Reflections on institutional boundary workand boundary crossing: prison, free society,and prisoner reentry

Robert Riggs1

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

On the day I first arrive at a transitional house for formerly incarcerated men where I

would conduct fieldwork, I confront a boundary between me and the inside of the

house: the front door. Girded by a wrought-iron security gate and topped by a

conspicuous surveillance camera, the door sits at the apex of a once-grand staircase

that rises from street level to what used to be called the ‘‘parlor floor’’ of the old

brownstone. Naturally, I knock on the front door. I do not know it at the time, but

that door would never be answered.

I stand on the threshold of my fieldwork and of this place—this transitional

house—that might be imagined as an in-between space between the prison and ‘‘free

society.’’ In Goffman’s conception, the prison exists in a relational dynamic with

free society ‘‘symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to

departure that is often built right into the physical plant’’ (1961: 4). Like other

elements of the prison, the physical barriers that contain prisoners do boundary

work, but the men I would come to know at the transitional house had crossed these

physical boundaries and ‘‘reentered’’ free society. In this report from the field, I

reflect on imprisonment and reentry through the lenses of boundary work and

‘‘boundary crossing’’ (Sion 2014).

Concrete walls, guard towers, chain-link fences, razor wire—these features of the

prison stand as concrete manifestations of the state’s power to punish and control

bodies (Foucault 1977), yet they also signal danger, the need to contain, separate,

incapacitate, and isolate. Here, we are in a Durkheimian world of an offended

conscience collectif demanding retribution, insistent upon flushing the morally

destitute out of the healthy social organism (Garland 1990). A convicted criminal is

& Robert Riggs

rdr300@nyu.edu

1 New York University, New York, NY, USA

123

Dialect Anthropol

DOI 10.1007/s10624-015-9398-x

‘‘dirt’’ in the otherwise pure social body, a person that has ‘‘no place’’ in free society

(Douglas 1966[2002]: 98). This out-of-placeness at no time becomes more evident

than during a high-profile prison escape. In transgressing the physical boundary

between prison and free society, the prisoner cum escapee emerges as dirt, as matter

out of place, as a body that must be either captured and returned to its rightful place

or eliminated. As Goffman would agree, the physical separation of prisoners from

free citizens coincides with a ‘‘symbolic boundary’’ (Lamont and Fournier 1992).

Sociologists Lamont and Molnar (2002) point out, ‘‘Symbolic boundaries are

conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people,

practices, and even time and space’’ (p. 167). As much as physical separation,

imprisonment is about ‘‘conceptual distinctions’’ between, for example, dangerous

criminals and upstanding citizens, inmates and guards, monsters and humans.

Symbolic boundaries have real-world consequences by often giving rise to ‘‘social

boundaries’’ or ‘‘objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal

access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social

opportunities’’ (Lamont and Molnar 2002: 168). Years of research in the age of

mass imprisonment (Mauer 1999; Garland 2001) in the USA have taught us about

the unending collateral consequences and secondary punishments associated with

being on the wrong side of the criminal-record boundary. Incarceration and the

‘‘negative credential’’ of a record seriously diminish former prisoners’ access to

resources across his or her entire post-incarceration life-course (Pager 2003;

Western 2006). In a number of ways, therefore, imprisonment is about boundary

making and boundary reinforcing, doing what we might call institutional boundary

work.

Indeed, maintaining boundaries requires ongoing work. Even boundaries that

seem unambiguous and clearly defined, what Alba (2005) calls ‘‘bright’’ boundaries,

are in actuality tenuous: ‘‘what makes an assumingly bright boundary so sensitive

and problematic to cross is not its impenetrability but its actual vulnerability’’ (Sion

2014: 432). The walls of the prison, high and impenetrable as they seem, still

require active policing. Similarly porous, as I am learning through my fieldwork, is

the symbolic boundary that marks prisoners as radically Other.

