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Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 83
Social Justice Vol. 44, No. 1 (2017) 83
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry
and Neoliberal Neglect
Alessandro De Giorgi*
We come back to nothing. We left from nothing
and we’re back to it.
—Darryl (eldnotes, December 14, 2011)
I , U S —
to percent of the nation’s total population—were living under some
form of penal control. Within this mass of unfree citizens, 2.2 million
individuals, equaling the fourth largest city in the country, were conned in
federal penitentiaries, state prisons, and local jails (Kaeble & Gaze 2016, 1).
According to recent estimates, children born in 1990 of an African Ameri-
can father without a high school diploma face a 50 percent probability of
experiencing the incarceration of their male parent before reaching age 14
(Wildeman 2009, 273). Black men born between 1975 and 1979 who did
not graduate from high school had a 70 percent chance of spending some
time in prison by age 35 (Western & Wildeman 2009, 231). As criminolo-
gist Bruce Western has illustrated, the cycle of imprisonment and reentry
has become a “modal life event” for a vast population of marginalized Black
and Latino youth, for whom the experience of incarceration has become
more likely than such life-course milestones as getting married, attending
college, or serving in the military (Western 2006, 20–32). is extreme
concentration of the state’s penal power among poor urban communities
of color has led critical scholars to describe the historically unprecedented
carceral expansion of the last few decades as the consolidation of a racial-
ized paradigm of punitive governance of the poor in a neoliberal society
* Alessandro De Giorgi (email: alessandro.degiorgi@sjsu.edu) is Associate Professor
at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. He received his PhD in
Criminology from Keele University (United Kingdom) in 2005. His teaching and research
interests include critical theories of punishment and social control, urban ethnography,
and radical political economy. He is the author of Rethinking the Political Economy of
Punishment: Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics (Ashgate, 2006) and editor of a
special issue of Social Justice on “Beyond Mass Incarceration: Crisis & Critique in North-
American Penal Systems” (2015).
84 A D G
increasingly fractured along lines of racial and class inequality (Alexander
2010; Tonry 2011; Wacquant 2009).
Yet the warehousing of America’s poor men and women of color only
illustrates one side of the current penal crisis, the other side of which is
represented by the escalating issue of prisonerreentry. As penal expansion
proceeded unabated between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s, both
mainstream criminologists and “tough on crime” politicians systematically
overlooked the circumstance that over 95 percent of prisoners are eventually
released from prisons and face the arduous struggle of reintegrating—or
more likely, trying to integrate for the rst time—into the larger society
(Petersilia 2003; ompson 2008; Travis 2005). In 2015 alone, more than
641,000 people were released from federal and state prisons in the United
States (Carson & Anderson 2016, 11)—an average of 1,700 each day, and
these numbers do not include the more than 11 million individuals cycled
each year through the true “rabble management” institutions that are local
jails (Irwin 1985, ch. 1).
ese masses of marginalized young men and women are dumped on a
daily basis into the segregated neighborhoods of urban containment from
which they were forcefully removed months, years, or decades earlier. Often
their only possessions are a bag of clothes, a bus ticket, and sometimes a few
dollars of “gate money” provided by the correction’s department at the time
of release. When they are fortunate enough to have some family member
waiting for them after release, former prisoners return to households that
have been further impoverished and destabilized by the costly and traumatic
experience of having a relative behind bars (Braman 2004; Comfort 2008,
2016). As a consequence of their criminal record—a state-sanctioned negative
credential that eectively operates as a license to discriminate for employers,
landlords, lenders, etc.—returning prisoners will be even less employable than
they were before entering prison (Pager 2007). Once back on the streets,
caught between the daily realities of poverty, homelessness, illness, addic-
tion, and the looming threat of reincarceration, most of them will scramble
to survive as chronically unemployed recyclers, panhandlers, hustlers, and
backsliders (Gowan 2010), while the few “successful” ones will be channeled
into the secondary labor market of minimum-wage, insecure, and degraded
work, where they will serve alternatively as a hyper-exploited labor force or
as a disposable reserve army of labor (Bumiller 2015; Doussard 2013). In
other words, they will join the ranks of what British political economist Guy
Standing (2011) has recently dened as the precariat. Unsurprisingly, the
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 85
cycle of incarceration and reentry has become a powerful engine—though
a largely invisible one1—for the reproduction of racialized inequality.
Prisoner Reentry in Oakland
is article presents some preliminary ndings from an ethnographic study
I conducted among a group of formerly incarcerated people facing the chal-
lenge of prisoner reentry in Oakland, California. Between March 2011 and
March 2014, I spent time with recently released prisoners at street corners,
and I interviewed and followed them as they were looking for jobs, applying
for welfare, trying to get their driver’s licenses reinstated, struggling against
long-term addictions, hunting for aordable housing, getting evicted, sleep-
ing in their cars, panhandling in the parking lots of local supermarkets,
and so on. Over a period of three years, I developed close relationships
with approximately 15 people. All of them, except one, were either African
American or Latino men. Most of them were in their mid-forties at the
time of the study (although there were also a few elderly individuals), often
with lifelong trajectories of connement in juvenile facilities, jails, prisons,
and federal penitentiaries.
Oakland is a formerly industrial, predominantly Black and Latino city
(28 percent and 25.4 percent of the population in 2010, respectively), with
a signicant history of political activism that intersects labor and racial
justice movements (Murch 2010; Rohmberg 2007). Among other things,
the rst chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded
in Oakland in the October of 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale,
who at the time were both students at one of the city’s community col-
leges. Not unlike other industrial cities in the United States, between the
1970s and the 1990s Oakland has witnessed major processes of capitalist
restructuring, relocation, deindustrialization, and urban renewal that have
turned its once vibrant working-class minority neighborhoods into largely
desolated atlands, scattered with dismissed warehouses, abandoned fac-
tories, and boarded up buildings—a paradigmatic example of what Loïc
Wacquant has called the post-industrial “hyper-ghetto” (Wacquant 2001,
103–8; 2008, 43–91). At present, Oakland is aicted by signicant levels of
poverty (in 2015, 20 percent of its residents lived below the ocial poverty
line), high rates of unemployment (10.5 percent, compared to the national
US average of 4.9 percent in 2016), wide income inequalities, and a rampant
process of gentrication that is quickly reconguring the urban landscape
and further deepening the spatial segregation of homelessness and urban
86 A D G
poverty.2 Not surprisingly, the city also features a very high concentration of
incarceration and prisoner reentry: as of 2014, 4,400 individuals on proba-
tion and 1,055 parolees resided in Oakland (Alameda County Probation
Department 2014, 7–8).
e main focus of this research was on two areas of Oakland where
racialized poverty—as well as mass incarceration and prisoner reentry—has
been historically most concentrated: East Oakland and West Oakland. Most
of the eldwork took place within a geographic area spanning only a few
blocks inside West Oakland—a dilapidated neighborhood known in the
streets as Ghost Town. ese few blocks emerged as a particularly suitable
eld site because they comprise an extremely impoverished urban area that
is quickly turning into a “service ghetto”: a self-contained space, bordered
on all sides by gentrifying uptown neighborhoods, which local authorities
have designated as the ideal location for homeless shelters, transitional
houses, community clinics, women’s shelters, halfway houses, SRO hotels,
and rehabilitation programs. In this respect, Oakland’s Ghost Town oers
a clear example of what the emerging “prisoner reentry industry” may look
like in the age of mass incarceration (ompkins 2010).
e specic area of my eldwork features an extreme concentration of
criminalized populations—homeless people, recyclers, drug addicts, physi-
cally or mentally disabled persons, street hustlers, sex workers, day laborers,
Figure 1. Map of Ghost Town.
