Being and Becoming an Ex-Prisoner

Diana Johns

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138665897
• eBook ISBN: 9781317214526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite broad scholarship documenting the compounding effects and self-reproducing character of incarceration, ways of conceptualising imprisonment and the post-prison experience have scarcely changed in over a century. Contemporary correctional thinking has congealed around notions of risk and management. This book aims to cast new light on men's experience of release from prison.

Drawing on research conducted in Australia, it speaks to the challenges facing people leaving prison and seeking acceptance amongst the non-imprisoned around the world. Johns reveals the complexity of the post-prison experience, which is frequently masked by constructions of risk that individualise responsibility for reoffending and reimprisonment. This book highlights the important role of community in ex-prisoner integration, in providing opportunities for participation and acceptance. Johns shows that the process of becoming an 'ex'-prisoner is not simply one of individual choice or larger structural forces, but occurs in the spaces in between.

Being and Becoming an Ex-Prisoner reveals the complex interplay between internal and external meanings and practices that causes men to feel neither locked up, nor wholly free. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in desistance, criminology, criminological or penological theory, sociology and qualitative research methods.

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1 What’s the post-release problem?

‘Scott’

The last day of autumn. I am driving under a leaden sky through outer-suburban Melbourne to meet my first ex-prisoner interviewee, ‘Scott’. That’s not his real name. But, to those who’ve spent time in Victoria’s prisons, he is well known, having spent much of his adult life behind bars.

We’ve arranged to meet in a pub on a busy corner. It’s quiet, late morning. I find a seat near the door, through which he soon bursts, tilting towards the bar. He hasn’t slept for three days, he tells me, he’s been injecting amphetamines. I try humour – so coffee’s unnecessary then? – and offer to buy him a coke. His reluctant acceptance seems part chagrin at having no money, part old-fashioned ideas about chivalry and gender roles. Ideas steeped in prison thinking, I wonder, as we sit down to talk.

Scott is 34, turning 35. He has around 220 convictions, mainly for property and drug-related offences. Since his first adult custodial sentence at 18, he has been imprisoned and released at least fifteen times. His last release date was just over six-and-a-half months ago, which is the longest he’s been out that he can remember. Other times, it’s been two days, five days, and he’s back inside. This time, he was sentenced to 15 months, with a minimum of 7, but they kept him in for 12 and then let him out on 3 months’ intensive parole because, as he tells me, ‘the more you go to jail the less they trust you on the street’.

This time, for the first time, he has support – and an address: for 3 months, while on parole, he stayed with his sister, sleeping on the couch in the two-bedroom unit she shares with her two small children. Now, his transitional support caseworker has helped him find accommodation: a self-contained ‘studio apartment’ in a boarding house. It’s small, but it’s home, for now.

He also has his Mum, though her support is limited. Her boyfriend – his stepfather – died a few weeks after Scott’s release, so he’s had to be there for her as she’s gone ‘a bit weird in the head’. It’s his niece and nephew – his ‘bubbas’ – who are the main motivation for him to stay out of jail. And the fact that he’s ‘sick of living like a crumb’ and of people dying around him.

He’s been trying to moderate his drug use, not using every day, trying to manage his money so he doesn’t feel tempted to go and do ‘burgs’ to get money to buy more drugs. He’s trying to leave the ‘old days’ behind: the days of thieving and burglary to pay for his drug habits, and of being flush with thousands of dollars in his pocket from selling heroin. It was ‘an exciting life’, but he admits it was risky too: ‘I’ve had thirty thousand dollars stolen off me . . . people have tried to overdose me to steal money off me, and . . . I’ve woken up in the . . . hospital that many times’.

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He uses anything: heroin, speed, ice, cocaine. And he’s on methadone, which he hates because ‘it’s wrecking me teeth’, but at least he’s not ‘doing illegal stuff to get it’. Though he does still ‘shoot up’ his methadone. When I ask him why, he explains that, if you take a handful of Valium tablets and then shoot up, you get something like a ‘heroin stone’ – ‘that instant kick where you’re straight one minute and then you’re like . . . ’ (he slumps).

