Doctoral Dissertation Research: Recidivism and Cycles of Incarceration

Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA

Investigators

Abstract

Cycles of incarceration are typically investigated using large-scale, quantitative studies to identify variables that predict reoffending across thousands of people at a time. Recidivism research shows that histories of imprisonment, unemployment and drug abuse are all strong predictors of return to prison. This research will investigate the processes driving these statistical patterns. The research contends that prisonization (being socialized into prison-oriented behaviors), economic exclusion and drug use together create the social logic of recidivism. Economic exclusion increases both the financial draw of the drugs trade and the psychological rewards of drug use. Many people using and trading illicit drugs in poor urban neighborhoods find themselves imprisoned. At the same time, prisonization can involve learning skills and knowledge that facilitate entry to the drugs trade, an accumulation of street capital that promises status and income within street culture. I expect to see former prisoners reproducing habits and routines learned in prison, finding significant barriers to entering the labor market, and struggling with constraints and opportunities that increase the logic of using and selling drugs. This project uses ethnographic research living at a halfway house and interviews with former prisoners to investigate why people cycle in and out of prison. It focuses on three drivers of these cycles: prisonization, economic exclusion and drug use and addiction. Leveraging an existing network of connections with former prisoners developed through previous fieldwork living at the house, it involves a further phase of ethnographic immersion in the site, follow-up interviews with previous participants, and thematic interviews examining processes of economic exclusion and drug use and addiction. By living alongside people as they readjust to the world outside prison, I am able to see up close the set of contingencies that play upon former prisoners, and uncover processes underlying cycles of incarceration through detailed examination of daily rounds and routine activities. Investigating why people cycle in and out of prison will inform ongoing popular and policy-oriented discussions, at a time when lowering recidivism is a central social interest. Ethnographic research based on living at a halfway house - intuitively interesting to many potential readers - can provide a "hook" for spreading the research findings to a broader audience, and injecting methodically conducted social science research into public debate.