So I stand at the top of the stairs on that first day, waiting at a door that would

never be answered. A noisy portable air conditioner hums from a window down at

street level. Someone is surely inside. I look at my watch, confirming it is 10 a.m.,

the time of my appointment with Martin, the house’s director. After about 10 min of

sitting on the stoop and milling about, up and down the stairs, back and forth on the

sidewalk, I spot a doorbell at ground level. This leads me to an inconspicuous side

door under the stairs: the way into the house.

No one uses the front door of the transitional house anymore. It is blocked on the

inside by a bunk bed. The old parlor floor has been converted into two bedrooms

that contain 4 bunk beds and 3 single beds, providing sleeping quarters for 11

formerly incarcerated men in transition from prison to community. Upstairs on the

third floor are two more bedrooms with beds for six more men. To walk through the

side door is to leave all traces of grandeur behind and enter a low-ceilinged warren.

Off the hallway to the right is an inner door leading to two cramped offices. A

stairway on the left side of the hallway provides access to the upper floors; opposite

R. Riggs

123

and underneath this stairway is another stairway that descends to the house’s

basement. At hall’s end are a kitchen, a bathroom, and a sad television area. A back

door gives onto a small dirt-covered yard littered with leaves, piles of bricks, and

other materials from abandoned household projects.

The house, called Brighter Horizons,1 is one of many informal-sector transitional

houses in New York City known as ‘‘three-quarter houses.’’ Three-quarter houses

are the wild west of housing in New York City. They are largely unregulated and

unlicensed for profit or nonprofit entities that rent beds to single adults. Though they

are nominally transitional housing for many formerly incarcerated people, they

receive no government contracts to provide this ‘‘service,’’ unlike the typical

halfway house. Their entire existence does, however, completely rely on the state—

on funds provided by the state and on human bodies managed by the state.

Three-quarter houses, for instance, often tailor their rents according to tenants’

relationships to government benefits. So they charge $215 per month for individuals

on public assistance, which is the maximum ‘‘shelter allowance’’ provided to single

adults from the New York City Human Resources Administration, which sends

monthly checks directly to house operators. While most tenants of the houses are on

public assistance, some are employed and some receive higher monthly amounts of

government assistance, such as Social Security Disability. The houses typically

charge these tenants $300–$350 per month for the same bunking space. The houses

receive referrals from the New York State parole department, other city and state

agencies, and numerous nongovernmental social service organizations across the

city, which do often receive substantial funding from government contracts.2

Informal-sector they may be, but three-quarter houses have become a de facto

extension of the city’s official reentry apparatus in an era of mass incarceration and

mass reentry. The houses vary considerably in living conditions and treatment of

tenants,3 and Brighter Horizons is surely far along on the better end of the spectrum.

Brighter Horizons’ director Martin did 21 years in prison and had crossed the

physical boundary between prison and free society back in 2001. One day we are

talking about his reentry experience and how he had gotten Brighter Horizons

opened in 2007. Martin goes back to his prison experience and to relationships he

had formed in prison:

The brother I went to [a correctional facility] with for the [college-in-prison-

program], he and I were literally handcuffed and shackled together [when we

got transferred to the facility]. And the irony is that when we got there, he and

I locked [in cells] right next to each other. Right next to each other. He came

home before us, before me, and he started [a reentry program]. When I came

home in 2001, I went to see him, and he said, ‘‘Martin hold on a minute, don’t

worry about it, I got a job.’’ I said, ‘‘Listen, brother the last thing I want you to

1 All names of people, places, and organizations in this report are pseudonyms.2 The term ‘‘non-governmental’’ does not exactly capture the ways many of these social service agencies

are public–private ‘‘hybrids’’ (see Haney 2010).3 For more information on three-quarter houses, see the report Three-Quarter Houses: The View from

Inside, published by the Prisoner Reentry Institute of John Jay College of Criminal Justice at http://

johnjayresearch.org/pri/files/2013/10/PRI-TQH-Report.pdf.

Reflections on institutional boundary work and boundary…

123

do is fire somebody.’’ He said, ‘‘Nah, don’t worry about that cuz I gotta create

some space for you.’’ Because him and I had developed this bond on the inside

together. The next day, he calls and says, ‘‘Martin, can you start work?’’

