Bruce Western reflects on significant cuts by the House of Representatives to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, which helps fight hunger in America. New work requirements have gained the most attention, but the House bill also includes lifetime bans for people with prior convictions for several kinds of violent crimes. People with violent convictions keep their food stamp eligibility under the bipartisan Senate bill, setting up a showdown in the conference committee. Cutting benefits for people with criminal convictions is a particularly mean display…
Bruce Western on society's tendencies to draw lines in the sand, making distinctions between victims and perpetrators, though these can very often be the same person just at different times.
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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.
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Bruce Western is interviewed by the team at Decarceration Nation in this podcast about radically re-imagining America's criminal justice system. Reflections on Georgio Agamben's work on testimony and survivors solidifies a personal narrative around an all-encompassing, systemic issue.
Listen to the podcast here.
Prison is often just a stop along the road for individuals who have been struggling with victimization all their lives. In a world that is so saturated with issues of moral complexity, our criminal justice winds up piling punishment upon people who are the most disadvantaged and have very serious histories of victimization.
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Bruce Western talks about the Boston Reentry Study, which looks at whether witnessing deadly violence as a child can have a lifelong impact, tracking 122 men and women released from prison in Massachusetts between 2012 and 2014 to see how they're adjusting to life outside.
Read the interview here.
Vincent Schiraldi and Lael Chester reflect on Connecticut's proposed emerging adult justice reforms that could make Connecticut the first state in United States history to include most emerging adults – those ages 18, 19, and 20 – who have committed crimes into its juvenile court. Elected officials in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Vermont have proposed legislation similar to HB5040 and HB5042.
Read the opinion piece here.