Miller R, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
Published date | 01 July 2023 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221114157 |
Author | Fergus McNeill |
Date | 01 July 2023 |
Miller R, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass
Incarceration. Little Brown and Company, New York, 2021
Introduction
Ifirst met Reuben Miller in Chicago in November 2012, at the annual conference of the
American Society of Criminology, but we abandoned the conference that day. Instead, he
took me around the westside reentry projects in which he had recently undertaken the
fieldwork for his PhD research.
When I got back to Glasgow, I wrote a blog-post about thatexperience. Having recounted
a little about my impressions of the projects we visited, I wrote about the conversations that
we shared
1
. In particular, I recalled how frustrated Miller was with the (then) absence of any
social movement or civil rights campaign around reentry, not least given its racialised
dimensions. That absence was striking not least because we were talking within the very
neighbourhoods from which the Black Panthers had emerged in the 1960s. As he later
argued (Miller, 2014), rather than being understood as a question of state in/justice that
should be resisted, ‘carceral devolution’had cast reentry as a responsibility of former prison-
ers (to transform themselves); of their families (to welcome back their own); and of under-
funded community organisations (to triage the consequences of mass incarceration).
I argued in that blog-post, and argue still, that it is an obligation of any democratic state
that punishes to ensure that punishment ends. Yet, as Halfway Home demonstrates so vividly,
the ‘penal state’or carceral state (Garland, 2013), however messy, fragmented and contested
it may be (Rubin and Phelps, 2017), produces not re/integration but instead a ‘supervised
society’in which multiple forms of exclusion and disenfranchisement leave people in the
condition Miller calls ‘carceral citizenship’(Miller and Stuart, 2017). I was exercised
enough by the memories of that day –and by the way that it provoked me to think afresh
about reintegration in my own country (Scotland) to argue that:
‘…we need to build a movement that is about rehabilitation and reentry (and of course mass
incarceration and mass supervision) as civil and human rights issues, and not just about how
people and their communities can support one another to manage the consequences of the
State’s dereliction of duty [to reintegrate].’
I share these recollections of that initial meeting firstly to underline its impact on my
thinking about mass incarceration, mass supervision and reentry and, secondly, to note
how far we have come in the last 10 years. Two years after that meeting, events in
Ferguson, Missouri, sparked the growing recognition that racialised criminal injustice
was indeed both a public issue and a civil rights struggle. By the time I visited Miller
for a second time in Chicago, in May 2018, mainly to discuss my book Pervasive
Punishment (McNeill, 2018), we were both deeply involved in trying to build and
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