To start this new job, just 2 weeks after he came home, Martin had to leave a

different job he had gotten less than a week out of prison: ‘‘But I already had landed

a part-time job.’’ I ask Martin how he had gotten the first job, and he says, ‘‘Inside-

outside relationship, [someone] who also happened to be a classmate of mine in the

[college-in-prison program]. His cousin was working for a foundation, which

provided these, if you will, ‘‘at-risk youth’’ or ‘‘troubled youth’’ with after-school

care, and they hired me as a part time guidance counselor.’’

In discussing how he got the idea to open a transitional house, Martin recalls a

seminal event that occurred when he was working at the reentry organization: ‘‘I

remember a deacon calling me when I was at [the reentry organization]. I actually

worked with him when I was in [a prison]. And the reality is that, with the deacon,

he was like the catalyst to alter my life, because I learned so much being around him

and being with him, and he never saw me as an inmate and there’s nothing I

wouldn’t do for him.’’ Wayne remembers the deacon calling him at work:

He said, ‘‘I got this guy coming home and do you think you could find some

place for him to live?’’ I was like, ‘‘Sure; send him. I got him. Don’t worry

about that.’’ He said, ‘‘All right, I gotta tell you, he’s a pre-op trans, you know,

transgender.’’ I says, ‘‘That don’t mean nothing to me. That’s his choice. I’m

here to try to provide services for formerly incarcerated people, and I’m gonna

help him.’’ That probably was the catalyst for Brighter Horizons because I

couldn’t find no place for this guy to stay.

What I find illuminating to consider in these comments are the three relationships

Martin mentions and how consequential they were. There is the relationship to the

‘‘brother’’ Martin was shackled to and befriended in the college-in-prison program,

the relationship to the other formerly incarcerated man who had gotten him a job

and who had also participated in the college-in-program, and the relationship to the

deacon he had befriended in prison. There is an element common to each of these

three relationships: They were all formed in a certain type of prison context.

The two prison contexts Martin’s stories invoke—a college-in-prison program

and religious services—contain an element of boundary crossing. We have to

imagine people like the deacon and the college professors and college staff

members crossing the physical boundary between prison and free society repeatedly

over long periods of time. Of course, prison guards and other prison staff members

also cross the prison–society boundary regularly to come to work. However, as

Goffman (1961) noted, ‘‘In total institutions there is a basic split between a large

managed group, conveniently called inmates, and a small supervisory staff…. Each

grouping tends to conceive of the other in terms of narrow hostile stereotypes, staff

often seeing inmates as bitter, secretive, and untrustworthy, while inmates often see

staff as condescending, highhanded, and mean’’ (p. 7). Individual variation within

the category ‘‘prison guard’’ undoubtedly exists (see Conover 2000), but as a

R. Riggs

123

category, prison staff members, like the category of prisoners itself, are of the total

institution.

Martin’s deacon who ‘‘never saw me as an inmate’’ and his college professors

would not be of the institution in the same way prison guards are. We would have to

consider them a third category that, if not characteristic of all total institutions, is at

least characteristic of most prisons. To generalize, we can define this category as

community-based organizational staff. On most days across the USA, community-

based organizational staff members cross the boundary between prison and free

society to operate prison programs that bring prisoners into regular face-to-face

interaction with people who are not of the total institution. What does it mean that a

little bit of the outside world invades the inside world of the prison regularly? What

does it do to the total-institutional context? How does it impact prisoners’

interactions with each other and their views of themselves?

Several men in the house, including Martin, had been involved with a prison

program operated by a community-based organization called All People United

(APU) during their incarcerations, and Brighter Horizons held regular social events

and meetings organized in conjunction with APU. At one of the meetings, I met a

woman named June and observe her conversations and interactions with the

formerly incarcerated men she had known from the inside. June notes, ‘‘Some

people at this table know me, and they know my history, and they know that a great

deal of my life in the past 20 years has revolved around being inside.’’ Her 20 years

involved with the program meant she had known several of the formerly

incarcerated men for a long time. For instance, she and Martin had first met 17

or 18 years ago, and their relationship had endured over that long period of time.

