Facing Down the Long-Term Consequences of Incarceration

Recent MacArthur Fellowship recipient and 2019 National Fellow Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist, and social worker. His work examines the myriad laws, limitations, and hurdles faced by formerly incarcerated individuals as they are forced into a “carceral citizenship.”

In this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft — the National Fellows Program newsletter — New America National Fellow Reuben Jonathan Miller talks about his new book on the long-term impacts of incarceration on the lives of individuals and their families.

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Note: This Q&A is originally from November 2020.

Your Fellowship project is focused on your book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration. Can you tell us about this project and your goals for it?

The book is about the many ways that mass incarceration has changed the social life of the city. The prison and policing and the courts, probation, and parole have filtered into our most intimate relationships, changing how grandmothers, partners, and children relate with one another. I try to trace those changes nationally, drawing from my research over the last decade and a half, and my own experiences as the son and brother of formerly incarcerated men.

My hope is to change the conversation about the work mass incarceration does in the social world, and to think more carefully about the many ways that social life has been altered by our impulse to punish people we’re afraid of and people that we’ve thrown away.

In Halfway Home, you explore life in a “supervised society.” Can you explain a bit about this term and its significance in your book and your work?

Roughly 45,000 laws and policies dictate where people with criminal records may live, work, and with whom they may spend their time; shape their family dynamics; and dictate which neighborhoods they must avoid. These laws and policies compel [those with criminal records] to participate in programming that would be voluntary for other Americans, and they restrict those same people from full participation in the political economy and culture. This doesn’t just affect the 2.3 million people held in a cage, but the 19.6 million Americans estimated to have a felony record — a full third of whom are Black, almost all are poor. But this doesn’t stop at the threshold of the Black family. Poor white men represent a third of the prison population, and over a third of white men will be arrested by their 23rd birthday. Mass incarceration is an American problem, and the supervised society draws millions of Americans into its ambit.

You have a background in sociology. What drew you to this discipline, and how does it translate into your writing?

Sociology gives me a language and a set of methods to ask questions about the larger operations of society and empirical tools to answer them. I was drawn to sociology because of the scholars I read — Loïc Wacquant, W.E.B. DuBois, C. Wright Mills, Barbara J. Fields, and Karen E. Fields. Sociology’s macro social focus allows me to connect the dots between my experiences caring for loved ones in and out of prison with changes in the larger political economy and culture and it helps me locate my fieldwork (reporting) and the narratives I’ve uncovered for my fellowship project within a broader history and set of social practices.

“Mass incarceration is an American problem, and the supervised society draws millions of Americans into its ambit.”

Your research examines life at the intersections of race, poverty, crime control, and social welfare policy. Has the current moment seen any significant changes in this field? Do you see this dynamic changing anytime soon, and if so, how?

Everything is up for grabs. I’ve been interested in the relationship between people and their government, specifically the government’s caring arm and how that relationship changes our lives. Right now, we are in the beginning of the important work of rethinking our relationships with our government and with the power brokers that have for so long shaped what we know and how we’ve come to know it. The Movement for Black Lives is at the forefront of this change. So too is the new journalism that’s come under fire in recent months for making us reimagine the stories (often myths) we tell ourselves and call our national history. And the more radical, abolitionist, even anarchist-activists and free thinkers have helped us to do this work, just as they have in every moment of progress from our nation’s inception.

You are a professor at the University of Chicago. What do you think students are taking away from this moment, and how can adults learn from their generation?

My students are starting to ask new questions. They are resisting the easy caricatures of social life that our social science, arts, and journalism has too often relied on, and they are forcing us to have new conversations about what our relationships could and should look like. Our students are forcing us to reimagine justice, and to reimagine what it means to be in relationship with one another, and I love it.

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