Prior studies cast U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing. This article complicates that proposition by exploring when, and how, threat under penal confinement leads people to mobilize. Using interviews with currently incarcerated and recently released men across three states, I show that although imprisonment generally fosters political inaction, collective mobilization does arise under certain conditions.

Imprisonment is recognized as routine in the lives of disadvantaged young men. Scholars center the impact of relatively brief prison experiences on postprison early adulthood, but this approach overlooks the many who are imprisoned for long periods. This study addresses this concern by analyzing interviews with African American and Afro-Latino men who were sentenced as youth and early adults to long prison terms. Prison-like conditions pervaded men’s life histories in ways that shaped how they made sense of incarceration and early adulthood.

This 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.

This 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.

We 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.

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.