Now a professor, author, and recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, Reuben Jonathan Miller grew up poor and Black on Chicago's South Side. Many of his family members and people he grew up with have been incarcerated. Halfway Home is Miller's work of creative nonfiction regarding the lives of people who have been released from prison. He writes that it is nearly impossible for ex-offenders to fit back into society because there are so many state and federal policies restricting them from housing and jobs. As he puts it, "The problem of mass incarceration has never really been about crime. It’s that the people Americans are afraid are subject to a separate set of rules. They live in a separate and altogether different social world because they belong to a different political community…You cannot treat or arrest or perhaps even reform your way out of mass incarceration because mass incarceration is about citizenship, not criminal behavior, and citizenship is about belonging" (269-270). Miller doesn't offer any solutions, but this is an eye opening book, nonetheless. Well worth reading. ( )

Miller is an academic at the University of Chicago. One of his topics of study is how the formerly incarcerated re-integrate into the city. Per the appendix he has published on this topic.

This book is not academic, it is a narrative nonfiction for the general public. And it is interesting, but it read as a series of anecdotes about individuals in Chicago and Michigan that were paroled. Parolees have it much worse than those that have served their entire sentence--but they also struggle with housing and finding work. Parolees must run a gauntlet of checkins, drug tests, treatment programs, and training programs--all while also trying to find permanent housing and a permanent job. They spend their days trying to get from one appointment to the next, usually by bus. A late bus can send the back to prison.

I found this book very interesting and upsetting, but also unsatisfying. I think I might find something more academic more to my taste. I also would have appreciated suggestions as to how this can be changed. What people who are not landlords or business owners can do to help change the current system and to help those currently stuck in it now. ( )