Most days, he carries a box cutter and an ice pick on him, just in case, just like you do in jail, except in jail you make them yourself. His preferred weapon inside was a modified toothbrush: you shave all the bristles off with a razor, then melt razor blades into the head, in different directions, so it doesn’t matter which way you cut someone, it’ll cut them. And when it does, it opens up two wounds, so it’s harder to stitch up. Across the face is best, so that every day they look in the mirror, they remember it was you who cut them. He’d never start it, but he’d do it if he had to . . . It’s all about respect.

He had to appear in court last week for charges dating from last year. He received a 6-month suspended sentence that, together with the 3-month suspended he’s already serving, means that, if he breaches, he’ll be locked up for 9 months. He doesn’t want to go back to prison, although he does confess some days he wouldn’t mind, some days he just can’t face getting out of bed, just wants to sleep the day away, and the night, and the next day . . .

In jail he slept a lot: he’d get up early, about 8 o’clock, to have his methadone; he’d have a nap from around 1 till about 5, then get up to walk and talk with mates until lockdown, then he’d be back to sleep about 8.30, 9 o’clock. Perhaps it’s all the medication he’s on – antidepressant, antipsychotic, anti-epilepsy drugs, methadone – he just has no energy most of the time. When he was younger, he was always up and about, at the gym, playing basketball, walking, walking. Lately, he can’t even get himself to the gym. His Mum’s happy, though, because he’s still the weight he was when he was released – 80 kilos – when normally, by now, he’d be down to 45. He puts that down to his favourite meal: vanilla ice cream with a few spoonfuls of Nutella, warmed for about 15 seconds in the microwave so it goes all soupy.

Since being out, having secured stable accommodation, he’s been focused on trying to manage his money and his drug use and avoid criminal associates that he knows he would end up following ‘like a sheep’. He is also struggling with his personal identity – who he is and how others see him. He has seen people that he has known for years, and respected, who are now so ‘fucked up’ and he reflects that, ‘maybe that’s how people see me’. He would like to find a girlfriend – lamenting ‘I’ve been out six months and I haven’t even been with a girl’ – but, he adds despondently, ‘it makes me just think that I’m not really worthy, not worth it’.

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During the hour and a half I spend with Scott, we become ‘sort of friends’, as he puts it: ‘I might be a thief but mate because I know you, you could leave your purse there with five grand in it and I wouldn’t touch a cent because I know you. And we’re sort of friends now, you know?’.

Driving home, I am aware of a clinging sense of wretchedness. I feel heavy with the weight of Scott’s story and with what it means to be his ‘friend’. This feeling will return as I gather stories of what it means to be – and to become – an ex-prisoner.

Since the birth of the modern prison, despite countless innovations and reforms, a question persists: Why do so many men released from prison return to prison? This book seeks to explore and understand the social space inhabited by ex-prisoners, from which some manage to integrate back into society and yet where many seem to linger, neither locked up nor wholly free. It focuses on the experience of men, as prison is largely a male domain: more than 90 per cent of prisoners are men, and male prisoners’ higher proportion of prior imprisonment suggests that men face particular reintegrative difficulties. Beyond this pragmatic concern, however, lies a deeper rationale: the fundamental issue of maleness and masculinity. In the closed male domain of the prison, masculinities are negotiated, performed, reproduced. Patriarchal norms are enacted, exaggerated, reinforced through modes of domination and intimidation. This book explores connections between ways of ‘doing’ masculinity and ways of being in prison – and how these leak out into the post-prison realm. It seeks to foreground this gendered aspect of prison life and prisoner subjectivity that research tends to treat as incidental.

‘Scott’ is one of twelve men whose stories are the warp and weft of this book. Their understandings and perspectives form the backdrop against which I have tried to make sense of the different ways men experience their return to the community following release from prison. Their voices and experiences are the yarns that give the book its colour and texture. Central to this book is the idea that prison is part of a penal apparatus that functions to reproduce itself. Prison produces the post-prison, in that men’s experience is shaped and shadowed by their experience of being imprisoned. This idea builds on the work of Halsey (2006, 2007) and Arrigo and Milovanovic (2009) and the concept of the ‘carceral assemblage’. The post-prison is seen as a social space characterised by risks – of homelessness, social isolation, family and relationship breakdown, poverty, unemployment, mental ill-health, substance abuse and reimprisonment. Each time a man returns to prison, he will be released with fewer resources and less capacity for social integration. Each release magnifies the post-prison risks he faces. The rise of the ‘risk’ paradigm, the punitive turn and increasing numbers of people imprisoned and released have exacerbated this situation. Risk thinking conceives reoffending risk in terms of individual failings and typically deems ex-prisoners ‘risky until proven innocent’ (Maruna, LeBel, Mitchell & Naples, 2004: 272). Such logic dominates post-prison thinking.

