“Free but Still Walking the Yard”: Prisonization and the Problems of Reentry

This paper draws on nine months of ethnographic research living in a halfway house and interviews with former prisoners to theorize the embodied experience of reentry. I treat prison release as a sudden change in social position, in which people with deeply ingrained prison habits and dispositions confront new patterns of daily life in the outside world. This mismatch between embodiment and environment can create significant problems: triggering feelings of stress and anxiety, making it difficult to function in routine social situations, and amplifying exclusion from the labor market and other institutions. I use the concept of habitus to capture the interplay of structural determinism and individual agency in reentry transitions, drawing attention to both the lingering impact of prisonization and continued change and adaptation among former prisoners entering new social settings. The analysis sheds light on the complex challenges faced by the record numbers of Americans flowing out of prison each year