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 87
formerly incarcerated people, etc.—and some of the highest rates of street
crime, incarceration, and prisoner reentry in the city of Oakland. Accord-
ing to the 2010 census data, in the particular tract in which I conducted
most of the study, 48 percent of residents are unemployed; the median
household income is $19,800 per year, compared to $54,618 for the whole
city of Oakland; 44 percent of families live below the poverty line, but the
number jumps to 64.5 percent among female-headed households with
children under 18 years of age. Finally, close to 50 percent of the population
is African American and 21 percent is Latino/a.
e entry point into the eld was provided by a small community clinic
located at the heart of Ghost Town, which provided free basic health care
services to the poor and uninsured residents of the area. e clinic was
founded in 2001 by an African American pastor, a former NBA prospect
player born and raised in West Oakland, who in the early 1980s—after suf-
fering a severe injury in the court—developed an addiction to prescriptions
painkillers and later to crack cocaine. A faith-based nonprot organization
largely funded through grants and fundraising events, the clinic was housed
in a modest storefront edice surrounded on all sides by boarded-up build-
ings. It consisted of a small waiting area with a front desk for the sta and
a few chairs for the patients; a visitation room furnished with basic medi-
cal technologies, where a doctor and two nurses would see the patients;
and a small bathroom. Inside the same building, next to the clinic, a few
spare rooms were used by various nonprot organizations as classrooms for
computer literacy courses and résumé preparation sessions, as a barbershop
providing free haircuts, and as the headquarters of a local crime prevention
initiative focused on street outreach.
In addition to oering basic medical assistance and other services to the
poor, the community clinic also provided some volunteer and employment
opportunities to a limited number of recently released prisoners. During
my period of eldwork at the clinic, formerly incarcerated people who had
just been released on state parole or federal probation had the option to
sign up for one or more services oered by the clinic, as well as to apply
to the nonprot organization for a volunteer position. Eventually, some
of them would get hired—although always part-time and only for a few
months—as sta members. Normally, an average of six or seven “reentry”
sta would be on the organization’s payroll at any given time. As members
of sta, their responsibilities would include doing outreach to other recently
released prisoners, checking in new patients, answering the phone, sweeping
the oors, cleaning the bathrooms, emptying the trash, and standing at the
88 A D G
outside corner to ensure that potentially disruptive or dangerous individu-
als (such as visibly intoxicated people or anyone carrying weapons) would
be kept outside the premises.3 e hourly pay for the clinic’s sta was $12;
people typically worked around 20 hours per week, for average monthly
salaries of $960.
At the time of this study, most of the sta members were still on state
parole or federal probation. Some of them were living on their own or with
their families and were thus able to bring home the whole check they received
from the clinic. Others were residing under strict supervision in a nearby
federal halfway house operated by the multinational prison corporation GEO
Group. ese people were only allowed to leave the halfway house for a few
hours each day to volunteer or work at the clinic, apply for social services,
or search for housing, and they were tested for alcohol and drug use on a
daily basis. In addition, as soon as they managed to get hired (either by the
clinic or by any other employer), they were required to give up 25 percent of
their paychecks to the privately owned halfway house as a “subsistence fee.”
Finally, a smaller group of sta members lived in a building comanaged by
the same nonprot organization that ran the community clinic. As tenants,
these employees were required to pay monthly rent for an amount that was
only a few dollars lower than the checks they received from the clinic. us,
once rent was subtracted from the paycheck, they would be left with only a
few dollars of spending money each month. Admittedly, some of the sta
members considered this whole arrangement a “scam.” Yet being able to
work part-time and having access to decent housing—not to mention basic
health care—was already far beyond what other formerly incarcerated people
could ever aspire to. In fact, most of the sta employees never questioned
these arrangements with the clinic’s management.
As I will try to illustrate in the remainder of this article, the initial goal
of my research was to study prisoner reentry—which I considered at the
time as the latest chapter in the ongoing expansionist trajectory of the US
carceral state—but I ended up learning more about chronic poverty and the
daily struggle for survival in a neoliberal city than I was able to document
any signicant expansion of the penal state. In a sense, rather than fugitive
lives “on the run” from the tentacles of a hypertrophic penal system, to bor-
row from Alice Goman’s (2014) recent work, I witnessed instead the daily
struggles of stigmatized people scrambling to disentangle themselves from
the treacherous grips of chronic poverty, sudden homelessness, untreated
physical and mental suering, and the lack of meaningful social services:
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 89
a surplus humanity reproduced more through institutional neglect and
abandonment than by any concerted eort by the social and penal arms of
the state to subjugate them (see Wacquant 2009, 289–303).
Rising above the Ghetto
Most of the participants in this study are the sons and daughters of the
so-called Second Great Migration, which over the span of three decades
(1940s-1970s) saw more than ve million African Americans leave the
segregationist South for the heavily industrialized cities of the North and
West (see Wilkerson 2010). Here, a signicant fraction of the Black working
class would nd employment either in the expanding industrial economy
(particularly in the defense and automobile industries) or in the desegregated
federal public sector (e.g., postal service, transportation, etc.). With its large
port, army base, and shipyards, between the end of World War II and the
late 1960s Oakland became an important destination for this large wave
of internal labor migrations. e parents of my research subjects were for
the most part members of the Black working class, gradually turned into a
surplus labor force by the processes of outsourcing, downsizing, and industry
relocation generated by the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s–1980s (see
Rhomberg 2007, 183–98; Self 2003).
Many of the research participants came of age during the 1980s and 1990s,
at the crossroads of such major structural transformations as the neoliberal
revolution, the drastic retrenchment of welfare, the explosion of the crack
epidemic, and the war on drugs. Entering their adulthood during a historical
conjuncture that witnessed one of the most severe economic crises of the
second half of the twentieth century, with steadily increasing unemploy-
ment rates, rapidly declining wages, and a dramatic wealth redistribution
towards the top of the US class structure prompted by Reagan’s neoliberal
economic policies (see Harvey 2005, 39–63), most of them were attempt-
ing—by their own account— to rise above the ghetto. After the crumbling
of the industrial sector prompted by the globalization and automation of
production of the late 1970s, the shrinking of public sector employment in
the wake of the scal crisis of the state of the 1980s, and the disappearance of
anti-poverty programs in the aftermath of the welfare reforms of the 1990s,
the underground economy—and specically, the crack economy—emerged
as one of the few equal-opportunity employers accessible to young men of
color with modest education and few marketable skills (see Bourgois 1998,
64–65; Sullivan 1989; Wacquant 2008).
90 A D G
e life experiences shared by many research participants reveal that
their families (and specically the single mothers and grandmothers who
raised them for the most part) did everything they could to keep them o
the streets—doing their best to be adequate role models, struggling to enroll
them in better schools, even signing them o to other family members, in
a sort of self-inicted “natal alienation” aimed at preventing “the system”
from taking their children (Patterson 1982, 7–8; Price 2015, 22–39). Yet,
these attempts were systematically frustrated by endemic poverty, structural
segregation, pervasive incarceration, and the virtual absence of any social
safety net. Drawing from a narrative of self-armation and individual
achievement that clearly resonates with the neoliberal turn of the 1980s
and 1990s, several of the people I followed revealed that they had become
involved in the drug economy after witnessing what they perceived as the
failure of their own parents—lower-working-class people whom they saw
engaged in a lifelong struggle to make ends meet and who nevertheless
never rose above the status of low-wage earners. Ethan’s story oers an
ethnographic snapshot of this reality.
* * * * *
A charming 47-year-old African American man wearing long dreads,
golden dentures, and a number of chains, Ethan is the latest addition to the
clinic’s sta. He is staying at the halfway house and has been a volunteer
at the clinic for a couple of weeks, although he spends most of his time at
the corner, talking on his cellphone and smoking cigarettes. He is one of
four children from a working-class family that moved to California from
Oklahoma in the 1950s; his mother worked all her life as a janitor and made
great sacrices to get by as a single parent. Ethan dropped out of school at
age 16, after his father’s premature death, and started getting involved in
the streets. When I rst met him, he had just been released from a federal
penitentiary after serving 7 years of a 10-year sentence for drug tracking,
so he still had three years of “papers” ahead of him. On a cold morning in
late November, we sat at the corner outside the clinic to talk while sharing
a cigarette.
