Halfway Home

Starred review from November 16, 2020
University of Chicago sociology professor Miller debuts with an intelligent and heartfelt study of how mass incarceration frays familial relationships, harms communities, and sets parolees up for failure. He notes that one in three Black men has a felony record, and that 45,000 state and federal laws “regulate the lives of the accused.” Drawing from his childhood in the South Side of Chicago, where almost everyone he knew had a brother, father, or cousin in juvenile detention or prison, Miller paints a detailed picture of life in poor Black neighborhoods, where “the vulnerability to surveillance and arrest, to frequent rounds and types of incarceration, extends far beyond jails, courts, and prison yards.” Extended interviews with inmates and former inmates reveal how difficult it is for people with criminal records to obtain housing, find work, get a place in a reentry program, and avoid being “flopped,” or sent back to prison for parole violations. Miller, whose father and younger brother served time in prison, also shares in intimate detail the stress of having a loved one in jail. Striking a unique balance between memoir and sociological treatise, this bracing account makes clear just how high the deck is stacked against the formerly incarcerated.

Starred review from February 1, 2021

For incarcerated persons in the United States, release does not equal freedom. Miller's first book is an important, harrowing ethnographic study that reads like a keenly observed memoir, which, in part, it is. His own father and brothers having been imprisoned, Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, is candidly close to his research on mass incarceration and its after effects. By listening closely to his many subjects, Miller demonstrates what living with a criminal record is really like: debilitating, dehumanizing, marginalizing, and exhausting. Structural barriers keep the formerly incarcerated from meaningful shelter, work, and civic engagement. While fear, racism, and disdain for people in poverty are underlying causes, the law is the direct cause, with state and national housing, employment, and criminality policies jeopardizing successful reentry at every turn. These realities originated with slavery and racialization, which led to societal assumptions of Black criminality. Unjust and unsustainable, yet entrenched, these realities will only change if society learns to acknowledge the humanity of people who are feared--even people who have caused harm--and ceases to exclude them from the rights of citizenship. VERDICT A worthy companion to the lauded Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, this is essential reading for all who care about justice in contemporary America.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2020
Imprisonment is a nightmare--and it's only the beginning of the state's punitive powers. A professor at the School of Social Services Administration at the University of Chicago, Miller introduces us to psychologist Winston Moore, a Black man who ran Chicago's jails in the 1960s and '70s and chided Black people for tolerating criminals in their midst. The author points out that 40% of the incarcerated population in the U.S. are Black men and women, and 84% are poor. "It is clear to anyone paying attention," writes Miller, "that the legal system does not administer anything resembling justice but instead manages the nation's problemed populations." It's also part of a "lineage of control" that extends back to slavery and the Jim Crow South. Mass incarceration has grown dramatically since Moore's day, owing to such race-targeted programs as the war on drugs. But that's only the beginning, for "mass incarceration has an afterlife...a supervised society." The formerly incarcerated are barred from participating in many aspects of public life: They are forbidden to vote or hold public office, and they can be denied housing rights, jobs, food stamps, student loans, the right to adopt a child, and the ability to move from one city or state to another. These legal exclusions are close to Miller's heart. As he writes, his father and brothers were jailed, and it was only thanks to an accident of fate that he became an academic and not a prisoner himself, given the unequal application of the law and its tendency to land hardest on minority populations. "In a supervised society, the prison and the jail and the law frays our closest ties," writes the author in a memorable passage. "It pulls our families apart. It did this to...me, and it does this to millions of families." Reminiscent of Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy (2014), Miller's well-argued book delivers a scarifying account of law gone awry. A powerful argument in favor of judicial reform--now.

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January 1, 2021
Interweaving personal memoir and qualitative data in narrative form, Sociology professor Miller's Halfway Home is reminiscent of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (2010) in its exploration of the "supervised society" and "carceral citizenship" of mass incarceration that systematically prevent former prisoners from participating in society. Miller begins by examining the coercive nature of plea bargains. Next, anecdotes grimly portray an egregiously broken institution, such as state Department of Corrections taking money deposited for upkeep of incarcerated loved ones and applying it toward prisoners' "debt" to the legal system. Miller's experiences with finding a home for his formerly incarcerated brother show how people enter a post-prison life precariously dependent on the whims of parole officers or favors from strangers. Legally excluded from housing and restricted in employment, former prisoners are haunted by records that prevent them from advancing economically or socially. Thus, Miller arrives at his ultimate plea for "radical politics of community and hospitality that would take us far beyond the limits of a moral calculus based on public safety or fear of retribution."

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