LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      Reentry is a term few people outside the criminal justice system know. Some individuals and communities have experienced firsthand the consequences of our national failure to facilitate meaningful reintegration of recently released prisoners. Far too few individuals can either articulate or imagine the benefits of a comprehensive approach to reentry. This is due largely to the fact that this country has never devoted the time, care, or attention necessary to create such an approach. Instead, our efforts to address reentry have, at best, remained an afterthought and, at worst, have been dismissed as someone else’s concern. What has led our choice as a nation to ignore this crisis is the pervasive interplay of race, power, and politics that infuse and confuse our attitudes about crime.

      So permit me to begin with a definition to ground our discussions. Reentry is the process by which individuals return to communities from prison or jail custody. The focus of this book is the way that race, power, and politics all conspire to make reintegration more difficult, if not impossible. In conversations, studies, and reports, we often discuss crime statistics, drug use, and incarceration rates. In addition, significant attention has been paid to prison conditions and to the philosophy and approach to incarceration. Whether we are talking about rehabilitation, retribution, or incapacitation, we have spent precious little time considering what happens when individuals leave custody. We rarely consider, for example, the obstacles for men and women who have been separated from family and community for significant periods of time. Alternatively, we have also failed to examine in depth the communities themselves. The cycle of poverty, incarceration, and frequent removal of large numbers of people to jail and prison generate instability in the fabric of the community. Racial and ethnic bias, the War on Drugs, and the portrayal of young men of color as predators all conspire to blur our focus on the issue.

      The United States is in the midst of the largest multiyear discharge of prisoners from state and federal custody in the history of its prison system. This release is a direct consequence of the explosion in incarceration that this country experienced and endorsed over the last two decades. The repercussions of this massive release effort are only now beginning to be felt. Staggering numbers of ex-offenders, having completed their sentences, are returning to the communities from which they originally came.¹ In 2001 alone, corrections officials discharged over six hundred thousand individuals, with most returning to the core communities of their incarceration.² As a result of the War on Drugs and the almost single-minded focus in the 1980s and 1990s on targeting, denouncing,

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