Doctoral Dissertation Research: After Prison, Who Will You Become? Women's Citizen-Making at Prisoner Reentry Organizations

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Nearly 100,000 of the 730,000 people who exit state and federal prisons each year in the US are women. This population has grown quickly since the 1970s. Women are targets for intervention by organizations that work to reform, educate, save spiritually, or otherwise prepare ex-prisoners for community life as citizens with rights and duties. This process is known as prisoner reentry: voluntary or mandatory programming to make prisoners worthy of their belonging as citizens. Increasingly, this work falls on community-based organizations (religious and secular, for-profit and not-for-profit). With the increased outsourcing of this work, organizations with different visions for women ex-prisoners as citizens are engaged, sometimes targeting women particularly, but sometimes merely including women in predominantly male reentry programs. This research examines what such community organizations actually do, in their delivery of messages about belonging and rights in gendered ways, and in the treatment of women as inviting targets for morally-motivated interventions. The PIs use re-incorporation as citizens as a framework for examining programs addressing work, parenting, and romantic relationships. Three types of organizations are compared: secular organizations guided by therapeutic practices; religiously inspired organizations guided by faith principles, expecting workforce participation or education in participants; and reciprocally religious organizations expecting an expression of faith from participants. The study employs multiple data sources, including administrative and organizational records, interviews with organizational staff and officials, and personal observations of programming in two southern Wisconsin counties. The project will illuminate variation in how organizations understand women ex-prisoners as citizens along the dimensions of work, parenting, and romantic relationships. The research team includes undergraduate researchers who are being trained in data coding and basic textual analysis. Ultimately, the project will inform the criminal justice system with regard to the utility of community-based organizations that provide services to women ex-prisoners attempting to reenter society.