Book review: Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
| DOI | 10.1177/13624806211016558 |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration,
Little, Brown and Company: New York, 2021; 353 pp.: 0316451517, $25.98 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Susan Sered, Suffolk University, USA
I, like many others, eagerly awaited the publication of Reuben Jonathan Miller’sfirst
book. Having read several of his scholarly articles, I looked forward to seeing how his
ideas about carceral citizenship would translate into a monograph. Halfway Home did
not let me down. Skillfully employing a literary voice that speaks directly from his
own experiences, Miller develops profound conceptual arguments into a jargon-free,
extraordinarily engaging read.
The book draws on Miller’s observations and experiences as a volunteer chaplain at
Cook County jail for five years, as well as three-and-a-half years of fieldwork in
halfway houses in Chicago and multiple years engaging with 60 men and women starting
on the day of their release from Detroit areaprisons. Miller tells the stories of thepeople he
has met—many of whom have become close friends—with care, compassion and immedi-
acy. Building relationships with individuals for substantial periods of time allows him to
move beyond one-dimensional tropes in which former prisoners are either miserable fail-
ures or success stories. Instead, he introduces readers to complicated people whose
needs, desires, talents and challenges play out in multiple institutional contexts.
Readers come to know Ronald and Zo (among others) not as frozen in time anecdotes or
“cases”, but as complex people whose lives change repeatedly over the course of the book.
Throughout, Miller walks a careful line between not painting these people as saints—
acknowledging the bad decisions they make—yet showing compassion and understanding
as he contextualizes their actions in constantly shifting webs of restrictions, regulations, insti-
tutional requirements and structural violence. Some of the most conventionally “successful”
people he follows die by the end of the book, despite years of doing all the “right”things.
Miller fittingly describeshis methodology as “the gift ofproximity”(p. 283ff.). His own
father was incarcerated for many years;he himself was raised by his grandmotherwhile two
of his brothers were sent away from home by the courts. These experiences were not
unusual: Miller explains that all of the Black people he has met who grew up poor have
firsthand experience of families split by incarceration. As the primary support for his
brother who was in and out of prison during the time in which Miller researched and
Theoretical Criminology
2022, Vol. 26(1) 173–180
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806211016558
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