This book seeks to reconceptualise the social space inhabited by released prisoners by applying a theoretical lens that can ‘see into’ that space. This lens comprises three concepts: assemblage, culture and liminality. By exploring the ways in which prisoners understand and experience release, and drawing these together with the conceptions of post-release support workers, this lens casts new light on how and why prison shadows persist in men’s lives and make (re)integration¹ difficult. I explain these concepts – and how and why I have used them in this book – below. First, though, I describe the study – its conception, its aims and the questions at its heart. The research context provides a brief account of the historical and non-governmental roots of post-release support, and a snapshot of imprisonment and release in Victoria, Australia, as background to the study. This leads into the scope and setting of the research, its contribution to post-prison knowledge, and an outline of the structure of the book.

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The conception of the study

Prior to undertaking this research, I worked as a Personal Support Program² (PSP) caseworker. PSP participants were referred for many reasons, including, for some, a history of offending and imprisonment. One young man commenced the programme upon release from prison. Aged 21, he reported a history of foster care, family estrangement, drug abuse and associated mental health problems. His abuse of the drug ‘ice’ had left him with lasting cognitive impairment. In prison, he was stable, ‘medicated’ and contained. Released without links to ongoing medical or psychiatric care, and homeless, within weeks he was reimprisoned. As his sole support in the community, I felt largely ineffective, having little capacity to interrupt the cycle of homelessness and offending in which he seemed caught. Another ‘client’, imprisoned briefly while on the programme, spent the rest of the 2 years failing to appear in court and having hearings repeatedly adjourned in a bid to avoid reimprisonment, while nevertheless continuing to offend through his drug use. He admitted he’d never waste a hundred bucks on ‘speed’ if he’d worked hard for the money, but, as the government was giving it to him for nothing, he didn’t mind. It was something to do.

The experience of working with these men and others provided insight into the invisible worlds they inhabit, the difficulty engaging meaningfully with those worlds, and the problem of a lack of support available to recognise their particular needs. Inspired by that work, this study was driven by the desire to understand the subjective experience of inhabiting a social space largely invisible to non-imprisoned society. The opportunity presented itself when a national prison research project,³ funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), advertised a PhD scholarship, for which I applied, successfully. My study’s post-release focus fitted the larger research on Australian penal policy and practice and its impact on vulnerable populations. The number of men returning to custody attests to the vulnerability of people caught in offending cycles and the problems associated with efforts to foster and sustain so-called reintegration.

The notion of reintegration is particularly problematic for prisoners with no previous experience of effective integration into a law-abiding community. Rather than reintegration, the issue is one of working towards integration as a new and continuing process. This can entail ongoing social learning and reacculturation: acquiring and absorbing information about how to live a law-abiding life; trying to assimilate the norms and mores associated with such a lifestyle; and, at the same time, struggling to unlearn or repress the ways of being when ‘doing crime’ or in prison. Along with the ex-prisoner’s participatory efforts, the reintegrative aim of social inclusion implies reciprocity, mutual tolerance and a degree of community acceptance. This poses a dilemma: if a man⁴ can live in the community independently, with a legal source of income and avoiding crime, and yet still feels an outsider, is he ‘reintegrated’? Out of such dilemmas, the myriad difficulties of engaging ex-prisoners and facili...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Being and Becoming an Ex-Prisoner
• International Series on Desistance and Rehabilitation
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What’s the Post-Release Problem?
• 2 A Catalogue of Post-Prison Disadvantage
• 3 The Post-Release Problem
• 4 Assemblage, Culture, Liminality
• 5 Phenomenography
• 6 Lived Experience of Release
• 7 Post-Release Support Perspectives
• 8 Home, Identity, Connection
• 9 Being and Becoming
• References
• Index