A Life History Perspective on Social Integration after Prison

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SES-1424089Bruce WesternHarvard UniversityEach year, over 700,000 men and women are released from prison, mostly to poor inner-city communities. This proposal describes an innovative analysis conducted under the auspices of the Boston Reentry Study (BRS); a longitudinal survey of 122 Massachusetts state prisoners newly-released to the Boston area. The project will use BRS interviews -- nearly 700 interviews with men and women released from prison and members of their family' to produce small biographies recording the life histories of each of the BRS survey respondents. Combining quantitative survey measures of housing, employment, and family relationships in the year after incarceration with qualitative life history narratives allows a unique analysis of how individual biographies shape the transition from prison to community. The research will explore how the process of community return is associated with individuals' histories of family relationships, institutionalization, and their sources of material and social support.Despite the importance of the topic, research on the formerly-incarcerated is challenging for conventional quantitative and qualitative approaches. Survey-based studies find it difficult to sample from a hard-to-reach population and measure the process of transition from prison to community. Qualitative field studies find it challenging to fully reflect the great heterogeneity of the formerly-incarcerated population. The project will use analytical transcription of nearly 700 interviews to produce searchable narrative life histories for each of the 123 BRS respondents. Unlike prior quantitative research, the current approach will yield far more detailed information, particularly about early life experiences and the sequencing of major life events. And unlike ethnographic research, the relatively large sample size represents the real diversity of those leaving prison, from the young men involved in drug dealing and serious violence, to the older men and women who have struggled over a lifetime with drug addiction and mental illness. In addition, by tracing life histories to early childhood, the project goes beyond much of the recent work on prisoner reentry "quantitative and qualitative" by linking developmental experiences to adult transitions from prison to community.The project promises three broader impacts. First, the research will provide methods that can be useful to researchers of hard-to-reach populations for which traditional methods may be poorly suited. The current study synthesizes quantitative and qualitative methods providing data collection at scale that facilitates understanding of the life history and processes of integration for those at the extreme margins of social and economic life. Second, the problem of prisoner reentry is also now a question of key policy significance. Several recent and significant criminal justice reform efforts have focused on former prisoners and the conditions of community supervision. The current research will thus inform the policy process and criminal justice reform more generally. Finally, the proposed research, like the BRS project more generally, is conducted by a closely-knit research team comprised largely of students and other young researchers. The laboratory environment of the project provides a unique training opportunity where researchers are actively involved in all phases of the study design, data collection and analysis.