Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Written by Reuben Jonathan Miller

Narrated by Cary Hite

A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation's carceral system" (Heather Ann Thompson).

Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record.

Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America's most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.

As The Color of Law exposed about our understanding of housing segregation, Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they've paid their debt to society.

Informed by Miller's experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller searchingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens.

PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist

Winner of the 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences

2022 PROSE Awards Finalist

2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner for Cultural Anthropology and Sociology

An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love

As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781549173332

Reviews for Halfway Home

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Now a professor, author, and recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, Reuben Jonathan Miller grew up poor and Black on Chicago's South Side. Many of his family members and people he grew up with have been incarcerated. Halfway Home is Miller's work of creative nonfiction regarding the lives of people who have been released from prison. He writes that it is nearly impossible for ex-offenders to fit back into society because there are so many state and federal policies restricting them from housing and jobs. As he puts it, "The problem of mass incarceration has never really been about crime. It’s that the people Americans are afraid are subject to a separate set of rules. They live in a separate and altogether different social world because they belong to a different political community…You cannot treat or arrest or perhaps even reform your way out of mass incarceration because mass incarceration is about citizenship, not criminal behavior, and citizenship is about belonging" (269-270). Miller doesn't offer any solutions, but this is an eye opening book, nonetheless. Well worth reading.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Miller is an academic at the University of Chicago. One of his topics of study is how the formerly incarcerated re-integrate into the city. Per the appendix he has published on this topic.

This book is not academic, it is a narrative nonfiction for the general public. And it is interesting, but it read as a series of anecdotes about individuals in Chicago and Michigan that were paroled. Parolees have it much worse than those that have served their entire sentence--but they also struggle with housing and finding work. Parolees must run a gauntlet of checkins, drug tests, treatment programs, and training programs--all while also trying to find permanent housing and a permanent job. They spend their days trying to get from one appointment to the next, usually by bus. A late bus can send the back to prison.

I found this book very interesting and upsetting, but also unsatisfying. I think I might find something more academic more to my taste. I also would have appreciated suggestions as to how this can be changed. What people who are not landlords or business owners can do to help change the current system and to help those currently stuck in it now.