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Book review: Homeward: Life in the Year after Prison

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorMike Guilfoyle
Published date01 March 2019
Date01 March 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0264550518821028a
Subject MatterBook reviews
PRB821028 143..146
Book review
145
Homeward: Life in the Year after Prison
Bruce Western
RSF; 2018; pp. 234; £29.95; pbk
ISBN: 978-0-87154-955-6
Reviewed by: Mike Guilfoyle, Retired Professional Associate Member,
Napo
In this illuminating, sharply textured and accessibly written study of the lives of
ex-prisoners in the first year of life after prison, Bruce Western brings to the text his
well-honed sociological lens as a highly respected scholar of some of the well-
documented harms of mass incarceration. In the Boston, USA-based study, West-
ern frames his analysis on how ex-prisoners navigate this transition in such a fashion
as to pose for the questioning reader some of the wider policy challenges on
reducing incarcerative options through better informed social and criminal justice
measures.
With a staggeringly high figure of over 600,000 people released from federal or
state prisons each year, his use of over one hundred in-depth interviews with some of
the men and women (mainly from African American and Latino backgrounds)
released from the Massachusetts state prison system makes for many richly com-
pelling narratives of survival, failure to cope and the many obstacles to overcoming
the stigma of a prison record.
He does not baulk from examining some of the research and ethical challenges of
working with what survey researchers call ‘hard to reach populations’, and these
issues are well explored in Chapter 2 in such sensitive areas as confidentiality,
consent and offering monetary incentives to interview many of those already in
desperate financial plight. It is also noteworthy that two-thirds of the ex-prisoners in
this study under supervision from parole and probation officers are burdened by
monthly supervision fees. This is followed in the next two chapters by the more
substantive analysis of the range of stresses experienced shortly after release, with
or without family, or wider networks of social support. He makes recurrent reference
to what he terms the struggles with human frailty for...

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