Another formerly incarcerated APU-affiliated man at the meeting is James.

James tells the group about his experience attending, with June, an event the

previous day at which he had met several officials high up in the state and the

federal government:

I had a very eventful week…I was in the same building as [governmental

official 1] but it wasn’t as intimate as it was with [government official 2]….

You know, I don’t think I’ve been home 6 calendar months, and if you had

told me [in prison] I was gonna be with [government official 2] I would’ve

probably told you that you had lost your mind. To see those type of realities

coming to fruition is just like mind blowing…. Talking to [government official

2] for the brief time I had the opportunity to talk to him and…being able to

read through what he was actually saying and the forces that he found himself

up against when he went to [the government sector and advocated for prison

reform]…just made me realize that we got a lot of work to do. One of the

things that [government official 1] was concerned about…is this idea of felony

disenfranchisement…and the sad part about it for me, and I raised my hand

first because, I openly participated in my own destruction, is that we don’t care

about the civic process and the polity that we live in. Even if we say that we do

care, our actions don’t really show that. We say that we want things to change,

but we don’t want to get behind the people that’s gonna make the change.

Reflections on institutional boundary work and boundary…

123

James sounds like an educated man, and he is. Like Martin, James had gotten a

college degree from a college-in-prison program, though it was not the same

program Martin had attended for either his Bachelor’s or Master’s degree.

James’ comments evidence his embrace of a politicized identity, which was

supported by other observations during fieldwork. They also evoke self-reflection

(‘‘I openly participated in my own destruction’’), empathy for the government

official who faced powerful forces against his prison-reform efforts, and reflection

about the need for formerly incarcerated people to become involved in the

democratic process. Something important seems to have happened to James’

worldview and identity in prison, and I am certain we cannot understand his

experience without attending to the importance of the prison programs he

participated in and the relationships he formed in these programs, with other

prisoners and with community-based organizational staff members.

One of these relationships was to June. June discusses the event she attended with

James the day before the meeting: ‘‘I was with [government official 1] yesterday

too, and I would say I had something to do with facilitating my company at that

event [James, among others] and how wonderful it feels to watch you [James].’’

Given James’ expression of uncertainty about how long he had been out of prison,

June reminds him, ‘‘It’ll be 6 months on October 10th; I know you don’t hang on to

dates much.’’ With these comments, June illustrates elements of her relationship

with James. She knows him well enough to understand he does not ‘‘hold onto dates

much’’ and remembers the exact day he got out of prison. The fact that she had

facilitated James’ presence at the event illustrates how consequential this

relationship and affiliation with APU was for James during his reentry. Together,

James’ and June’s comments suggest that both of the programs operated by

community-based organizations were significant for James in several ways.

June’s further comments about the previous day’s event, which was held in

upstate New York, are also worth highlighting because they suggest the potential

scope of some of the issues I am discussing here. In describing the event, June

brings up other prison programs operated by community-based organizations that

were represented at the event:

So this was an [name of a prison theater program run by a community-based

organization] event…which is another wonderful program, and the men who

were there yesterday, formerly incarcerated men…did a wonderful presenta-

tion on reentry and the pains of reentry. And one of them spent a lot of time

talking about what it’s like to live in a three-quarter house and the things

you’re up against, but it was so graphic and so deep and so powerful. And

mixed with those guys was this entire room…of so many supporters of various

prison programs. To see a room filled with so many people from so many

different walks of life all there because they’re really supporting the cause

about what needs to happen inside and out so that transition is smoother, so

that when you hear guys from [the theater program] or guys from APU or guys

from any number of other programs, they’re all talking about the same thing

and it’s developing a set of skills and a kind of way of being in the world that

allows them to enter a much smoother transition…especially the guys that

R. Riggs

123

went ahead and got their Bachelor’s degrees or Master’s degrees inside. So it

was wonderful for me to be in that room but it was particularly prideful for me

to be standing with James.

