mass incarceration

 Once released back into their communities, formerly incarcerated people are expected to successfully acclimate back into society, yet they are often barred from the very assistance they need. Researchers are continually learning about what life is like after prison. A recent article in The New York Times details a new study that reveals how childhood trauma and mental illness hinder formerly incarcerated individuals’ ability to reconnect with loved ones, establish housing, and find work in the first year after prison.

The lead investigator of the study, sociologist Bruce Western, followed 122 former inmates in Massachusetts in their first year out of prison. He found that childhood trauma — particularly childhood violence — affected many of the participants in his study. Half of his participants also reported having a chronic condition and nearly two-thirds reported either a physical or mental health concern. In his recent book about the study, Homeward, Western argues that those who go to prison are much more likely to have challenges with addiction, mental illness, and physical disability. Western writes,

“Redressing the historic injustice of mass incarceration must do more that settle accounts with the past. Police, judges, and penal officials who acknowledge historic harms can begin to heal relationships and build trust with disadvantaged communities. But such efforts will feel hollow without real change. Under the harsh conditions of American poverty, the antidote to violence is not more punishment but restoring the institutions, social bonds, and well-being that enable order and predictability in daily life.”

In other words, for true change to occur, we must address the frequent connections between childhood trauma, mental health, and criminal involvement with adequate programming and treatment. At this point, the United States addresses crime with lengthy stints of incarceration, disentangling it from a complicated picture of people’s lived experiences with violence and trauma. As Western strongly asserts in the article,

“The whole ethical foundation of our system of punishment I think is threatened once you take into account the reality of people’s lives.”

Best known for her seminal text The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander has examined the injustices and inequality perpetuated through mass incarceration, particularly its effects on black men in the United States. However, her recent article in The Nation, reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, “breaks her silence” on interrelated topics, such as NSA spying, drone warfare, and the detention of immigrants.

In a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., Alexander seeks to “connect the dots” between mass incarceration and broader systems of poverty, racism, militarism, and materialism. Motivated by King’s wider critiques of the Vietnam War abroad and labor exploitation at home, Alexander refuses to keep a narrow view of the inequality of mass incarceration or “stay in her lane,” as she describes it. In the spirit of the March on Washington, she links her own research with the national and international phenomena of the war on terror and the war on drugs, saying,

When we declare war on “things” like terrorism and drugs, it becomes easy to forget that real people—mothers, fathers and children—will be targeted, caged and killed without due process, without consideration of their basic humanity, and without asking the hard questions required of complicated social and global problems that cannot be solved by a simple declaration of war.