This dissertation employs an organizational approach to examine how reentry organizations seek to provide social value as public-private partnerships with the mission statement of aiding the reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. With the help of a case study of a reentry organization in Cleveland, Ohio, I examine the sociological significance of the discursive “brokerage metaphor” of reentry organizations as brokers of the social and cultural capital the formerly incarcerated require as catalysts for their reintegration back into society. Based on ethnographic data and in-depth field interviews collected over a period of 16 months in Cleveland, Ohio, my research finds that the “brokerage metaphor” for reentry elides important factors which play an integral role in the organizational behavior of reentry organizations and the sociological experience of reentry for the formerly incarcerated. These other factors notably include the competitive and regulatory organizational environment of the reentry organization, and the intersectional identities of formerly incarcerated women. These external factors reveal the paradox of the public-private partnership represented by the reentry organization wherein some obstacles that stymie the objectives of the reentry organization might be attributed to its public partner, the government. Furthermore, my research finds that besides the brokerage of social and cultural capital, reentry organizations as public-private partnerships provide other tangible benefits for achieving the reentry of the formerly incarcerated, such as a remove from the carceral continuum that invites participation and creates the space for community-building. This dissertation research advances a new direction for the study of public-private partnerships wherein the lens of inquiry is not merely on the private partner, rather, the spotlight is also trained on the external impediments that prevent the organization from achieving full social value. This direction for research bodes well for determining appropriate and effective ethical policy interventions to addressing pressing social problems through public-private partnerships and social enterprise.

The purpose of this project was to explore how ex-offenders collectively leverage personal and community assets to transcend passivity and powerlessness in the face of reentry barriers, as well as to identify the personal milestones that signal social and community re-integration, post-incarceration. A qualitative inquiry utilizing interviews and a support group structure modeled on action research was used to generate two distinct products. The first product concerned a peer-group model that could be employed by ex-offenders as a form of community capacity building. The second product sought to identify reentry milestones utilized in the development of effective support programs to aid ex-offenders in the areas of employment and housing. Data collection points included the narratives elicited from participants during the intake and exit interviews, a grounded theory analysis fostered during each support group session with the intent to identify group curriculum, and the life stories revealed in the reflective journals all participants are asked to maintain. Narrative analysis was employed to understand the meaning participants provide to the work of the support group as well as the volunteer work they are asked to do to illustrate their commitment to community building. The participants utilized a grounded theory analysis to examine transcripts of group discussions in an effort to explicate the most important components of a peer-group model. / text

While extensive research has been conducted on the causes of intimate partner violence in the community, very little is known about rates and predictors of domestic violence perpetrated by offenders who have recently been incarcerated. Some evidence suggests that formerly incarcerated individuals may be at an increased risk to perpetrate intimate partner violence during the transition from prison to the community (e.g., Hairston & Oliver 2006; Hilton, Harris, Popham, & Lang, 2010; Oliver & Hairston, 2008). The primary goal of this dissertation was to examine the extent to which former inmates engage in domestic violence during the transition from prison to the community. A second goal of this dissertation was to determine the independent and interactive effects of selected individual, situational, and social-structural factors on post-prison domestic violence. The current dissertation project involved a retrospective study of data collected from n = 1,137 formerly-incarcerated male offenders who were released from state prison between 2004 and 2009. Data regarding individual-level factors of borderline and antisocial personality characteristics and exposure to family-of-origin violence were extracted from institutional records. Additional individual-level demographic characteristics including offenders' age, ethnicity, education need, marital status, number of children, crime of conviction, length of incarceration, and participation in correctional rehabilitation programs extracted from institutional records were also considered. The situational-level factor of offenders' employment after prison release was also collected from institutional records; and the social-structural factor of neighborhood disadvantage was collected from information available in offenders' community supervision records and Census tract-level data. The outcome measure of post-prison domestic violence was gathered from local law enforcement records. Data were entered into statistical models to predict post-prison domestic violence. Main effects on post-prison domestic violence were examined for each of the individual-level demographic characteristics, borderline and antisocial personality features, exposure to family-of-origin violence, employment, and neighborhood disadvantage. Interactive effects on post-prison domestic violence were examined between borderline and antisocial personality characteristics, exposure to family-of-origin violence, employment, and neighborhood disadvantage. Significant predicted main effects on post-prison domestic violence included age, ethnicity, education need, number of children, violent criminal history, attendance of substance abuse treatment in prison, witnessing interparental violence as a child, and neighborhood disadvantage. Significant predicted interaction effects on post-prison domestic violence included the interaction between physical abuse as a child and neighborhood disadvantage. Implications for policies regarding post-prison supervision sentencing, housing, and the advancement of programming to prevent intimate partner violence during the transition from prison to the community are discussed. Contributions to the literature on intimate partner violence, environmental transition theory, and ecological theoretical frameworks are also addressed.