I think it is significant that June sees something common in all of these prison

programs, based on her own longtime experience with APU and on her view that the

formerly incarcerated men and program staffers she heard speak or talked to at the

event were ‘‘all talking about the same thing.’’ She discussed how she felt everyone

in the room at the event knew ‘‘what needs to happen inside’’ to facilitate the

transition into society. My observations of and interactions with reentering men

living in Brighter Horizons suggest June may be onto something.

In many ways, the very existence of Brighter Horizons—a form of housing for

formerly incarcerated men that is beyond the frontier of the legitimate housing

market and that has been allowed to exist outside of the state’s regulatory regime4—

is evidence of the institutional boundary work imprisonment does. Three-quarter

houses are the housing of last resort, the only alternative to living on the street or in

a city shelter, for many of the city’s poor and marginalized. Among other

marginalized groups who live in three-quarter houses—the impoverished, addicted,

homeless, e.g.—the residents of Brighter Horizons I got to know over the summers

of 2014 and 2015 were members of one of the most marginalized populations in all

of New York City, existing on the wrong side of a symbolic and social boundary.

Like other members of the population of released prisoners, the men were poor,

with very few material possessions; they had criminal records; they had long gaps in

their employment histories; they were strangers to the technological age; and they

faced significant structural and institutional barriers that would make rising above

their present circumstances an enormous challenge. Yet, when you drill down into

any population and start getting into the nitty–gritty of individual and collective life

on the ground, you see variation, human creativity, resistance, emotions, and,

perhaps most importantly, relationships. For many of the transitioning men at

Brighter Horizons, a few of whom I have discussed above, relationships formed in

prison programs operated by community-based organizations were especially

significant.

These types of programs are typically small-scale, marginal, and not funded by

the state. State-funded prison programs tend to be geared toward correcting

prisoners’ ‘‘thinking errors’’ through ‘‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’’ (CBT), or

giving them the ‘‘soft skills’’ needed for participation in society and the economy, or

aiming to ‘‘rehabilitate’’ them through substance abuse treatment and ‘‘anger

management’’ classes, which also often use a CBT model. A great deal of scholarly

attention has been paid to these types of prison programs as well. Large recidivism

studies commonly include measures of completion of these types of programs in

their statistical models, for example (see Gendreau et al. 1996; Lattimore et al.

2010). As an exception to the scholarly focus on CBT-type and treatment or

‘‘rehabilitative’’ programs, there is a long-standing tradition of research on college-

4 A recent New York Times expose spotlighted the illegal and extralegal practices of some three-quarter

houses in New York City. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/nyregion/three-quarter-housing-a-

choice-for-recovering-addicts-or-homelessness.html?_r=0.

Reflections on institutional boundary work and boundary…

123

in-prison programs. However, even here, studies typically aim to measure the

‘‘rehabilitative’’ aspects of program participation, such as whether participants

recidivate at lower rates than nonparticipants (see Gaes 2008).

There is an underlying assumption in the design and evaluation of these types of

prison programs, specifically concerning the targets of their interventions and the

mechanisms through which the programs work, or should work. On one hand,

programs aiming to correct ‘‘thinking errors’’ target the mind and are supposed to

work through some type of psychological mechanism. Many antiviolence programs,

for instance, are designed according to a Cognitive Self-Change (CSC) model (Fox

2001).

As Fox (2001) notes, such programs ‘‘insist that violent offenders suffer from

‘cognitive distortions’—so called thinking errors associated with a criminal

personality’’ and operate according to a discourse that ‘‘dissects the self as one

that has hidden thoughts and feelings—and there are particular ones that motivate

violence’’ (Fox 2001: 176, 178). Fox (2001) found in her study that these types of

programs, rather than addressing stable criminal identities, actually ‘‘impose

particular kinds of criminal selves on inmates’’ and that these ‘‘selves are

reproduced by the institution in order to carry out its work’’ (p. 179). The criminal

self must be produced to make possible the programmed construction of a new

conforming self. Program participants, Fox finds, vehemently resist embodying the

essential criminal selves required of the programs, which are often mandatory for

individuals convicted of offenses classified as violent5: ‘‘By fighting back against

institutional power, inmates…attempt to preserve the very selves the institution tries

to mortify’’ (p. 191). Fox’s implicit reference to Goffman’s (1961) concept of the

‘‘mortification of the self’’ as one of the characteristics of total institutions is telling.

