Abstract
Liam Martin's Halfway House concludes with a simple declaration: “a halfway house saved Joe Badillo's life” (p. 209). Some 200 pages earlier we are introduced to Joe as the gravitational center of this book. Joe is a mixed-race man in his 40s who experienced a “cycle of confinement spanning two decades of recurring movements in and out, in and out” (p. 25). From 2012–2015, he lived in a halfway house in the greater Boston neighborhood Martin calls Clearview Crossing. Across nine chapters, Martin offers a moving ethnographic account of Joe's experience at Bridge House, framed with sharp insights into the social forces bearing down on him within and beyond this public and privately funded organization. As we learn more about Joe, we are also confronted with an important tension over whether spaces like Bridge House are ultimately helpful or harmful to the men who reside there. Intervening in this debate, Martin centers the notion of “carceral care” (p. 5) to juxtapose these organizations’ provision of care to marginalized people with their exercise of carceral control. Like the concept of carceral care, this book is fundamentally about contradictions.
For instance, in Chapter Three, we are introduced to two of the defining features of Bridge House. Men are permitted—encouraged even—to stay at Bridge House for as long as they need. Consider that Joe lived at Bridge House for three years and three months when the average length of stay at a federal halfway house is a little under four months. Bridge House even held Joe's room while he was hospitalized, leaving his bed empty for months. This exceptionally generous approach to social inclusion contrasts with Bridge House's hard-line approach to drugs and alcohol. Drug tests were a regular occurrence and a “dirty” test called for immediate removal, no questions asked. Later on, we see how these rules weighed heavily on Joe as he sought to manage his chronic pain while “caught between a medical system that was narrowly focused on drug-based solutions” and Bridge House's “coercive model of drug abstinence” (p. 159).
Chapter Four explores the centrality of family to the Bridge House model. As Martin explains, “there was a saying at Bridge House: ‘Bridge is family’” (p. 78). These ideals were most visible in the requirement that men eat evening meals together at 6:00 pm every weeknight. Women volunteers often cooked the food, intentionally providing a concrete imitation of “a male-headed nuclear family” (p. 92). Outside of Bridge House, men were also encouraged to follow a “highly normative and gendered script” for success, “forming not just a family but a quite conventional nuclear family of husband and wife with two children” (p. 79). This vision of marriage as a “turning point” in men's reentry was grounded in the ideal of family life as a source of stability. Outside of abstract commitments, however, this organization “paid little attention to the men's actual families” (p. 95) wherein these ideals were rarely reflected. Instead, their families tended to be sources of stress and conflict as men at Bridge House “negotiated the tricky dynamics of family reunification under severe material hardship” (p. 93).
In Chapter Five, Martin uses the phrase “recovery hustle” to highlight the influence of organizations like Bridge House on the shape of criminalized individuals’ reentry journeys. Staying at Bridge House required the men housed there to outwardly embrace this organization's version of rehabilitation—namely its hard-line approach to sobriety. Criminalized men's success in this space depended upon a particular kind of rehabilitative performance: “selling an image of [themselves] as dedicated to the twelve steps” (p. 107). These performances served numerous purposes. For criminalized men, they tempered the punitiveness of Bridge House, sparing them from the sharpest edge of its rehabilitation model. Exceptional performances could also turn into material rewards, as organizations like Bridge House often use their programming as “informal apprenticeship systems grooming the next generation of staff” (p. 124). And for Bridge House, success stories articulated in their specific vocabulary of change could serve as compelling evidence of their program's effectiveness in the scarce and competitive funding landscape of nonprofit service delivery.
In Chapter Six, we learn of a spatial contradiction besetting not only Bridge House but also reentry service providers of all kinds. These organizations are predominantly concentrated in neighborhoods suffering at the intersection of overlapping social problems. Bridge House is ideologically committed to sobriety, yet simultaneously located at “ground zero in the drug crisis” (p. 128). Amid this environment were few opportunities to form the kind of connections often held up as the key to social mobility and “access[ing] the components of full citizenship” (p. 137). Instead, for Joe and others like him, reentry was about “converting relationships that were once mobilized in the drug economy into networks of mutual support for addiction recovery” (p. 137).
Chapter Seven offers a critique of the inconsistencies in the provision of care for marginalized individuals like Joe. Woven throughout this book is a story of Joe's ongoing health problems. Back in jail, he nearly died of an epidural abscess. After being released, Joe described the challenges he faced postsurgery as a “homeless, wheelchair-bound addict” (p. 40), ultimately resulting in his re-incarceration. Later on, while living at Bridge House, the infection returned and required a second major surgery. This chapter highlights how the emergency medical care Joe received in these two instances was a sharp contrast to the chronic neglect and meager social allowances that defined his everyday reality. As Martin powerfully observes, “it was a strange world, where Joe was at different moments brutally abandoned and then revived with the most advanced forms of high-technology medicine” (p. 176).
Chapter Eight locates Joe's search for employment within a broader conversation about welfare and labor in the United States. Unlike many formerly incarcerated people, who are quickly pushed into low-wage work by unsustainable levels of welfare support, living at Bridge House offered Joe the time and stability to pursue what he perceived to be a more meaningful career in Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counseling. Martin highlights the role of Bridge House in facilitating this ambition, suggesting that without this organization, “Joe would have been experiencing desperate urgency to generate additional income by any means necessary” (p. 180). Although we later learn that Joe successfully obtains full-time work in the recovery field, this chapter centers his struggle to do so “while facing broad social exclusion” and “dealing with serious health problems” amid a social order that fails to “recognize his frailty and guarantee a decent standard of living outside labor-market participation” (p. 191).
Joe's lifesaving experience at Bridge House makes it difficult to uphold sweeping declarations about halfway houses as merely widening carceral nets and intensifying penal power. Instead, Martin mobilizes Joe's biography to contend that even amid the control halfway houses wield over criminalized people, they can also be “crucial sites of care and support” (p. 6). Here, Martin is careful to contextualize this optimistic framing of Bridge House within Joe's “grim assessment of the alternatives” (p. 40). Long after Joe had completed his probation sentence that mandated his residence at Bridge House, he still considered it his best option—“volunteer[ing] to live under a regime including curfews, drug testing, and bans on sex and overnight visitors” (p. 173). A halfway house saved his life, but it did so “in the absence of alternative sources of support that did not also impose carceral confinement” (p. 205), raising larger questions about the provision of care to people in dire circumstances. Against Joe's successes, Martin reflects on the extent to which we can, or should, think about halfway houses as tools to challenge or extend mass incarceration.
Halfway House is an excellent and compelling read. Its scholarly contributions are embedded within, and made more meaningful by, its strong central narrative and rich descriptions that distinguish the ethnographic tradition. Although Joe's story is presented loosely chronologically, chapters are also clustered thematically (as above), making this text particularly well suited for teaching undergraduate courses on punishment or community corrections. Throughout, Martin thoughtfully reflects on his position as a researcher—from his residence at Bridge House to the challenges and successes of seeking to involve Joe as a research collaborator—making a meaningful contribution to scholarly dialogues about the ethics and complexities of doing ethnographic research. More broadly, this book will be of great interest to an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including sociologists, punishment and society scholars, criminologists, and those studying the penal voluntary sector.
