Nearly 20 Million Americans Have a Felony Record. What Happens After They’ve Served Their Time?

Reuben Jonathan Miller's book Halfway Home was reviewed in the New York Times.

There is, of course, the immediate experience of incarceration: the detention at any given moment of more than 2 million people in American jails and prisons, or what the sociologist Reuben Jonathan Miller calls “cages” — a word that captures the brute fact of confinement more vividly than the antiseptic vocabulary of “correctional facilities.”

But in “Halfway Home,” Miller wants us to understand incarceration’s “afterlife” — how prison follows people “like a ghost,” a permanent specter in the lives of the 19.6 million Americans who have a felony record. These people have done their time, but they’re still constrained by what Miller, who teaches at the University of Chicago, describes as “an alternate form of citizenship.” There are some 45,000 federal and state laws that regulate where they can work, where they can live and whether they can vote. They reside in a “hidden social world and an alternate legal reality.”

The title of Miller’s book is both literal and ironic. A halfway home can refer to an actual place where formerly incarcerated people are supposed to gain skills for re-entering society. For many of them, though, halfway is just about as far as they’re allowed to get. “The problem of re-entry is not simply a problem of behavior,” Miller writes. Programs hand out “certificates of completion” in subjects like food preparation and anger management. But as one administrator at a human services agency tells Miller, “My guys got 14 certificates and no job.”