Shaping the road to reentry: Organizational variation and narrative labor in the penal voluntary sector
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221128102 |
| Author | Kaitlyn Quinn,Philip Goodman |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Shaping the road to
reentry: Organizational
variation and narrative
labor in the penal voluntary
sector
Kaitlyn Quinn
University of Missouri –St. Louis, USA
Philip Goodman
University of Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Financial austerity, welfare state retrenchment, and the movement towards evidence-
based interventions have intensified the pressures on penal voluntary sector (PVS) orga-
nizations. The result is an increasingly competitive field of social service provision in
which organizations must differentiate themselves in the struggle over funding, con-
tracts, symbolic authority, and potential clients. We explore this struggle by examining
the distinct roads to reentry constructed at four PVS organizations in Ontario, Canada.
Our analysis initiates a dialogue between individual narratives and organizational dis-
courses, contending that the road to reentry is coauthored among organizations and
criminalized individuals—albeit on unequal terms. Our findings reveal that there are sig-
nificant pressures for criminalized individuals to perform narrative labor to align them-
selves with organizational understandings of reentry. Such pressures include: the denial
of services or social assistance payments, threats of being returned to prison for “inad-
equate”participation in rehabilitation, and risks of not being considered for coveted
“professional ex”positions at PVS organizations. In light of these empirical findings,
we also offer a conceptual reflection on the challenges criminalized individuals likely
face accessing services from multiple organizations with differing roads to reentry,
Corresponding author:
Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of Missouri –St. Louis, 1 University Blvd., 324 Lucas
Hall, St. Louis, MO 63121-4400, USA.
Email: k.quinn@umsl.edu
Article
Punishment & Society
2023, Vol. 25(4) 998–1022
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745221128102
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
suggesting that navigating these diverse roads not only requires narrative labor, but also
narrative dexterity.
Keywords
penal voluntary sector, prisoner reentry, non profit organizations, narrative labor, road
to reentry, rehabilitation, community-based organizations, organizationally preferred
stories
Introduction
In recent years, scholars have offered rich case studies of criminalized individuals’
experiences accessing reentry services at one or another non-profit organization
(Guzman, 2020; Halushka, 2016; Hamlin and Purser, 2021; Mijs, 2016; Miller, 2014,
2021; Smiley and Middlemass, 2016). What might otherwise be seen as disparate case
studies are linked because they form what punishment and society scholarship frames
as the penal voluntary sector (PVS) (Corcoran, 2011; Tomczak, 2016). These case
studies dominantly position PVS organizations as “people-changing institutions”
(Miller, 2014: 317) that intervene in criminalized individuals’dispositions, highlighting
the (largely) punitive outcomes of these efforts. In parallel, other scholars have synthe-
sized data across multiple organizations to offer various typologies of practice
(Goddard et al., 2015; Kaufman, 2015; Maguire et al., 2019; Quinn and Tomczak,
2021; Tomczak and Buck, 2019). Doing so has brought the heterogeneity of PVS orga-
nizations into starker relief: it is clear that the PVS is neither unequivocally inclusionary
nor exclusionary in either its character or impact (Tomczak and Thompson, 2019).
Despite the flourishing of these two lines of inquiry, scholarship at their intersection—
comparing the impact of PVS organizations’different approaches on criminalized indi-
viduals’reentry experiences—is relatively rare (but see: Flores, 2016; Halushka,
2017).
1
Researching this nexus is critical because, as Mijs (2016: 13) asserts, we
cannot form a full understanding of reentry without “considering the organizational
forces bearing down on the people making their way back from prison.”COVID-19
related early releases, drug law reforms and scrutiny of related sentences, and community
calls for parsimony in punishment—among other recent developments—suggest an
urgent need for attention to criminalized individuals’reentry journeys and the organiza-
tions charged with smoothing the way.
We attend to these gaps and opportunities by advancing Mijs’(2016) argument that
PVS organizations offer criminalized individuals a road to reentry by examining vari-
ation in the roads offered by different organizations in dialogue with criminalized indivi-
duals’experiences. Based on interviews with criminalized individuals at four PVS
organizations in Canada and document analysis of these organizations’public materials,
we offer three major takeaways—two empirical and one conceptual. Figure 1 helps to
summarize the basic shape of this argument.
Quinn and Goodman 999
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