This mixed methods dissertation is comprised of three papers that consider interrelated ways in which social bonds, within the context of parenting, are experienced by women recently involved with the corrections system. Types of social bonds considered include agency professionals, romantic partners, and children--all previously theorized to play a role during the reentry period. These social bonds are considered within the context of the challenges experienced during this period, and how and why these social bonds may--or may not--support women as they transition back into the community.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management Sciences: Public Management (Peacebuilding), Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2017. / The retributive justice system has been used in most parts of the world aimed at rehabilitating, deterring and incapacitating offenders. High prison rates reveal that the retributive justice system has not been too effective when it comes to reducing recidivism and addressing causes of crime. The system makes offenders to be accountable to the state, while victims of crime are left out of the picture. Family members of offenders, who are the secondary victims, are also closed out of the system, while in essence; they suffer a lot including loss of family members to imprisonment, which affects the family fabric. This research seeks to enhance the restorative justice work with ex-prisoners done by Second Chance Rehabilitation centre. The question that this research seeks to answer is: can restorative justice models have a positive impact on the lives of ex-prisoners and their families? An Action Research paradigm was used during this study. Eleven restorative justice interventions were implemented with a group of twelve ex-prisoners, while four sessions were implemented with ten family members of the ex-prisoners. The findings of this research reveal that, participants attained new knowledge through these interventions, which influenced their attitudes and behaviour about life and relationships. Additionally, the study revealed that human beings are social beings, who can be socialised into doing right, which is a message that should be passed on to policy makers, so they would implement effective rehabilitative processes which will yield transformative results. / D

The criminal justice system is a primary driver of racial and gender injustice. While research and policy advocacy tends to center the most typical criminalized subjects— black, and more recently Latino, men— unique insights into the dynamics of race, gender, and punishment emerge when we focus on a more unique group: transgender people of color. Nearly half of black transgender people experience incarceration over the course of their lives. The extreme criminalization of transgender people of color highlights the intersectional nature of carceral violence, and the ways state violence operates alongside social exclusion and structural abandonment. The carceral state produces and maintains social divisions. This dissertation investigates how the penal definition and management of racialized gender boundaries produces vulnerability and constrains life chances for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. I also demonstrate how, in the face of state coercion, criminalized gender-nonconforming people navigate and seek to mitigate vulnerability. The empirical context for this work is the California state prison system and the reentry ecosystem of San Francisco. Drawing on extensive archival research, 20 months of ethnographic observation in transgender prisoner advocacy organizations, and 136 interviews with formerly incarcerated transgender people, advocates, policymakers, and former prison staff, this dissertation shows how racialized gender regulation operates, transforms, and is resisted in penal organizations. This study traces racialized gender regulation over time— from 1941 to 2018— and across the carceral continuum, examining the management and navigation of racialized gender boundaries behind prison walls and in reentry organizations upon transgender people’s release. While transgender prisoner discourse foregrounds issues of identity, I find that neither identity nor accounts of race and gender as stable and transportable structures are sufficient to explain the ways racialized gender boundaries operate at the meso-level of penal organizations. Prison administrators and reentry staff articulate and regulate racialized gender boundaries based on historically-specific organizational imperatives (e.g. to distinguish between reformable and incurable prisoners, or to allocate limited reentry resources). Currently and formerly incarcerated transgender people, in turn, engage with classification pragmatically and pursue safety strategies designed to minimize vulnerability to both interpersonal and state violence. I arrive at these findings through three papers that focus on different dimensions of organizational practice and pragmatic survival strategies. In the first paper, I argue that, rather than emphasizing a categorical conflict between an institutionalized gender binary and gender-nonconformity, we should analyze how the nature of prison gender boundaries arises from the historically evolving nature of racialized punishment and the inherently coercive nature of classification in a total institution. Prison gender boundaries reflect an evolving conflict between the prison’s efforts to label, control, and confine bodies, and prisoners’ capacity to resist. Prison administrators make and manage gender boundary violation based on the evolving penal logics and resources at their disposal; from 1941-2018, administrators successively use strategies of segregation, treatment, risk management, and bureaucratic assimilation. Prisoners, in turn, express or repress non-normative gender identifications based on the consequences of classification in changing penal regimes. In the second paper, I extend research that has explained incarcerated transgender women’s high rates of victimization based on the prison’s rigid institutionalization of the gender binary. Employing an intersectional approach, I demonstrate that trans women of color in men's prisons are vulnerable because their restricted mobility, subjection to guard coercion, and material deprivation facilitates sexual assault. In this context, trans women of color use embodied, social, and economic resources to avoid victimization. Lastly, I examine how racialized gender regulation persists in the reentry organizations transgender people encounter upon release. Examining the gender rules and gendered interactions fostered by reentry housing programs, I show how the repudiation and regulation of black trans women’s womanhood leads to their exclusion from reentry resources and heightened reentry hardship. Together, these three papers work to explain how racialized gender regulation in the penal system generates complex, intersectional inequality, while also illuminating the ways criminalized transgender people of color understand, navigate, and resist these conditions.