E: I done it all, man. You become a part of the streets and the streets
is no good. ere ain’t nothing in these streets but death, man, and
that’s what you do to people, you bring death to people when you
sell ’em crack. But how you look at your drugs is money, man. And
when you start having money you get a sense of power ’cause can’t
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 91
no one tell you what to do. e term “above the ghetto” means you
don’t have to live in the ghetto no more.
A: So, was that your plan? Making enough money to get out of here?
E: Yeah, above the ghetto! And have nice things. My mom and dad
worked—well, he worked till he died at 57, and she still works
cleaning places now, at 74 years old. Matter of fact, my mother
just turned 75. She’s worked all her life and my father worked all
of his life, and you could put they earnings together and they never
been in as many places I been, cars that I drove, the cities and states
that I been in, the clothes that I’ve worn, you know what I mean?
I looked at my parents and said “there’s no way in the world I’ll
get a job. You guys worked all your lives to raise me and my broth-
ers and you have what you have, which is nothing. You guys ain’t
never been anywhere.” ere is no way in the world that my dad
would go purchase a $600 pair of alligator shoes or a $900 pair of
crocodiles. I did.
A: So was that your reasoning? ey worked their whole life and never
got anywhere?
E: at was one of the reasons. I wanted things, but when you have to
break that one income down for all the bills, all the food, where’s
the clothes now? Why don’t we get to go to the mall? I’m not living
like this. Plus, being a male you is taught to be a man. What is a
man? No one tells you what a man is, they tell you what a man is
supposed to be. So you grow up trying to be this man, a provider,
a protector, a breadwinner, right? I mean, if you sell drugs, you do
the same thing! You brainwashed me “this is what a man supposed
to do.” So, OK, I’ll nd an easier way even though it’s breaking the
law and still get the job done.
A: So, at the time you were dealing, would you also buy things for your
mom?
E: Oh yeah! I would say to her “Hey ma, what you going to do for your
birthday?” She’d be, “Ah, I just want to go to Black Angus.” And I
said, “OK.” I would invite probably 15 dierent people that she’s
close to and people that’s close to the family. “Man, I’m taking my
mother to Black Angus. Y’all be there at this time!” And when we
got at the restaurant I’d say to her, “Mom I don’t know why they
putting us at this big table!” And as soon as some people’s starting
to come in, she’d be like “I just knew you were going to do this.”
And I’d pay for everybody, everybody.
92 A D G
A: So that would be a surprise for her.
E: Yeah, or she’d wake up in the morning and I’d try to nd one of
them giant birthday cards and set it on the kitchen table and a dozen
roses, or I’d y her to Vegas and then one day I’d have a stack of, you
know, silver dollars in those little trays, I would carry those for her.
“Wherever you want to go mom, this your day whatever you want
to do!” You know, she’d get dressed and we’d hit the casinos and
she’s playing them slot machines and she went to Tony Roma’s for
baby back ribs and shit, and she’s happy. You know what I mean?
* * * * *
In the streets of the ghetto, at the margins of a crumbling industrial economy
and in the narrowing shadows of a shrinking welfare state, Ethan’s genera-
tion was trying to grab its piece of the American dream.
Neoliberal Neglect
As I mentioned earlier, my expectation during the preliminary stages of
this project was that the ethnographic eldwork would provide evidence
of an extensive and intrusive penal state entangling formerly incarcerated
people in a wide net of post-carceral controls, ongoing surveillance, aggres-
sive policing, and unrealistically strict parole and probation conditions (see
Feeley & Simon 1992; Goman 2014; Rudes 2012; Simon 1990, 203–49).
Instead, I documented widespread public neglect, institutional indierence,
and programmatic abandonment of these marginalized populations by both
the social and the penal arm of the state (Wacquant 2010). Paraphrasing
Michel Foucault’s (1978, 138) famous denition of biopower, I would
argue that the research has documented several instances of a system that
“foster[s] life or disallow[s] it to the point of death,” rather than examples
of a disciplinary state intent on imposing punishment and surveillance on
its unruly populations. Overall, the experiences of the returning prisoners I
followed seem to suggest the emergence of a low-intensity model of segre-
gated urban containment that largely devolves to market forces and private or
semi-private actors—from nonprot agencies to minimum-wage employers,
from ghetto slumlords to faith-based organizations—and is aimed at the
low-cost management not only of formerly incarcerated people, but also of
the variously marginalized and disenfranchised populations that inhabit the
postindustrial ghetto: people on parole and probation, homeless individu-
als, persons suering from severe physical disabilities or mental illnesses,
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 93
drug addicts, chronically unemployed or underemployed men and women,
undocumented migrants—the assorted surplus humanity that Zygmunt
Bauman (2003) has famously dened as “wasted lives.”
e institutional framework for this low-intensity/low-cost model of
governance of urban marginality is provided by the current parameters
against which a “successful reentry” is measured. ese standards are ex-
tremely low: Essentially, a reentry process is considered successful as long
as the released prisoner does not commit any serious crimes. In this sense,
recidivism suppression prevails over any meaningful institutional eort to
improve former prisoners’ socioeconomic stability, well-being, physical and
mental health, and civic integration. As far as the present study is concerned,
these developments might be explained at least in part by the circumstance
that most of the eldwork for this research took place in the aftermath of
the great recession of 2008 (with the ensuing scal crisis and major cuts to
state and local budgets) and at the height of California’s implementation of
the Public Safety Realignment P lan of 2011 (AB 109). is major legislation
was prompted by the US Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Brown
v. Plata, which upheld a lower court’s order to reduce the state’s prison
population to 137.5 percent of stated capacity, in an attempt to address the
lack of medical and mental health care due to prison overcrowding. e new
legislation established that eective October 1, 2011, certain non-violent,
non-serious, and non-sexual felonies would carry sentences of incarcera-
tion to be served in county jails (instead of state prisons). In addition, AB
109 has essentially eliminated state parole for a large number of oenders,
while shifting the responsibility for the supervision of released prisoners
to local counties. Predictably, this experiment in penal devolution—not
dissimilar in its logic from a comparable trend toward localization that has
been documented in the eld of welfare (see Soss et al. 2011)—has resulted
on the one hand in a drastic reduction of the services once available to state
parolees, and on the other hand in a process of “transcarceration” (Lowman
et al. 1987) whereby a signicant portion of the reduction in the state’s
prison population has been absorbed by an increase in the jail population of
some counties.4 More generally, however, to the extent that the new model
of low-cost penal supervision heralded by the conjoined forces of scal
conservatism and carceral devolution is to be considered not as an excep-
tion, but rather as an increasingly central feature of the governance of social
marginality in the age of austerity, what emerged from the eldwork for
this project might actually provide a blueprint for post-carceral supervision
in the present conjuncture.
94 A D G
Today, whatever minimal services are available to former prisoners are
provided mostly through the non-prot, faith-based, semi-private sector,
what Jennifer Wolch (1990, 201) has aptly dened as an emergent shadow
state: a “para-state apparatus with collective service responsibilities previously
shouldered by the public sector, administered outside traditional democratic
politics, but yet controlled in both formal and informal ways by the state.”
In this framework, highly individualistic and market-friendly solutions are
systematically proposed as the only answers to a broad range of structural
obstacles faced by formerly incarcerated people: At every turn in their
trajectories through the carceral state, from arrest to reentry, criminalized
people are taught that success or failure is entirely dependent upon their
own eorts. As I will discuss below, the neoliberal ideology of personal
responsibility, market competition, and self-help ultimately pervades every
aspect of the reentry process as it is presently framed. Criminologist Elliott
Currie has recently dened this approach to reentry—and more generally
to the rehabilitative interventions directed at criminalized populations—as
“conformist intervention”:
Conformist intervention is about getting people to accept the typically
bleak conditions of life that have put them at risk, or turned them into
“oenders,” in the rst place. As a corollary, it teaches them to locate
the source of their problems mainly, if not entirely, in themselves. So
“rehabilitation,” for example, comes to mean trying to train vulnerable
people to navigate what are often chronically marginal lives and stunted
opportunities; and we then measure the “success” of these eorts in
very minimal and essentially negative ways: they commit fewer crimes,
do fewer drugs or dierent drugs, maybe get, at least briey, some sort
of job. And even if the job is basically exploitative and shortlived and
their future options are slim and their present lives are still pinched,
desperate and precarious, we still count that as all good—as evidence
of programmatic success. (Currie 2013, 5)
Indeed, the main services oered to reentering prisoners are aimed
at restructuring their personalities along the coordinates of an idealized
neoliberal subject: a self-reliant entrepreneur of the self, constantly at work
to accumulate human capital and eager to compete with his/her peers in
the lowest regions of a deregulated labor market (see also Halushka 2016;
Miller 2014). Consistently, former prisoners can access plenty of résumé
preparation courses, job interview coaching workshops, anger management
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 95
classes, group counseling sessions, NA or AA meetings—but no aordable
housing, free health care, accessible education, or a basic income.
