Reuben Miller, Halfway home: Race, punishment and the afterlife of mass incarceration

Published date01 July 2023
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/14624745231175784
AuthorReuben Jonathan Miller
Date01 July 2023
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Reuben Miller, Halfway home: Race, punishment and the afterlife of mass incarceration.
Little Brown: New York, ISBN 0316451487, $18.99
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are
forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin, 1961
Most of the writers I know hope that their work will be read. Their delight would be for a
reader, whoever they might be, to track the moves they tried to make and appreciate their
works subtleties. This was my hope for Halfway Home, a book that was years in the
making. That my work has been engaged, pulled apart, and pushed in productive ways
by scholars whom I so deeply admire is more than a giftit is a privilege for which I
am grateful.
Halfway Home is the culmination of three independent f‌ield studies conducted across
multiple cities in the United States, focusing largely on Chicago and Detroit (Miller,
2021). It begins where I did, in Chicago as a volunteer chaplain at the infamous Cook
County Jail. The daily census approached 10,000 people when I was there from 2003
to 2008, the height of mass incarceration. While my city is (and was) just under a
third black, black people represented three-quarters of the jails residents. I was struck
by the sea of black faces moving through the halls in coff‌les and the misery and disregard
I found behind those walls. I went to social work school to become a better chaplain,
hoping to pick up clinical skills to be of some use. But this wasnt a problem you
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