Interest in human and social capital's contribution to the desistence of crime is increasingly popular amongst criminologists, economists and policy makers. However, little attention has been drawn to the influence human and social capital indicators contribute towards the relationship between the re-entry process and juvenile crime at the neighborhood level. The current study hypothesizes the existence of a mediating relationship between human and social capital indicators (2000) and the rates of receiving formerly incarcerated persons (1997-2002) and juvenile arrest (2006-08) in 92 Portland, Oregon neighborhoods. Portland, Oregon receives more formerly incarcerated persons from Oregon's state correctional facilities than any other city or county in Oregon. Using neighborhood rates of residents with house-hold income above 50K, high school graduation, and annual income type: retired or government assistance, as proxies for human capital measures and neighborhood rates of residents employed by non-profit organizations, number of churches, and self-employment as proxies for social capital measures, OLS regression and bivariate correlations tested for a mediating effect between human and social capital on rates of re-entry and juvenile arrest rates. Findings indicate neighborhoods with increased rates of returnees have higher rates of juvenile delinquency. In addition, mediating human and social capital indicators affect the direct relationship between re-entry and juvenile crime: neighborhoods with more residents receiving retirement income, higher percent of self-employed residents, non-profit employees, or higher rates of residents earning income above 50K had lower rates of returnees in their communities. Greater rates of Portland neighborhoods which house residents with high proportions of house-hold incomes above 50K per year see increases in the rate of juvenile crime. Rates of neighborhood churches showed a positive correlation with on both rates of returnees and juvenile crime; obtaining a high school diploma was also associated with increased returnee rates and juvenile crime. Neighborhoods with more residents who are self-employed or employed by non-profit organizations had reduced rates of returnees and juvenile crime. Future research and recommendations are discussed to examine the impact of these findings on neighborhoods with formerly incarcerated persons, levels of human and social capital and juvenile crime in Portland, Oregon.

Sociologists of punishment generally agree that the American prison exacerbates social inequality, but the mechanisms by which it does so remain somewhat fuzzy. This thesis pulls from the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), a canonical theorist of power and inequality, and specifically his three "thinking tools" of field, capital, and habitus, to unveil these mechanisms. Empirically, I turn to ethnographic data I collected in a minimum-security men's prison that is generally reserved for convicts who will be released to one of the three most populated counties in Oregon. I explore how soon-to-be-released prisoners (i.e., prisoners who will be released within six months) understand and prepare for their exit. Data suggest most prisoners approaching release want to adopt an honest working class style of living, and that many take proactive steps they perceive as likely to increase their chances of accessing this lifestyle (sometimes called the "straight life"). However, I argue that any (re)integrative potential emerging from these conscious and interest-oriented strategies are at risk of being trumped by two processes I title "capital erosion" and "habitus adjustment." I frame these as unintended, but nevertheless strong, consequences of imprisonment. Ultimately, I suggest imprisonment worsens existing patterns of inequality by means of draining power from the nearly powerless and disintegrating the poorly integrated.

The researcher conducted a mixed method research study on parole violations from a South African perspective. In South Africa, there is limited research regarding the causes of parole violations. Thus, the study is mainly descriptive, but also exploratory in nature and considered a first of its kind. The study aimed to explore parole violation as a phenomenon through the perceptions, opinions, attitudes and incident recall of re-incarcerated parolees. Furthermore, the study aimed to describe the causes for parolees to fail on parole. A two-phase sequential mixed methods research design was used that involved the collection and analysis of primarily quantitative data from self-administered questionnaires. These questionnaires were complemented by a qualitative data collection phase consisting of focus group interviews. A representative sample (n=111) chosen according to the various ethnic groups was drawn from a population of 1 111 adult male parole violators in the Gauteng region (aligned to the regional divisions used by the Department of Correctional Services and not to the provincial borders) for the quantitative phase. Non-probability sampling was used to select 22 participants who volunteered for the second, qualitative phase of the study (focus group interviews). Descriptive statistical analysis was used to analyse the data collected from the questionnaires. The data was analysed by means of frequencies (frequency tables and graphs) to describe one variable and cross tabulations (contingency tables) to show bivariate quantitative data. All the focus group interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis. The transcripts provided a complete record of the discussions and helped to facilitate the analysis of the data according to identified, recurring themes. On release, many stigmatised and rejected parolees face widespread post-release challenges that prevent successful reintegration. The study revealed that poor pre-release planning and post-release support, a lack of education, unemployment, substance abuse, and a loss of family support are described as the main causes of parole violations. The recommendations from the research findings showed the importance of pre-release planning, risk assessment, employment, education, treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, community partnerships, family involvement, and graduated responses to parole violations that are fair, consistent, and legal. / Penology / D.Lit. et Phil. (Penology)

The thesis examine the process of rehabilitation offered by the Department of Correctional Service as from the time the offender is admitted (sentenced) until such time he is released back into society. Rehabilitation in the departmental context is based on four key delivery areas, which must be in place to ensure that offenders are rehabilitated. Faced with several challenges, e.g. demilitarization, structural defects of the facilities that are not conducive for rehabilitation or build for Unit management principles, career path developed for officials, and the transformation of the old penitentiary system to the new generation prison system, the department failed to achieve their objectives. The thesis will examine the current process of rehabilitation in the Department of Correctional Service, and identify areas of under performance to seek best practices to improve service delivery. The study will also focus on the readiness of offenders to be release as rehabilitated offenders and the After Care the Department provide to offenders upon their release. / Corrections Management / MA (Correctional Management)