“Get a Job, Any Job”: The New Working Poor
Although “get a job, any job” is perhaps the injunction most frequently
directed at former prisoners—not just by parole ocers, but also by family
members who now face the challenge of housing and feeding an additional
relative on what is often a meager budget—the great majority of the research
participants could not nd a job after incarceration. e few among them
who did were usually working for minimum wage, without benets, part-
time, and temporarily: ey were joining the ranks of the working poor.
is meant that the majority of them literally struggled to survive in the
streets, and their basic needs—from housing to food, from medical care to
transportation—often went unmet. ey faced sudden homelessness, food
insecurity, persistent physical ailments, and mental suering.
Yet, being poor is not only a depressing, alienating, and dangerous ex-
perience for these people, it is also expensive. Former prisoners normally
have no bank accounts and no credit, despite the fact they are often in debt,
either with the court system or with their families and friends. Cashing a
check at a check-cashing store (for $10–$15) costs them more than what
a bank-account holder pays for it. eir persistent condition of economic
disenfranchisement feeds the predatory capitalism of the streets—slumlords,
pawnshops, check-cashing places, bail bonds, and so on (see also Desmond
2016, 306–8). During the eldwork for this research I have seen people
panhandle to survive even while they were employed, as is illustrated by the
case of Ray and his girlfriend Melisha.
* * * * *
Ray is a 49-year-old African American man who was released from prison
in 2010, after serving 11 years. is was his “second strike,” following a two-
year prison sentence served in the late 1980s. As a child, Ray was raised by
his single mother in the infamous Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts,
Los Angeles. Although he likes to reminisce about his “gangbanging” days
in the streets of LA, before ending up in prison Ray had experienced a few
stints of working-class life. In the 1990s, he had a temporary job unload-
ing trucks at a warehouse; he worked at a Taco Bell restaurant and then at
Home Depot. Ray is proud of his working past, which he sees as a gateway
to a successful future after prison. Indeed, after his release he didn’t waste
96 A D G
Figure 2. Ray at work (left) and panhandling (right).
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 97
any time. He immediately signed up as a volunteer at the community clinic
and eventually was hired as a part-time employee. He worked there for a
few months but was soon dismissed for lack of funds. He then landed an-
other part-time job at a furniture shop, where he worked for ve months
at $10 an hour ($800 per month), until the store went out of business. For
the following three months, his only income was a $200 monthly check
from General Assistance. In the spring of 2012, he reconnected with an old
colleague from Taco Bell who was now the manager of a KFC restaurant.
is friend hired Ray “on call” at $8.00 an hour. Ray has managed to keep
his job for most of the three years since his release, but—as illustrated by
the following eld notes—he has struggled to survive at the bottom of the
US labor market.
January 14, 2013
Six months have passed since Ray started working at KFC. He calls me this
morning: “Bro, can you bring us something to eat today? We starving...”
Two weeks ago they received an eviction notice from their small apart-
ment in East Oakland, which they must leave by Sunday. Back in December,
Ray and Melisha were arrested after getting involved in a late-night ght
outside the apartment, which prompted a neighbor to call the police. e
police took them to jail, where they spent the next three weeks. Partly as a
consequence of this, they have not been able to keep up with their monthly
rent of $900, so they now owe $600 to the landlord.
Over the last few days they have been moving their few appliances out
of the apartment. During my last visit, they squeezed their belongings into
a few garbage bags, which I helped them take to a cheap self-storage service
in East Oakland. All that is left in the apartment is the mattress they plan
to sleep on until the sheri kicks them out and the old laptop I gave to
Melisha so that she could apply for jobs online.
When I pull in front of their apartment—Ray calls it “the garage”,
because it’s basically a ground-oor concrete box—they are waiting for me
outside, as they often do, sitting on the sidewalk. Stewe, the small pinscher
Ray adopted soon after being released from prison in 2011, starts jumping
around when he sees me. “How are you guys doing?” I ask. Melisha barely
acknowledges my presence and keeps staring at her phone—usually a sign
that they have been arguing. Ray replies with his usual sarcasm: “Exactly as
planned, bro! We are homeless and starving!” I give Melisha the two bags
of groceries I brought for them, and she steps inside the apartment.
98 A D G
Ray asks me to follow him into their car, because “we need to have a
man-to-man conversation.” We sit in the Camaro, which is slowly falling
apart. It is even messier than usual, with dirty clothes, empty KFC bags, and
other stu scattered about. I wonder once again how they could have paid
$4,000 to a shady East Oakland dealer for a car in such abysmal condition:
e stained upholstery is peeling o, the seats are dotted with cigarette burns,
the wires are coming out from under the steering wheel, and the window on
the driver’s side doesn’t work anymore. ey paid $2,000 up-front, thanks
to a tax return Ray had nally received after months of anticipation, and
agreed to pay the rest in 12 installments of $250 each—though of course
they would never keep up with the payments.
Ray tells me they are desperate for money. He has only been able to work
for a few hours a week at KFC since being released from jail last month. He
still works on call for $8.00 an hour and makes less than $200 each week.
Meanwhile, Melisha has been unable to nd any job—despite lling out
applications at McDonald’s, Walmart, Pack n’ Save, Ghirardelli, and several
other places—and her SSI payments were suspended while she was in jail.
A: Right now… e two of you, how much cash do you have?
R: Nothin’.
A: Nothing?
R: Zero. Pennies. Oh, here you go! [searches into his pockets, then opens
his hand to show me a few dimes] at’s our savings right here. Oh
yeah … And our free cookie [hands me a greasy paper bag from KFC
with a half-melted chocolate chip cookie inside].
A: A free cookie?
R: Yeah! Free cookie, from KFC. Free cookie, that’s all we got right
here.
ey must leave the apartment by the end of the week and need to nd
a new place to stay. Ray tells me that one option would be a trailer park
right underneath the freeway’s ramp around the corner. While we’re talk-
ing in his car, Ray takes out a piece of cardboard on which he has written,
with a black marker: “HELP ME SAVE MY DOG … needs a Doctor!
Donations to pay one please.” He explains that today he plans to panhandle,
with the dog by his side, at the entrance of a Safeway supermarket located
in a nearby residential area. He tells me that he is optimistic about how
much money he will make, because Stewe attracts middle-class women
who have pity for him. Afterwards, we drive toward the Safeway where Ray
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 99
plans to panhandle, but Melisha makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be
there with him and will wait in the car. She has been crying along the way
and says that Ray has lied to me about not having a drink since his release
from jail. He’s been drinking a lot, she says. She is depressed about this and
everything else that’s going on in their lives.
At Safeway, Ray gets his sign and dog ready and sits by the side of the
supermarket’s entrance. He seems in good spirits, and we crack a few jokes
about what he’s doing. I stay at a distance because Ray says that if passersby
see me they will think it’s a joke and won’t give him any money. So I sit on
a wall nearby and watch the scene. e few people who stop by—mostly
elderly white women on their way to the supermarket—are clearly attracted
by the little dog, while barely acknowledging Ray and mostly ignoring his
solicitation for money. Meanwhile, Melisha is sitting in the front seat of
the Camaro, playing with her phone and pretending that she doesn’t know
Ray. Around 4 pm, almost four hours into the panhandling session, Ray has
made $20 and a few pennies. He sets aside $10 for gasoline and gives $5 to
Melisha (who immediately buys a lottery ticket). He spends the rest on a
few cans of malt liquor from the liquor store around the corner.
