Bruce Western, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison.

• Author: Bell, Marina

Bruce Western, Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018)

BRUCE WESTERN SETS A HIGH BAR FOR HIMSELF IN HOMEWARD: LIFE IN THE Year After Prison. In the opening pages, he explains the importance of an ethical framework, particularly when it concerns studying people who are or have been incarcerated. Indeed, an ethical imperative drives the book. He observes that policy is guided by the question of "what works"--or at least, it is supposed to be. But much less often do researchers and policy makers ask, "What is right?" Specifically, in this case, "What are our obligations to those who are punished?" (p. xiii). The reentry literature abounds with statistical research, studies of recidivism, and evaluations of program efficacy. Less of this research, Western says, actually depicts the lives of the people it studies. And when details of their lives are filtered out, assumptions about them lead scholars to conduct research in ways that ultimately result in shortcomings of the data--assuming people live in stable homes, pay taxes, work regularly, etc. Western indicts his own prior work among these studies. Beyond problematic data, it is also important for scholarship to tell the stories behind the numbers, "to capture the texture of life during the transition from prison to community" (p. 4). Homeward sets out to do just this. One of Western's primary goals, he explains, is to bear witness, based on what he feels is an unmet need to bring these people and their stories to life.

The book is based on his Boston Reentry Study, comprised of interviews with 122 men and women leaving Massachusetts prisons and returning to neighborhoods throughout the city of Boston, as well as interviews with members of their families. Western seeks to learn what happens to them. What challenges do they and their families encounter? How do they search for work? How do they handle mental health or substance abuse problems? Why do some go back to prison? Jeremy Travis has remarked that examining criminal punishment system problems through the lens of reentry takes the perspective of those who go through the system. For that reason, it is useful for asking questions about our obligations to people we send to prison, and Western hopes, for offering some answers.

One significant theme that emerges from Westerns analysis is how poverty refracts and exponentially exacerbates the problems that recur in the lives of those who go to prison and those affected by their incarceration. Poverty compounds mental and physical health problems, producing what he calls "human frailty."

Violence too, is deeply intertwined with, and exacerbated by, conditions of poverty. Western finds that violence is highly prevalent in the lives of his respondents, to such an extent that he refers to violence as another kind of deprivation, causing physical and psychological harm, also compounded by poverty. Western's understanding of violence disrupts the standard victim/offender binary: The United States' extreme incarceration policies, he argues, rest on a false narrative about "guilty criminals" and "innocent victims." This story "imports assumptions from middle-class life, in which a basic level of order and security prevails" (p. 9). Those privileged enough to live outside of environments rife with such poverty and violence have little basis...