Abstract
Introduction
I first met Reuben Miller in Chicago in November 2012, at the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology, but we abandoned the conference that day. Instead, he took me around the westside reentry projects in which he had recently undertaken the fieldwork for his PhD research.
When I got back to Glasgow, I wrote a blog-post about that experience. Having recounted a little about my impressions of the projects we visited, I wrote about the conversations that we shared 1 . In particular, I recalled how frustrated Miller was with the (then) absence of any social movement or civil rights campaign around reentry, not least given its racialised dimensions. That absence was striking not least because we were talking within the very neighbourhoods from which the Black Panthers had emerged in the 1960s. As he later argued (Miller, 2014), rather than being understood as a question of state in/justice that should be resisted, ‘carceral devolution’ had cast reentry as a responsibility of former prisoners (to transform themselves); of their families (to welcome back their own); and of under-funded community organisations (to triage the consequences of mass incarceration).
I argued in that blog-post, and argue still, that it is an obligation of any democratic state that punishes to ensure that punishment ends. Yet, as Halfway Home demonstrates so vividly, the ‘penal state’ or carceral state (Garland, 2013), however messy, fragmented and contested it may be (Rubin and Phelps, 2017), produces not re/integration but instead a ‘supervised society’ in which multiple forms of exclusion and disenfranchisement leave people in the condition Miller calls ‘carceral citizenship’ (Miller and Stuart, 2017). I was exercised enough by the memories of that day – and by the way that it provoked me to think afresh about reintegration in my own country (Scotland) to argue that: ‘…we need to build a movement that is about rehabilitation and reentry (and of course mass incarceration and mass supervision) as civil and human rights issues, and not just about how people and their communities can support one another to manage the consequences of the State's dereliction of duty [to reintegrate].’
I share these recollections of that initial meeting firstly to underline its impact on my thinking about mass incarceration, mass supervision and reentry and, secondly, to note how far we have come in the last 10 years. Two years after that meeting, events in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked the growing recognition that racialised criminal injustice was indeed both a public issue and a civil rights struggle. By the time I visited Miller for a second time in Chicago, in May 2018, mainly to discuss my book Pervasive Punishment (McNeill, 2018), we were both deeply involved in trying to build and sustain the collaborations and coalitions of activists, artists and academics through which different futures might be imagined and perhaps even enacted.
Indeed, the publication of Halfway Home in 2021 coincided with the culmination of the project that has dominated my life and work for 8 years. After two pilot phases, between 2017–21, ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’ was funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council and its Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant Ref ES/P002536/1). The project aimed to improve academic and public understandings of social re/integration after punishment; to develop innovative practices to better support re/integration; and to better engage a range of citizens, communities and civil society institutions in re/integration.
As a collaborative action research project drawing on criminology, popular music, politics and other disciplines, Distant Voices combined creative practices (principally songwriting and sharing), research and knowledge exchange to enable dialogue and learning about re/integration -- and to practice and support it. Its participatory methods drew together a wide range of differently situated citizens, organisations and associations to form a ‘community of enquiry’ and of creative practice.
Although Halfway Home is a sole-authored monograph, I know that Miller would agree that the learning it contains and communicates, like that of Distant Voices, has been produced in and through his dialogue with a similarly wide and diverse range of people with different kinds of expertise on and experience of mass incarceration, reentry and ‘the supervised society’.
So, in what follows, I want to pick out some key points of connection between these two projects which, though rooted in very different contexts and employing different methods, are striking in their similarities.
Proximity as method
Writing with Alison Liebling and Bethany Schmidt in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology a few years ago, on the subject of ‘Criminological Engagements’, we argued: ‘…criminological engagement for us implies constant movement between the ‘tower’ [that is, the supposed ‘ivory tower’] and the ‘field’. While we recognise the privilege and the value of having a place for refuge and reflection… we also recognise that reflection and analysis happens continuously in the field… Our distinctive contribution is not to trump or displace these processes, disrespecting our non-academic partners’ skills, capacities or ethics en masse. However, it is our task to bring our methodological and theoretical knowledge and skills to bear in respectfully challenging, developing, supplementing or re-imagining knowledge and its uses in penal policy and practice. It follows that, paradoxically, we must maintain critical perspective at the same time as narrowing the gaps between theory, research, policy and practice’ (Liebling et al., 2017: 997).