* * * * *
Ray and Melisha’s case is not isolated. In fact, during my eldwork I have
seen people sleep in their cars in the parking lot of the same fast food
restaurant where they were employed, and be told by their parole ocer
that this was acceptable as long as they notied the ocer whenever they
parked somewhere else (something they had to do frequently, in order to
avoid tickets). More generally, nding suitable housing upon release from
prison is one of the rst priorities and one of the most dicult challenges
for ex-oenders. e recent sociological literature has only sparsely analyzed
the nexus between homelessness and incarceration (but see Gowan 2002,
2010), despite several surveys showing that a high percentage of homeless
people have spent time in prison, and that a signicant number of released
prisoners face the prospect of homelessness upon release (Roman & Travis
2004, 7). e eects of draconian measures introduced at the height of the
war on drugs, such as the “one strike and you’re out” provisions that deny
convicted drug oenders access to subsidized housing, are compounded
today by the chronic lack of aordable housing in the urban areas to which
most ex-oenders return (ompson 2008, 68–87). In California, and par-
ticularly in large cities such as San Francisco and Oakland, the situation is
made even worse by the ongoing gentrication of residential areas, which
100 A D G
is narrowing the stock of accessible housing (see Beitel 2013; Smith 1996),
and by the provisions of the already mentioned Public Safety Realign-
ment legislation ( ), which has essentially deprived large numbers of
ex-prisoners of some of the few emergency housing options (e.g., halfway
houses, transitional housing, etc.) that were once available to state parolees.
Under these circumstances, returning prisoners are increasingly left to fend
for themselves in a hostile and discriminatory housing market. e few who
are fortunate enough to have stable families nd adequate housing upon
release; many, however, face the prospect of becoming homeless or falling
prey to the many slumlords who populate the shadow economy of the streets.
* * * * *
Rico is a soft-spoken 50-year-old Puerto Rican man who was released from
prison in 2010. He was raised by his single mother in the Marcy Projects in
Brooklyn. During his childhood, which he spent as a hustler in the streets
of New York, he was sexually abused by an uncle and suered constant
beatings by his mother’s violent boyfriend. As a young teenager, he started
using drugs and dropped out of high school; as soon as he turned 18, he
moved to Oakland to be with his biological father, who was dealing drugs.
Rico sold drugs for his father, but soon the two were arrested. In jail, his
father assured him that they would both be out in no time if Rico, who at
the time did not have any prior convictions, would “take the rap” for the two
of them. Young and inexperienced, Rico obeyed, and his father was released
after a few days. Rico, however, was sentenced to ve years in state prison;
during that time, he never received a visit, a call, or even a letter from his
father. Rico became addicted to heroin at the age 18 and has been in and
out of prison, mostly for drug-related charges, for the past 30 years.
When I rst met him, on a warm morning in late September 2012, he
had been clean for over a year; he had just graduated from a drug reha-
bilitation program and was staying in a sober-living house. At the time, he
was earning $800 a month at the community clinic in West Oakland that
served as the base for my research. is job allowed him to save money each
month—something he did methodically with the dream of renting a small
apartment. In the notes that follow, I document Rico’s struggle to achieve
housing independence after prison.
December 7, 2012
Rico is about to nish his shift at the community clinic. On the street cor-
ner outside the oce, we are chatting and smoking cigarettes. He tells me
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 101
enthusiastically that, since he has diligently saved a few dollars each month,
he now has enough to put down the rst month and deposit and is ready
to move into his new place in East Oakland. After work, he plans to pick
up a sofa and two couches from a used furniture warehouse downtown. For
the job, he has borrowed an old white Toyota pickup truck that is literally
falling apart. Because Rico has been without a driver’s license since 1981,
he asks me to drive the pickup. At the warehouse, which looks more like a
dumpsite beneath the freeway, we laboriously squeeze the oversized sofa and
the two couches onto the truck. We then drive to East Oakland through
a spectral sprawl of abandoned warehouses and factories. Liquor stores
dot the landscape, in front of which congregate hustlers, drug dealers, and
homeless people with carts in tow.
Rico’s new one-bedroom apartment, although in desolate surroundings,
looks decent. A modest ground-oor unit of a duplex, it is surrounded by a
metal fence. e small front yard is unkempt, with tattered furniture and old
car parts scattered across the sidewalk. e apartment sits across from the
parking lot of an elementary school, which is now bursting with people—
most of them Latinos—as the children are getting out. After bringing the
sofa and couches inside, we begin to turn the empty space into Rico’s rst
living room in years. Shuing the bulky furniture around takes a good
hour. Meanwhile, Rico has been jumping excitedly from one seat to the
next, in anticipation of the great times we will have playing games on his
PlayStation and chilling together. As he gives me a tour of the other rooms,
he repeats that for the rst time in years, he feels happy. In the kitchen, he
opens the fridge to show me the fresh groceries he bought. Unlocking the
kitchen window facing a small backyard, he points to the corner where his
grill will go. en he invites me to the rst BBQ he will host to celebrate
the new house.
February 15, 2014
Last January, the community clinic suddenly dismissed Rico for “lack of
funds.” Now out of work and without any source of income, he will be forced
to leave the apartment at the end of the month. I drive to his place around
noon and nd that he is just getting out of bed. He is depressed over losing
the apartment and looks thinner than the last time I saw him. He stresses
that he has done everything he could to do good. While looking for another
place to live, he has to nd a place to store his recently acquired furniture.
I agree to drive him around East Oakland to nd a place to stay. ere’s
a dilapidated building on Front Avenue, where Rico says rooms rent for
102 A D G
$500 a month. A rusted metal gate opens into a messy communal lobby:
bags of trash and old furniture are amassed in each corner, cigarette butts
litter the carpet, and debris is scattered everywhere. Black plastic bags
covering all the windows prevent natural light from entering the building,
even during daytime. e 12 single rooms are arrayed along both sides of a
long, trash-lled hallway. A large white pit bull with a plastic bottle in its
mouth runs back and forth.
I follow Rico to the last room on the left, which is occupied by one of
his old friends. Peering through the open doors, I see only decrepit rooms
with littered oors. In some, people are sitting on their beds eating, smok-
ing, watching TV, and arguing loudly. All residents of the premises share
two bathrooms and showers. Like the rest of the building, they are lthy.
Hip-hop music blasts from the surrounding rooms, including the one we
enter. ere, two middle-aged white men, whose teeth are mostly missing,
are smoking crystal meth. ey become nervous at the sight of me, but when
Rico reassures them that I’m not a cop, they intently inhale the vaporizing
crystals again. After a few minutes of silence, Rico explains that the build-
ing was formerly the site of a transitional housing program for recovering
drug addicts. Now it is just a ghetto building with cheap rooms for rent.
Since Rico is no longer on parole, he cannot go back to the halfway house;
moving here may be his only option, because the landlord does not require
a deposit or credit report.
October 10, 2014
Rico has lived on Front Avenue for almost eight months. He covered his
rent with monthly General Assistance checks from the county, along with
money from odd jobs, hustling, and gifts from friends. In June, the complex
caught re, likely because a tenant had a malfunctioning hot plate in one of
the rooms. Rico says that the sprinklers did not work when the re erupted.
Without emergency exits, the tenants had to jump out of their windows
to escape the ames.
I arrive at the building around 10 am. With half-burned cars, bags of
garbage, abandoned appliances, and carbonized furniture accumulating all
along the fence, the front yard now resembles a dumpsite more than ever.
On the front door, a red notice warns people not to enter the building
because it is “seriously damaged and unsafe to occupy.” Several people still
live here anyway, paying around $300 per month in rent to stay. If tenants
have insucient cash, the landlord accepts food stamps.
