrated Miller was with the (then) absence of any social movement or civil rights campaign around reentry, not least given its racialised dimensions. That absence was striking not least because we were talking within the very neighbourhoods from which the Black Panthers had emerged in the 1960s. As he later argued (Miller, 2014), rather than being understood as a question of state in/justice that should be resisted, ‘carceral devolution’ had cast reentry as a responsibility of former prisoners (to transform themselves); of their families (to welcome back their own); and of underfunded community organisations (to triage the consequences of mass incarceration). I argued in that blog-post, and argue still, that it is an obligation of any democratic state that punishes to ensure that punishment ends. Yet, asHalfway Home demonstrates so vividly, the ‘penal state’ or carceral state (Garland, 2013), however messy, fragmented and contested it may be (Rubin and Phelps, 2017), produces not re/integration but instead a ‘supervised society’ in which multiple forms of exclusion and disenfranchisement leave people in the condition Miller calls ‘carceral citizenship’ (Miller and Stuart, 2017). I was exercised enough by the memories of that day – and by the way that it provoked me to think afresh about reintegration in my own country (Scotland) to argue that: