The Hazards of American Justice
Credit...John Gall
of Mass Incarceration
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A combination of scholarly insight and firsthand pain lends force to this book about the inescapability of prison. Miller, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, interviewed hundreds of people to learn how former inmates navigate life after serving time. He himself grew up in poverty while his father was in jail. “Halfway Home” combines case studies with memoir, focusing on Miller’s brother, whose collect calls, arbitrary parole officer and efforts to remain free bedevil the author and his middle-class family. The book also offers a wide view, noting that 45,000 state and federal laws regulate the lives of former inmates, adding up to the most “profound level of legal exclusion.” Their status as ex-convicts affects their ability to vote, secure housing, find jobs and see their children. Some of Miller’s rhetoric goes too far: He refers to jails as “cages,” describes incarceration as “the afterlife of slavery” and entitles one chapter “Chains and Corpses.” Yet counterbalancing these flourishes are the enraging indignities suffered by his subjects — most of them African-Americans. They include one man who spent hours traveling to the wrong agency on the instruction of a careless parole officer. He would have had to walk nine miles to another agency had the author not agreed to drive him. Miller describes this precarious ecosystem as the “economy of favors.” Ex-convicts move “from one catastrophe to the next,” relying on the forbearance of others to help them avoid eviction, firing or a missed appointment, any one of which could mean a return to jail. Miller turns a rigorous yet compassionate eye toward a population that we often overlook. Far from having paid their debt to society, former prisoners are persistently kept from rejoining it.