Book Review: Halfway Home
A Book Review — Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
By Reuben Jonathan Miller, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. 352 pages, copyright 2021, Little Brown and Company.
Volunteer Daniel Doornbos shares his reflections on a recently published book that we as a staff team are reading and recommend to you all!
Born poor and black Chicago in 1972, his father in prison, abandoned by his mother, and raised by his grandmother, the author has plenty of experience in a hungry, frustrating, dangerous, and fearful world. His neighborhood was over-policed but under-protected. And the nationwide practice of mass-incarceration was just beginning.
Miller states, "I knew about foster homes and group homes and juvenile detention centers and jails and prisons because everyone I grew up with had been to at least one of these facilities or had a brother, cousin, father, mother, aunt, or uncle who had been incarcerated."
What makes Miller's work so interesting and valuable is what he calls the "Gift of Proximity", that is, spending time with the people you are studying. Normally, a sociologist might distribute and tabulate questionnaires, conduct interviews asking prepared questions, comb through various records, and make the scholarly assumption that most people just tell you what they think you want to hear. He dedicates an appendix to explaining proximity.
At age 27, Miller became a volunteer chaplain at Cook County Jail, where the inmate population numbers about 10,000. He worked minimum, medium, and maximum security wings. He prayed, sang, listened to inmate stories, and read from the Bible. In his situation, the chaplains served as a bridge between family members and inmates, beside working with the inmates themselves. The social workers gave referrals to drug-treatment programs and food pantries, and lent the chaplains their offices as a place to decompress.
Miller decided to attend the University of Chicago graduate school of social work in order to become a better chaplain, even though he was only a volunteer. That decision led him to a career as a sociologist, criminologist, social worker, and college professor.
Halfway Home is a book about people with many struggles and few resources.
A book on this topic can easily be a slow, boring read, full of statistics and devoid of personality. Instead, Miller provides the facts and information by recounting life experiences of real people. He changes scenes frequently, so the reader can avoid boredom while following multiple story lines. Even the footnotes are interesting and informative.
Although the book's focus is on life after incarceration, Miller starts with the practice of slavery in the 15th century and how it resulted the presence of enslaved African people in America. The enslaved were never considered to be human beings, more like shiftless, lawless, and godless beasts, in need of strong direction to convert them into useful laborers. It is no surprise that slaveowners constantly feared slaves escaping and forming insurrections. That attitude is still with us today as black people are often seen as personified trouble, deserving of a presumption of criminal guilt.
Ninety-five percent of convictions are resolved through plea deals. To avoid a long prison sentence, a trial he cannot afford, and to go home as soon as possible, the accused person, though factually innocent, chooses to plead guilty. Even if the accused does no prison time, the conviction follows him for the rest of his life.
There is no question of the need for re-entry programs. They relieve real human suffering in real time. But the problem of mass incarceration is ultimately a problem of citizenship—formerly incarcerated people being legally excluded from labor and housing markets. And it is all constitutional. Few companies are willing to "run the risk" of employing an ex-con. Most housing complexes have rules against felons renting or even visiting. So if your family rents their home and you, just released from prison want to stay with them, they could be evicted.
The book is a 15-year project. It focuses on people who live in Chicago and southern Michigan. This would be a limitation if the goal was to produce a textbook. However, it is a very large geographic area to be covered by one professor and a handful of student researchers. Published this year, 2021, the book is as up-to-date as one can get.
Halfway Home, Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration is a must-read for facility and volunteer chaplains serving the incarcerated of Santa Clara County. More than just another item on the suggested reading list, each chaplain should acquire, read, and keep his or her own copy as an informative reference.
Halfway Home is available online, $21 for the hardcover, $15 for the ebook.