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 103
Rico opens the gate and lets me into the dark space. As we hug, I can
almost feel his bones. He has been losing weight over the last few months
and doesn’t look good: His eyes are sunken and he emanates an aura of af-
iction and weakness. I thought his hepatitis might be getting worse, but he
claims the situation is simply stressful, and to prove his strength, he starts
doing pushups. “I’m alright, bro… See? Still can do these.”
e building has no electricity or heating. In the former communal
area, exposed electrical wires are hooked up to some outside source. e
smoke-stained walls support a structure verging on collapse. A pungent
post-re odor still dominates three months after the ames. Every window
is boarded up, and ashlights are needed to navigate around the debris and
charred furniture. Rico’s room feels claustrophobic in the darkness. e
furniture from the old apartment barely ts: a small TV, the sofa with the
two couches, a microwave, an old coee table, and a small cabinet. A huge
Puerto Rican ag hangs from the wall facing the door. Rico is on the sofa,
watching “e Brady Bunch.” I join him and hand him the lottery scratcher
and packs of Newport cigarettes I have picked up at the corner liquor store.
He has something for me, he says, and produces a black T-shirt with e
Godfather written in Spanish from a nearby pile of clothes.
en he shares news of his new 2015 license plate sticker. e registra-
tion fee came from money earned doing plumbing work with his older son.
He paid the fee—despite not having a driver’s license—so the cops won’t
have another pretext to “fuck me.” Next, he shows me pictures on his cell
phone. ere is a video of Rico working with his son, as well as a picture of
the $400 check he received for the work. After paying $300 in rent to stay
in the building, only $36 in “spending money” remain each month from
his $336 GA check.
A skinny young man in his mid-20s ambles into the room while we talk.
is is Rico’s younger son, who has spent the last few nights in one of the
rooms. About a month ago, Rico explains, the Oakland Police Department,
the anti-gang task force, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives raided the building. ey stormed the place looking for drugs
and weapons and took away a few people, thus vacating some of the rooms.
During the police raid, Rico escaped through a window in the back of the
building. Rico also says that the place has become very dangerous lately.
With some of the old residents having left or been arrested, new ones have
moved in. Most people in the building have guns, and violent incidents
have happened with increasing frequency over the past few weeks. Rico
feels so unsafe that he has installed two CCTV cameras—one overlooking
104 A D G
Figure 3. Rico in the abandoned building.
the front yard and the other covering the hallway. Both are connected to a
small monitor in his room, which he keeps on all the time.
e most signicant violent incident occurred late one night a month
ago. One resident had agreed to hide a bag belonging to a man on the run
from the police. However, the resident disappeared with the bag, which
contained several ounces of marijuana, three handguns, and $10,000 in cash.
So the victim threatened to shoot up the building unless his property was
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 105
Figure 4. e front yard of Rico’s house.
returned immediately. Rico attempted to talk to the man and to prevent
him from entering the building. An hour later, the man returned with three
other heavies, who forced their way past the main gate and into the building.
ey kicked down doors and beat an elderly Black resident almost to death.
When they approached, Rico grabbed the .357 he keeps for “self-protection”
and sat on the couch facing the door. Rico’s door started to give way under
the pounding. He red several shots and they returned re as they retreated
down the hallway. Outside his room, Rico showed me the bullet holes that
pocked the hallway, the bathroom door, and the ceiling. I counted eight
holes, but he assured me that many more shots were red. e door to his
room is now broken in half and has four bullet holes in it.
Inside Rico’s room, he shows me his loaded gun. It’s too dangerous to
keep anymore, he says, since he already has two gun charges on his record.
Another resident—a Latino man in his 40s—enters and asks Rico for
some weed. Rico agrees to give him some, but then he tells the man that he
expects $10 from him. e guy promises to bring the money soon. When
he leaves, I cannot hide my surprise and ask Rico whether he has started
dealing again. He says no.
106 A D G
At the time of this writing (April 2017), Rico has left the burned-down
building. As a felon with multiple drug convictions, he could not apply for
subsidized housing; without a job, he hasn’t been able to aord to move
to a better place; instead, he has moved into a decrepit RV, parked in an
abandoned lot in East Oakland, which he bought for a few hundred dollars
from a heroin addict.
* * * * *
During the three years I spent in the eld, not a week has passed without
someone imploring me to bring them some food because their fridges were
empty. I have also seen people sell their plasma and bone marrow to get a
few dollars. is was the case of Carmen—a young woman of Mexican-
American descent, who had served three years in federal prison for a bank
robbery she committed when she was a student at a UC campus in order
to be able to pay for her college tuition. Carmen was “donating” plasma
and bone marrow at a local lab for money. In this shady business there are
specic going rates, depending on the amount of marrow one donates. In
Oakland, donors get paid $125 for 250ml, $200 for 500ml, and $450 for
1,500ml. Under pressure to raise some quick money, which she needed
mostly to care for her terminally ill mother, Carmen used to donate the
maximum amount allowed, although this would force her to wait for up to
10 weeks until she could undergo the next procedure, which involves local
anesthesia and is quite painful.5
Most of the people I followed were unable to receive any kind of public
assistance—either because none was available or because they were ineli-
gible as a consequence of the many welfare bans attached to their criminal
convictions. As is well known, a lifetime ban on food stamps eligibility for
felony drug oenders was introduced as part of the 1996 welfare reform.
Since April 1, 2015, the ban on food stamps (Calfresh) and workfare ben-
ets (Calworks) has been lifted in California. But despite their potential
eligibility for food assistance, many people with criminal records choose
not to apply, either because they are unaware of their entitlement to these
benets, or because they have some pending issues with the criminal justice
system—such as unpaid child support, court-imposed fees and nes, or
even outstanding warrants for minor oenses—that make them wary of
providing identication to any public ocial. As for subsidized housing,
although felony convictions do not automatically disqualify applicants, at
the time of this writing (April 2017) the Housing Authority of the County
of Alameda is not accepting applications for Section 8. e only way to get
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 107
into the waitlist for public housing is through a lottery system that has also
been closed in Oakland since 2015, and in any case applicants can still be
discretionally screened out due to prior criminal convictions, particularly
if drug related.
Of course, besides housing, the most urgent need people face upon re-
lease—particularly if they don’t have families waiting for them outside—is
access to spending money for the basic necessities of life. But the only cash
allowance currently available to single men and women without children is
General Assistance: a county-level emergency program that oers a maxi-
mum of $336 per month, for a maximum of three months within a year.
Yet it would be misleading to even consider this form of cash advance as a
welfare provision, since it is considered a loan, and recipients must sign a
reimbursement agreement as a condition of eligibility—a clear instance of
the post-welfare neoliberal logic of “governing by debt” (Lazzarato 2015).
“We Do It to Ourselves”: Internalizing Neoliberal Ideology
Despite the weight of the structural circumstances they face, the participants
to this research appear to have internalized the neoliberal narrative of personal
responsibility that is constantly inculcated in prisons, rehabilitation centers,
and reentry programs (see also Gowan & Whetstone 2012; Miller 2014;
Werth 2012, 2016). ey wholeheartedly embrace the dominant rhetoric
of free choice, as well as hegemonic denitions of social deservingness and
undeservingness. is is illustrated by the following two ethnographic snap-
shots. e rst is a conversation between Ethan, whom I introduced earlier,
and Spike—a 40-year-old African American man who served 10 years in
a federal penitentiary after the major drug-dealing operation he had built
in West Oakland in the 1990s was disrupted by the police.
* * * * *
November 22, 2011
E: We got a Black president. A Black president, it showed the Black
community that you can be anything. We’ve come a long way from
slavery to a fucking Black president …
A: True, but does that mean that racism is over? I mean, look at the
prison population; who’s getting imprisoned all the time? It’s the
Black community, isn’t it?
E: We do it to ourselves. You can’t blame nobody for our actions. You
have to take blame for your actions, that’s what I learned. Hey man,
108 A D G
none of this shit is nobody’s fault! [opens his arms as if to embrace the
dereliction surrounding us].
A: So, do you think the system is fair?
E: e system is fair because somebody got to fall. Why not the Black
man? Don’t nobody like a Black person. We don’t even like each
other. Who kill more Black people than a Black person? Man, we
don’t even like us… How can you expect somebody else to like us?
