June 19, 2018
Perhaps the key lesson of the reentry study says something deep about the nature of incarceration. We usually think of incarceration as a deprivation of liberty, a loss of autonomy. But the men and women leaving prison in Boston were also disconnected from the intimate bonds of family, friendship, work and community. We saw in the stress of transition a strange kind of homesickness that endured even as the respondents returned from prison. Life, and all the relationships that comprise it, felt alien. Until it became more familiar, they were not yet home.
Read the commentary here.