The Transition from Prison to Community
Nahra, Alia, David Jonathan Knight, and Bruce Western. “The Transition from Prison to Community.” RSF Journal of the Social Sciences 11, no. 3 (October 2025), pp. 230-281 (Special Issue on Racial Bias in Law Enforcement, Criminal Justice, and Incarceration) https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2025.11.3.06
Abstract: High US incarceration rates in the 1990s and early 2000s produced large cohorts of men and women who left prison and returned, disproportionately, to low-income communities of color. Called reentry, the transition from prison to community is a process of social integration where formerly incarcerated people establish, with variable success, a foundation of material security, and connections to major social institutions such as the family and the labor market. This literature review summarizes research on reentry, examining its demographic dimensions, the legal and policy environment, and research on families, housing, health, incomes, and criminal desistance. The review indicates that criminalization and punishment in the reentry process stymie social integration, while support from family and social policy is socially integrative. Research also indicates large racial inequalities where, besides the racial disparity in incarceration, the severity of incarceration and the obstacles to social integration are greater for Black men and women leaving prison.
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Black Political Mobilization and the US Carceral State
READ MOREThis review highlights the centrality of Black-led political mobilization, formal and informal, to articulating alternate visions of safety beyond policing and building alternate structures to transform the legal system and challenge racial criminalization. Examples include community patrols, the efforts of Black police to confront violence in their own departments and stand up structures of responsiveness, and national campaigns to challenge punitive legislation and offer alternatives.
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Limited Scopes of Repair: Black Reparations Strategies and the Constraints of Local Redress Policy
READ MOREWe consider two local reparations cases—the Evanston Restorative Housing Program and Chicago reparations for police torture survivors. We argue that the programs are shaped by the differing political opportunities, the local context, and the social location of their advocates given that one was constructed within government systems in Evanston and the other largely by grassroots organizers in Chicago.
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Residential mobility and persistently depressed voting among disadvantaged adults in a large housing experiment
READ MOREThis study examines the impact of residential mobility on electoral participation among the poor by matching data from Moving to Opportunity, a US-based multicity housing-mobility experiment, with nationwide individual voter data. Notably, the study finds that receiving a housing voucher to move to a low-poverty neighborhood decreased adult participants’ voter participation for nearly two decades—a negative impact equal to or outpacing that of the most effective get-out-the-vote campaigns in absolute magnitude.
