Conference Participation

The Effect of Legal Paradigms on Social Development

Paper: Re-entry as a Public Problem

Abstract: In the dominant paradigm, reentry is most often framed as a personal problem with the reentering individual bearing both the responsibility and consequences for their success or failure. This framing obfuscates the institutional and structural conditions that shape carceral and post-carceral realities, shifting the burden away from the public and onto the reentering individuals, their families, and the communities they come from.

This article adopts a Deweyan framework to argue that when reentry is not successful, the consequence of this failure ripples beyond the returning individual, impacting families, labor markets, and communities, demonstrating that reentry is a public problem that requires a public solution. It further highlights how systems of power construct narrative landscapes that organize how reentry is understood, rendering the failure to navigate structural issues a personal and moral failing, thus alleviating public institutions of the burden to address these issues. Reframing reentry as a public problem reveals the state's role in producing a broad range of socially constructed and enforced consequences, such as exclusion from housing, labor restrictions, and disenfranchisement, demonstrating that they are not incidental. Reimagining reentry in this way redistributes responsibility to the public institutions that structure carceral and post-carceral life. This article concludes by arguing that reentry demands institutional accountability and examines higher education in prison and government-based reentry housing assistance as illustrative examples of how public access institutions can take seriously their democratic obligation to address these problems.  

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