What we advocate here is a practice that evolved out of a desire to do good scholarly work that made a difference as we moved into worlds that we did not previously know or inhabit. But for Miller, as the crucial Appendix to Halfway Home (entitled ‘The Gift of Proximity’) reveals, he arrived at a somewhat similar practice (of bridging the tower and the field) from the other direction; he journeyed beyond the field in which life had placed him in order to make better sense of it, as part of the struggle to change it: ‘I did not become a ‘ghetto resident’ or a prisoner in order to understand what it meant to live through mass incarceration: I didn't have to. I was born black and poor in a world where poor black people are disdained and blamed for their problems’ (p. 287).
Reading this and Miller's discussion of James Baldwin's rejection of mind-body dualism in favour of an African, embodied, social epistemology, I can't help but laugh at how ‘white’ and ‘British’ our quote sounds, despite its best intentions. Reflecting on Baldwin's claim that it is Black flesh that white America (schooled by a European worldview) seeks to mortify in the quest for detachment, objectivity and rationality, Miller writes: ‘…[this] is a failure of imagination and a loss of the kind of knowledge we could generate if we allowed our minds proximity to our bodies and to the bodies (i.e., the passions and the experiences) of the people we’re interested in learning about. In other words, we lose the ability to learn how the world works and, just as important, know how that same world works within us when we erect a wall between our soul… and our flesh, and the flesh of the people whose lives we follow’ (p. 285).
This line of thinking – this way of feeling – resonates powerfully with my experience in the Distant Voices project. In it, we aimed both to explore and to find ways to practice reintegration after State punishment, arriving partly by choice and partly by accident at the sort of embodied, visceral proximity of which Miller speaks. From the outset, we chose to blur the boundaries between community building, collaborative research, knowledge exchange and public engagement, knowing that closer connections amongst the diverse people involved would likely emerge. But it was the use of creative practices (in this case, collaborative song-writing) that added so much depth to these relationships, evoking a kind of affective proximity that both exceeded my expectations and disrupted my own ‘status quo’ (McNeill and Urie, 2020; Urie et al., 2019). Certainly, working with many others to hear people's stories and to help them craft and communicate those narratives through songs, I have been confronted much more forcefully with the ways in which criminal justice simplifies, flattens and distorts stories, and with the myriad ways that punishment estranges people. I have also been inspired and re-assured by the ways that people find to resist, subvert and survive these processes (Crockett Thomas et al., 2020, 2021).
In hindsight then, I think that Distant Voices aligned well with Miller's argument that what we as scholars need is so much more than an ‘empathetic imagination’; the social positions we occupy matter and we can't escape how they shape our worldviews. We will always observe others’ lives from those positions unless and until we can move our bodies and souls into positions of proximity. He goes further: ‘the point is not just to empathize… The point is to walk alongside the people you spend time with and to do your best to learn from and communicate something about their lives with all the tools you have’ (p. 291).
If those tools aren't up to the job, then we must find new tools, like those we have been seeking in Distant Voices. As Miller puts it, to challenge the limits of empathy we need not just ‘criminological engagement’ but a more thoroughgoing ‘sociology of being together’. Or as the English cultural sociologist Les Back puts it, we need a more ‘sociable sociology’ (and criminology).
Proximity is a gift. But it is one that can and must change us; being together entails movement in our positions; it should change our dispositions too, as we also become together.
Vulnerabilities and masculinities
A second core feature of Halfway Home illustrates these arguments. The book makes so much clearer how the afterlives of both slavery and mass incarceration echo in the (perhaps) more subtle brutalisation at play in ‘the supervised society’. If I had to pick a single substantive aspect of the book's analysis to highlight, this would be it: Miller's analysis reveals the depths and weight of penal system-induced vulnerabilities (Crewe and Ievins, 2021).
Brutalisation seems a good word here, since it speaks both to the racialised construction of supervision's objects as ‘brutes’ that need to be virtually or legally (if not physically) shackled, and to their brutal treatment at the hands of their contemporary overseers. As with slavery and with incarceration, this is not primarily about the conscious cruelty of individual actors; it is about a whole institutional apparatus that suspends people – that leaves them hanging – as carceral citizens. As I put it in the title of the short story that features in Pervasive Punishment (McNeill, 2018); the subjects of contemporary supervision wear ‘an invisible collar’, always waiting for the leash to be pulled, or for the floor to drop out from under them. Thus the penal systems of the supervised society cultivate and exacerbate their precarity.
More powerfully and more vividly than any other work I have read, Miller's ethnography drives home the intensity and relentlessness of both the degradation and the vulnerability this creates. The infuriating scene in the book (p. 251ff) depicting Miller's interaction with a parole officer inspecting a potential release address for his brother Jeremiah drives this home: ‘I had to indulge the parole officer, sitting through ridicule, so that he would approve the placement. All of these arrangements could dissolve on a whim. Any of the people I turned to for help could have said no without so much as an explanation’ (p. 253).
