What Happens When You’re Released From Prison?

Why do we ask those who are struggling the most to make the biggest changes?

On any given day, about 2.3 million people are locked up in the United States — making the “land of the free” the home of the largest incarcerated population in the world. Most prisoners, however, don’t spend the rest of their days trapped inside. Over 600,000 people every year exit the prison gates only to be hurled into the “free” world.

That transition is complicated and uncomfortable. Once they get out, where do they live? Do they have any friends or family to support them? Can they find work?

All of these questions, and more, are addressed in Bruce Western’s Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison—a book which deals specifically with “the aftermath of incarceration.” Five times over the course of a year, Western and his team at Harvard University interviewed 122 women and men who had left Massachusetts state prisons and were dealing with the transition back into society.

Western does well to let the respondents’ words and actions speak for themselves — a noble achievement for a researcher — and by doing so, Western’s book provides an honest (and depressing) account of life after prison. Here were some of the more unexpected and profound discoveries I took away from the research:

• “About 40 percent” of the respondents in their first week reported being anxious around large crowds;

They were distressed by public transport and crowded public places like stores and nightclubs. Many respondents stayed off trains and buses for the first few months to avoid being jostled by strangers.

• Mandatory parole and probation supervision cost the respondents $65–$80 a session. Western notes how “some respondents chafed at these initial meetings and resented the fees imposed at a time when they had no income.” You don’t say.
• “The role of older women was critical in the provision of support” to the interviewed respondents. About 80 percent of those living with family six months after prison, regardless of gender, were staying with a female relative. The stability of women in these trying times after prison was a consistent theme in their research. Western talks about how “the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters of those who go to prison” are the ones who usually “visit their loved ones, talk to them by phone, offer food and housing after release, and often help take care of their children.”
• There are many terrific insights offered in Homeward, but this one, by far, was the most illuminating:

The people we ask to make the largest changes in their lives often have the least capacity to do so. This is a profound paradox for even the most progressive visions of imprisonment and correctional policy.

It’s important to point out that Homeward is not just a compilation of experiences from former prisoners. In the last chapter of the book, Western wades into the public policy debate and attempts to imagine how we can move beyond a society of mass imprisonment. He highlights proposals like “social adversity mitigation,” which advocates for “reducing sentences for defendants who lived with poverty.”

In theory, that sounds great, but the political feasibility of that proposal is dubious at best. At a time when we can’t even get conservatives to admit that “Black Lives Matter,” how on earth are we going to convince them that people of color should be given more leniency in the criminal justice system because of their circumstances?

Western doesn’t dismiss these difficult questions, but he also tends to err on the side of optimism. He ends the book by calling upon American society to strive towards “mutual understanding”—a vague, Obama-esque call to action that feels hollow, and frankly naive, in the Trump era. And yet his point remains. To dismantle the prison industrial complex, empathy is a must. Do we have it within us? I’m not so certain. However, if we are ever to arrive at that point of mutual understanding, books like Western’s will play a key role in getting us there.