Bruce Western, Homeward: Life in the year after prison
| Author | Nicolas Vale |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865819865987 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Bruce Western, Homeward: Life in the year after prison. Russell Sage Foundation: New York,
2018; 216 pp. ISBN 0871549557, NZ$39.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Nicolas Vale, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Bruce Western’s (2018) Homeward:Life in the Year After Prison provides a compelling
insight into the complex process of social re-entry for 122 individuals leaving incarcer-
ation and returning to their communities in and around Boston. Following the lives of
the respondents over a 12-month period upon their release from Massachusetts prisons
in 2012 and 2013, the book brings forth the personalities, fortitude and wit of the
subjects against a backdrop of severe economic hardship, racial inequality, trauma
and mass incarceration.
Western and his research team draw us into the lives of the respondents on a person-
alised level through detailed accounts of their childhoods, familial backgrounds
and criminal histories. We navigate with them the challenges of reintegration where
differential access to resources and racialised social configurations shape their realities
and trajectories in contrasting ways. Although the book engenders an intimate under-
standing of the vulnerability of the respondents, we also are at times confronted with
feelings of disgust and condemnation towards their crimes, most often violent, which
have perpetuated human suffering, and a cycle in and out of incarceration. In this way,
Homeward is deeply engaging. As we walk with respondents the fine line between hope
and despair in re-entry, it humanises individuals who are so often stigmatised and
excluded from wider society after release from prison. The human frailty that underpins
the text invites from the reader a sense of shared humanity (and thus empathy) with
those defined by the criminal justice system as perpetrators – themselves victims of
violent crime, of state violence and of failed social policy. These factors, Western
argues, complicate their criminal culpability and the moral argument for depriving
them of their liberty.
Beginning with the impetus for the re-entry study, its context and design, and sup-
ported throughout with robust scholarship by others highly regarded in the field, the
book provides an incisive analysis of the reproduction of social inequality vis-a
`-vis the
criminal justice system. Western and his team lend qualitative depth to research statis-
tics, bringing to life texture and detail that quantitative data alone fail to provide. In this
way, Western extends on his previous work in Punishment and Inequality in America
(2006) by personifying his large data sets. The method provides insight into the lived
experiences of respondents, as well as the complicated web of human relationships that
exist within a much broader complex reality. It is this contribution to the existing
scholarship that makes Homeward notable, capturing ecological interactions from
a macro-sociological perspective down to the individual at the micro-level, producing
a fine-grained picture of racial and economic inequality enmeshed within the ethical
ambiguities of American penal policy.
Homeward tests our ability to suspend the reflex of moral judgement in response to
violent crime, our perceptions of justice, and of the offender/victim dichotomy against
conditions of dire poverty and intergenerational structural violence that surround incar-
ceration in the United States. These are no less relevant to New Zealand. As the debate
604 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 52(4)
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