A: OK, but don’t you think that the police target Black people more
than others?
E: Hey man, it’s because we most likely are the ones that’s going to
commit crimes, because of poverty, where we live, lack of jobs.
A: But so can you really blame the Black community for those crimes?
E: Yes, you can! When you want stu you have to go get it. e shit
that’s going on with people that don’t have anything, it’s because
they don’t want nothing. It’s nobody’s fault but theirs. Don’t believe
that shit, man! You starting to be brainwashed. We got opportuni-
ties, we got to take advantage of them. I learned all this shit now. I
didn’t give a fuck about no opportunity. I gave a fuck about getting
my money, man! Now I don’t care about money. I need money to
survive, but all I care about is my family.
E: Hey! [Talking to Spike, who has just joined us at the corner] Do you
believe this? Do you believe a person that don’t have nothing don’t
want nothing, or is it somebody else fault that they in that situation?
S: It’s they fault.
E: at’s all I’m saying.
S: It’s they fault, Alex.
A: But so you blame poverty on the poor?
S: Hold up, Alex, listen to this! I explained this to you once before.
It comes a point in a person life when he know wrong from right.
Just because your parents was using drugs or robbing and stealing,
it don’t mean that you have to do it. You can go out and make a
better life for yourself. Now you can cripple yourself if you choose
to do it because people that do things in life, they do it because
they obligate they self to do it, not because they have to. You got
to make you own choices in life.
E: You see, Alex? If I worked all my life, they going to give me retire-
ment and social security and shit. I’m going to get social security
benets. So this country will make sure that a person is taken care
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 109
of even when they get old. You don’t have to be in poverty, you don’t
have to be at the homeless shelters.
A: But what about people who work three or four dierent jobs and
still don’t get health insurance or benets?
E: at’s not true. If a person works three or four jobs and don’t have
healthcare or health insurance, it’s because they don’t want it. I just
got out of prison and the clinic here gave me medical, and I don’t
have a job.
S: It’s Medicare. Just because you don’t have no Kaiser it don’t make
you less of a person. I mean I got high blood pressure pills and all
that… I’m not paying for it. ey give it to me. Some people, you
give ’em free medical, do they come get it? Nope. So, they choose
to make choices in life, they choose not to want to take the medi-
cal but when the rain starts falling they hearts is short-breathing,
they feet swelling up and all that, and then they say [impersonating
a child’s whining], “Oh I don’t have medical…”
E: [continuing Spike’s impersonation] “It’s somebody’s fault!”
S: Life is what you make it, Alex.
E: e poor don’t have to be poor, man!
A: OK, but I mean back in the 1990s they cut welfare, right? People
don’t get nearly as much as they used to get back in the days.
E: Yeah, I remember when they cut it. en they made programs for
them parents where they can go learn a trade.
A: Well, people now have to show that they’re looking for work to
receive any assistance.
E: ey still give you government aid. Go learn this trade and we going
to send you to get a job. But people wouldn’t do it.
A: Alright, but what kinds of jobs were actually available to people,
part-time? Minimum wage?
E: Come on, Alex. ey got colleges all day long that advertise on TV
and you hear these young girls that get on there and say “I have a
career now!” ey still got programs.
A: So, do you think that you can actually get “from rags to riches,” so
to speak?
E: Yes, you can. Where do you think you going to be in another 10
years, after your book comes out? You out here grinding in the
heart of Oakland! You interviewing brothers to make a book, that’s
grinding, you hustling. Not hustling us, you know what I mean?
But you grinding to make money.
110 A D G
e second excerpt also features a conversation with Spike, who revealed
to me that he had started dealing drugs at age 13 in order to provide for
his heroin-addicted single mother and to protect her from the violence she
would suer at the hand of other drug dealers for not being able to pay
them. Despite having experienced homelessness, hunger, and violence during
much of his adolescence, Spike takes full responsibility for his “choices” as
a teenager coming up in the ghetto.
October 14, 2011
S: My mother used heroin [pauses for a few seconds, keeping his eyes
down]. So, by the time I got to the fourth grade I was ready to deal
with some situations and do certain things, because me coming up
as a kid, I seen some of everything. And I remember sitting in class,
and I left school and I told myself that I didn’t wanna be one of the
young men seeing their mama get jumped on ’cause she owes some
money for some drugs… So I had to make a choice in life: drop
out of school, sell drugs to take care of my mother’s dope addiction,
or deal with the consequences that’s coming behind it… So me as
a kid growing up, I grew up in the life, selling drugs for dierent
individuals…
A: So you started dealing out of necessity, so to speak? You wouldn’t
have started at all if you had enough to live and your mom wasn’t
on heroin?
S: Man, coming from a kid that didn’t have nothin’—I’m talkin’ about
nothin’ man!—to something, is a gift. You know, and not blaming
nobody for the choices I’ve made is a bigger gift. ’Cause now that I
have changed my life, I’ll sit up and hear people say “Well, I didn’t
have a father gure.” You can’t blame that on yo pops! My father,
I don’t even know my father. But when I went out and committed
them crimes, I couldn’t say, “Oh it ain’t my fault ‘cause my mama
on dope.” No, I know wrong from right! Just because she usin’ dope
do that mean I should use dope?
A: I understand, but as a kid, that’s what you had to face growing up,
right?
S: Man, when you grow up you have choices [pauses] you can make
[pauses] in life. You have choices. So, it comes a point in your life
to where you say “man, I don’t want to go to no jail. I can make
it better.” So just because your daddy went to jail all his life, that
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 111
mean you have to go? No! I have kids that’s mine that’s in college!
I never made it out the sixth grade.
A: So you don’t want people to think that you did this because you
had no other option?
S: No. My thing is, when people do stu, they make they own choices.
Stop blaming other people for shit you do! Like you ask me, if I end
up losing this job [at the community clinic], if I go back to the streets
am I gon’ say it’s their fault? It ain’t! How’s it they fault? How’s it
the organization fault?
A: I see your point. So you would take full responsibility for it?
S: [emphatically] You hafta!! When I go to jail, they [the community
clinic] ain’t goin’ to jail with me.
* * * * *
As neoliberal citizens in the making, forged through the hyper-individualistic
correctional narrative of personal change and redemption, the former pris-
oners I followed blame only themselves for their past and present circum-
stances, which they systematically attribute to their own choices—never
to the structural dynamics of class and racial oppression that constrained
their life opportunities since childhood. In this frame, the political and
civic disenfranchisement suered by criminalized populations becomes
normalized as the reasonable and predictable outcome of their own abject
lifestyles.6 In this sense, the emergence of any kind of political consciousness
as members of a subordinated social group targeted by structural oppression,
social inequality, and racial discrimination is eectively prevented through
the stubborn behaviorist ideology that is actively promoted at every turn of
these populations’ journey through the criminal legal system—from arrest
to pretrial detention, from plea bargaining to sentencing, from incarcera-
tion to reentry.
Conclusion: Against Neoliberal Penal Reform
In the mid-1970s, the United States abandoned the war on poverty (one
of the shortest wars it has ever fought) and declared a war against the poor
(Gans 1995; Katz 2013). roughout the following four decades, its power
elites would treat the nation’s racialized poor as a dangerous class and would
conne an astonishing number of them in prisons; they would diminish
their socioeconomic status, cripple their civil, political, and social rights,
and most importantly, they would threaten with the same fate all those
112 A D G
who would not submit to the new conditions of exploitation, subordination,
and existential insecurity brought about by the capitalist restructuring and
neoliberal revolution of the late twentieth century (see Camp 2016; De
Giorgi 2012; Wacquant 2013).
