Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221143516 |
| Author | Michael L Walker |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
Book Review Symposium
on Reuben Miller’s book
Halfway Home
Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife
of Mass Incarceration, New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2021;
352 pp. ISBN: 978-0-3164-5151-2
On foundational research
During graduateschool, I started categorizingpublished research as example-of,extending,
or foundational. These are not discrete categories but heuristics for figuring out what I
should read carefully. Example of work is usually tucked between two parentheses as evi-
dence that a method, concept, or theory has been referenced in the literature. Most of us,
most of the time, produce example of research, but such work does not shape a field.
Extending research takes a line of methodsor ideas in new directions. Comfort’s(2003)
“secondary prisonization”gives us a new way to think of Clemmer’s (1940) original term.
Contreras (2013) applies Collins’(2009) theory of violence and expands how we think of
markets to explain the pressures experienced by some young men in the Bronx. There is
less extending research than example of, but foundational work is rarer still.
Think: The Comparative Method (Ragin 1987), Asylums (Goffman, 1963), Society of
Captives (Sykes, [1958] 2007), The Behavior of Law (Black 1976), and The Managed
Heart (Hochschild, [1983] 2012)—innovative publications that provide new pathways for
understanding social behavior. Add to that list, Reuben J. Miller’s (2021) Halfway Home.
In some ways, Halfway Home is a culmination of Miller’spreviousworkoncitizenship
(Miller, 2017; Miller and Stuart, 2017; Miller and Alexander, 2016), reentry (Miller, 2014;
Miller et al., 2017; Miller and Purifoye, 2016), and the effects of mass incarceraton, punitive
law, and poverty on black families (Miller, 2013, 2019; Nkansah-Amankra et al., 2013;
Taylor et al., 2018). But Halfway Home is not repackaged published work from a successful
scholar taking a victory lap to say, “Look what I’ve done.”At its core, Halfway Home sen-
sitizes us toward a theory of social rejection, and it offers a deceptively biting critique of crim-
inal justice policy reform efforts, that if I am honest, I am still too cynical to fully embrace
even as I cannot deny the wisdom therein.
In the space allotted to me here, I intend to draw out the core sensitizing scheme that makes
Halfway Home a foundational study for scholars within and beyond punishment studies.
On Miller’s prose
Let me pick the low-hanging fruit. I will get to the theoretical architecture, but it is worth
noting how pretty the architecture is. Miller’s prose puts readers in the places of action—
Punishment & Society
2023, Vol. 25(3) 784–823
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/14624745221143516
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