Drawing on ethnographic research at a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail, this paper examines the experience of three residents who accept program mandates and identify as "in-recovery" - but often reject the associated practices when away from official surveillance. The men use recovery less as a program of drug abstinence then a flexible resource for reintegrating to a hostile social order. Differences in practice emerge from distinct locations in a racialized structure of opportunities: white resident Paul Barry juggles conflicting demands on his time from the program and the factory where he works by defining paid work as itself a form of recovery, black resident Tim Williams looks to recovery as a mobility pathway and chance to overcome racial barriers to employment, and Puerto Rican resident Joe Badillo becomes a cultural broker between the neighborhood street scene and a white program administration. At a time when prisoner reentry is increasingly governed by logics of coercive drug treatment, the paper traces the interplay of structure and agency as people navigating these systems make sense of recovery while trying to reintegrate to a postindustrial urban landscape.
Liam Martin is on the faculty of Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. His research examines issues of imprisonment and prisoner reentry. He is currently writing a book about ethnography conducted while living at a halfway house in Greater Boston: Halfway Home: between Prison and Freedom in the American Carceral State. This reentry work is part of a research agenda examining the causes and consequences of large-scale incarceration, including interactions between prison growth and race and class inequality, global transfers of punitive crime control policy, the broad impact of prisons on families and communities, and alternative ways of addressing harm.
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