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, some contradictory signals
have started to emerge from the US penal eld. Over the past few years,
the country has witnessed a timid reduction in some states’ prison popula-
tions, prompted essentially by scal concerns. In this context, the “tough
on crime” posture of the last three decades seems to be losing ground to
what in her recent book Hadar Aviram (2015) has dened as an emerging
“cheap on crime” approach—one that seems to be more concerned with the
cost-eective management of a slightly leaner correctional system than with
any serious eort at dismantling the carceral state or improving conditions
of life inside as well as outside prisons. Even if they were to continue under
Donald Trump’s law-and-order presidency, piecemeal penal reforms inspired
by budgetary concerns—like the ones promoted by current bipartisan initia-
tives such as the Coalition for Public Safety, Right on Crime, etc.—although
perhaps necessary to initiate modest prison population reductions, will
not even begin to address the structural crisis of mass incarceration in the
United States. Similarly, when it comes to prisoner reentry, current policies,
reform proposals, and the accompanying evidence-based rhetoric eschew any
consideration of the structural processes that produced—and continue to
reproduce—the conditions of segregated poverty and marginality to which
the reentry populations return (see also Gottschalk 2015).
Despite the abysmal levels of neglect and abuse characterizing US pris-
ons and jails—particularly when it comes to the physical and mental health
of their guests—penal institutions have come to represent one of the few
sources of public relief available to the poor in the postindustrial ghetto,
and often their only chance to access food, shelter, and sporadic healthcare.
In the end, the new penal austerity pursued by current mainstream penal
reform campaigns might well be an indication not so much of US society’s
reckoning with the structural injustice of the US penal state, but rather of
the nation’s growing unwillingness to fund even prisons, to the extent that
the carceral system has essentially become the only residual provider of
basic social services for America’s poor and racialized populations.7 In this
light, current neoliberal penal reforms should be seen as the latest chapter
in a long history of public retrenchment from the ghetto and institutional
abandonment of the racialized urban poor.
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 113
e US carceral state (and the emergent prisoner reentry industry as
an extension of it) keeps fullling the role penal institutions have histori-
cally played in capitalist societies, according to the materialist theoretical
framework that inspires the present work: transforming the poor into
criminals, criminals into prisoners, and prisoners into a disposable labor
force ready to ll the ranks of the working poor (see De Giorgi 2006,
2012; Melossi & Pavarini 1981; Rusche & Kirchheimer 1939/2003). In
the process, the carceral state also performs the crucial ideological work of
disciplining exploited and marginalized social groups to internalize their
condition of structural oppression as the predictable outcome of their own
criminal behaviors, and to normalize any form of neglect, marginalization,
and exploitation in the “free society” as a preferable option to resisting their
subjugation—through crimes of survival, if not political mobilization—and
getting punished for their unruly behavior. Ultimately, the reproduction of
a large army of disenfranchised poor people rendered politically powerless
to resist their exploitation in the labor market, and desperate enough that
they will accept any condition of work—no matter how insecure, precarious,
or low-paid—as the only alternative to starvation or further incarceration,
is not an unintended consequence or a collateral eect of the prison, but
rather one of its constitutive features and historical raisons d’être.
As Georg Rusche wrote in the 1933 article titled “Labor Market and
Penal Sanction,” which laid the foundations for the materialist criminologi-
cal approach known as political economy of punishment:
All eorts to reform the punishment of criminals are inevitably limited
by the situation of the lowest socially signicant proletarian class which
society wants to deter from criminal acts. All reform eorts, however
humanitarian and well meaning, which go beyond this restriction, are
condemned to utopianism. (Rusche 1933/1978, 4)
is means that, as long as conditions of life for those at the bottom of
the US structure of racial and class inequality will be characteriz ed by chronic
poverty, civic and political disenfranchisement, and pervasive marginality,
the prison—even a reformed one—will maintain its role as a tool for the
punitive governance of the racialized poor. Absent a radical overhaul of both
the hypertrophic carceral state and the punitive welfare system of the United
States, with the goal of arming the human rights to health, education,
housing, and adequate living standards for all, any eort to reduce the prison
population will amount to little more than replenishing the ranks of the
(post-)industrial reserve army of labor (Marx 1867/1976, 781–802). If it is
114 A D G
true that mass incarceration has substantially reversed the achievements of
the civil rights movements of the 1960s, then the time has certainly come
for a new mobilization for social rights: a movement led by the populations
that have been the main targets of the American penal experiment—the
poor, the unemployed, and stigmatized urban minorities—to take up the
unnished struggle against neoliberal neglect and the carceral state that
continues to thrive on it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
e author would like to thank Carla Schultz, Eric Grin, Hilary Jackl,
Maria Martinez, Samantha Sinwald, Sarah Matthews, and Sarah Rae-Kerr
for their invaluable research assistance. Many thanks to Rob Werth for the
kind invitation to contribute to this special issue of Social Justice, and to
Judah Schept, Megan Comfort, and Stefania De Petris for their insightful
feedback on previous drafts of this article.
NOTES
1. e invisibility mentioned here is at least twofold. On the one hand, the hyper-
criminalized social groups who ll the ranks of both the prison and the reentry populations are
rendered largely invisible to their middle/upper-class fellow citizens by the racially segregated
nature of virtually every aspect of civic and social life in the United States—from work to
leisure, from education to consumption, etc. On the other hand, the carceral warehousing
of the racialized poor eectively hides millions of marginalized people from governmental
statistics on a broad range of social issues (e.g., unemployment, education, wages, etc.), with
the consequence of articially distorting several ocial indicators of social inequality (see
Pettit 2012).
2. According to a report released by the Oakland-based community organization Causa
Justa/Just Cause (2014, 7), between 1990 and 2011 in the city’s more rapidly gentrifying
neighborhoods (e.g., North Oakland and Rockridge), average monthly rents increased by
30 percent. Over the same period of time, as a consequence of gentrication, Oakland lost
nearly 40 percent of its African American population.
3. Working at the corner outside the clinic was the most desired task by the members
of sta, as it involved the freedom to socialize with others on the street, smoke cigarettes,
use one’s cellphone, and sometimes pay a visit to the nearby liquor store. Predictably, these
semi-clandestine expeditions to the liquor store turned out to be very productive—although
somewhat expensive—ethnographic sessions.
4. According to a report released in 2015 by the Public Policy Institute of California
(Lofstrom & Martin 2015, 3), between September 2011 and September 2014 jail popula-
tions increased by 15 percent, reaching the total number of 82,681—well above the stated
capacity of 79,855.
Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 115
5. Paid bone marrow donations were punished as a felony in California until December
2011, when a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that since the
process of donating bone marrow is now similar to that of donating blood plasma—which
people can be paid for—bone marrow should no longer be considered an organ for which
payment is illegal under the National Organ Transplant Act. Needless to say, the practice
remains highly controversial, and opponents argue that this will determine one more class/
racial divide between rich recipients and poor “donors.” Along the same lines, Wacquant
(2008, 125) states that “commercial plasma banks do a booming business in the hyperghetto.”
Another reference to the selling of plasma as an income-generating strategy among the urban
poor can be found in Desmond (2016, 284).
6. e democratic consequences of this normalization of the political disenfranchise-
ment of “custodial citizens” through the colorblind ideology of personal responsibility are
analyzed by Amy E. Lerman and Vesla Weaver (2014, 25) in their recent book Arresting
Citizenship: “is new and more complex racial regime is the modern threat to a racially equal
democracy.... In particular, the use of individual choice to explain black overrepresentation
in criminal justice—whether the choice to commit crimes is seen as stemming from a lack
of moral values or rooted in the trappings of poverty—is particularly pernicious, because it
taps into another core value of liberal democracy, the idea of individual liberty. By using the
language of personal choice to justify racial inequality, we eectively allow one democratic
norm (liberty) to justify the subversion of another (equality).”
7. is is illustrated, among others, by Armando Lara-Millan and Nicole Gonzalez
Van Cleve (2017, 72) in their recent ethnographic study of the gatekeeping role performed
by jail sta members in limiting access to “jail benets” by the undeserving poor who enter
the jail: “Intake sta members view a portion of the jail population as purposely committing
crimes to receive ‘jail benets’—what sta members construe as shelter and safety from the
streets, food, showers, and medical services. As they have come to understand it, their role …
is in part to keep people they primarily understand as the undeserving poor from entering
the jail. It is common among the intake unit to refer to inmates as ‘regular customers’ and to
be on the lookout for inmates trying to ‘game the system’” (see also Comfort 2007, 285–89).
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