Elsewhere, I have described the emergence of a penal-supervisory ‘Malopticon’ that sees its subjects badly, that sees them as bad, that projects their badness (McNeill, 2019). But here, in Miller's account, the Malopticon's degrading, indifferent gaze extends to the family and friends of the supervisee, toying with their hopes and fears. Like the supervisee, they have no meaningful rights, no standing, no status; they can't risk the trouble that complaining or resisting might cause. Like the supervisee, they are not free, not emancipated citizens, engaging with a State that sees and respects them as such. Rather, they are treated as if neither their suffering nor their dignity is of any significance.
There is a set of four songs by Scottish musician Jo Mango and friends (2019), called System Hold, written in response to Pervasive Punishment (McNeill, 2018). One of the songs, ‘Weight’, captures this kind of familial suffering both sonically and in these lyrics, in which the supervisee's partner addresses his supervisor: ‘you write my life, you sign your name you cut him out the final frame you write my daughter calling out his name’
As for the supervisee himself, in Halfway Home, Miller shows how Black men under supervision are legally and penally prevented from embodying and practising the vision and the version of manhood to which many of them might aspire; they are denied the means to be strong, to be independent, to work, to provide for their families, to have dignity.
A similar kind of emasculation occurs in other places too, of course. One of the sub-projects of Distant Voices, called Making Things New, involved people in collaborative creative writing workshops with the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, resulting in the recently published book: A Casual Kindness (The Unbound Community with Pádraig Ó Tuama, 2022). One poem in the collection is particularly vivid in its depiction of dynamics like those that Miller exposes:
Licence
Damned if I say no and damned if I try to make a go of it on my licence. My girlfriend had a baby – hers and mine – and I’m struggling to get a job that I can keep. I’m on a waiting-list –a dozen, or a hundred. Anything at all. One phones me up and says there's work if I’ve a licence. But I’ve got another kind of licence if you follow. And I’m mandates to some dates with a social worker. I’m prohibited for being in certain places. I come with complications to the job. I’m still waiting. I’m a young man with an old man's pride. I’d like to work, to provide, to put food on the table. But I’m not able. There's a stinking lie in licence. There's a chain around me. I says to her that I’ll watch the wee man but I can't even buy a nappy because all the shops stock alcohol along with bread and cheese and nappies. My licence stops me being inside a building set up to sell booze. Have a licence to sell Tennents? I can't go. ALDI, Spar and even fucking Tesco! All fo them as dangerous to me as the bar just down the road. Don't get me wrong. I don't want samples of anything much stronger than a proper cup of tea. I go to meetings, once a week, more if I need more, but I wish my higher power would sort out my parole, and the licence that controls my poor parenting. I’m stuck at home, watching her go out to work and out to shop and worrying some cop will stop me on the street to inquire about the company I’ve been keeping. I’m barely keeping up. I go to meetings then come home, making every effort at keeping my conditions, not breaking them. I’m permitted half an opportunity and asked to make it double what it cannot be. I committed crimes. I know, I know, I know, and I know this as well: licensing is hell if you’re hoping to make good.
Gender is perhaps one area where Miller's analysis could develop still further; and the same could be said of the field more generally. Although analyses of both gender relations and of masculinities feature prominently in Halfway Home, more could be said about how gender roles and ways of ‘doing’ masculinity are perhaps evolving and diversifying (as the poem above perhaps suggests), and what this means for living in the supervised society, and for the afterlives of mass incarceration (see Gurusami, this volume).
Halfway to transformation?
There is no denying that both the gift of proximity and the interdisciplinary erudition that Miller displays in his writing make the analysis in Halfway Home compelling. That ought to be enough to make anyone interested in mass incarceration, race, reentry and criminal and social justice read this book.
But beyond the scholarly analysis, there is clearly a politics at play in Miller's insistence on and demonstration of the value/s of proximity. I know that the commitment to proximity extends into Miller's coalition and community building, but I also note that, surprisingly perhaps, Halfway Home does not end with an explicit clarion call for abolition or a commitment to ‘Transformative Justice’ (Brown, 2019). Miller chooses not to prescribe what we – as criminologists or sociologists – should be doing now about mass incarceration and its afterlives, other than moving closer to walk with and offer witness to those directly affected.
Perhaps that injunction is enough. Certainly, in my experience, taking proximity seriously will be transformative for us as individuals and for our communities. It is a good place – perhaps even the only place – where we can start to imagine, prefigure and practice the development of a more just society. Whatever else its qualities, that society will be characterised by the humanity, compassion and solidarity that imbues Halfway Home.
