Halfway Home

Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of eight million formerly incarcerated men and women. As a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and later as a sociologist studying mass incarceration, Reuben Miller spent years embedded with prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their friends and families. What his work among them revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: in most states in America, life after prison resembles its own prison. The idea of serving one's debt and returning as a full-fledged member of society has been replaced with a new reality of jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.

Halfway Home captures the stories of these men and women, focusing in particular on Detroit and Chicago-two with the largest post-prison populations in the country. This poignant and eye-opening book is a call to arms, revealing how laws, rules and regulations on the books across America extract a real cost not only to the men and women working to rebuild their lives, but also to our democracy. What's more, as the son and brother of men who have served time in prison, Miller writes searchingly of how necessary it is for Americans to acknowledge those who have served their debt to society.