She suggests that these types of programs are part and parcel of institutional power

and the overall institutional project.

On the other hand, programs addressing ‘‘soft skills’’ or evaluating college-in-

prison programs for their ‘‘rehabilitative’’ impacts target prisoners’ presumed lacks

and are supposed to work through imbibing them with cultural and/or human

capital. For instance, economists Mocan et al. (2005) develop a ‘‘dynamic model of

differential human capital and criminal activity’’ that claims the ‘‘change in the level

of human capital while in prison influences the post-prison behavior of the

individual’’ where ‘‘rehabilitation in prison decreases the tendency of criminal

activity after the release from prison’’ by increasing ‘‘legal human capital’’ (p. 679).

In this view, programs like college-in-prison or soft skills training address prisoners’

deficits and thus foster ‘‘rehabilitation’’ and make post-release factors like

employment more likely.

In keeping with the notion that prisons do institutional boundary work, I would

say that these types of programs and the ways in which scholars study them

reinforce the symbolic boundaries between prisoners and everyone else. They both

evidence and reify the conceptual distinguishing of prisoners as dangerous and

deficient. According to the logic of some programs, prisoners are essentially violent

5 I phrase it this way because classifications are not always connected to clear acts of violence. In NY, for

instance, being caught with a gun is classified as a violent offense.

R. Riggs

123

or pathological, and if they will not readily confess to being so, then they must be

shown through programming how to find the violent, dangerous selves within their

bodies and psyches. Other programs focus on the ways prisoners, unlike everyone

else, lack the ability to figure out on their own or to learn through socialization the

cultural codes appropriate to different settings. Still others assume that the value of

human-capital-increasing programs like college for prisoners, unlike for everyone

else, is ‘‘rehabilitative.’’ If we think along with Irwin (1970) that the prison is not

only an institution that physically enforces a separation of prisoners from citizens

but also a particular kind of ‘‘meaning world’’ that is daily reproduced in

institutional practice and social interaction, then it is easy to see that programs

insisting upon excavating prisoners’ pathologies and assuming their deficiencies are

part of the total institutions’ dominant meaning world. They help the prison do

institutional boundary work.

I believe this is in stark contrast to the social dynamics playing out in the types of

prison programs I am learning about in my fieldwork. In attempting to understand

some of the implications of the relationships and identities the people at Brighter

Horizons formed in prison and the dynamics of the programs they describe, I am

finding it illuminating at this point in my research to think of prison programs

operated by community-based organizations as boundary-crossing programs. It

seems not only true that these programs breach the physical boundary between

prison and free society but also evident that they foster the crossing of symbolic

boundaries that mark prisoners as dangerously, deficiently Other. Consider the

difference between the CBT-model antiviolence program described in Fox’s work

and Martin’s comment about the deacon who ‘‘never saw me as an inmate.’’ Think

of the contrast between the assumption that college for prisoners is valuable for

‘‘rehabilitation’’ and the evidence of James’ politicized identity. Reflect upon the

distinction between a program that targets and addresses prisoners’ lack of cultural

capital through formalized training and a program that nurtures through social

interaction and inclusion a ‘‘way of being in the world,’’ to use June’s phrase.

In Purity and Danger, Douglas (1966[2002]) long ago discussed the marginal-

ized status of individuals who had reentered society after serving time in prison:

‘‘Social workers in our society, concerned with the after-care of ex-prisoners, report

a difficulty on resettling them in steady jobs, a difficulty which comes from the

attitude of society at large. A man who has spent any time ‘inside’ is put

permanently ‘outside’ the ordinary social system. With no rite of aggregation…he

remains…credited with unreliability, unteachability, and all the wrong social

attitudes’’ (p. 98). Following Douglas, Maruna (2011) has argued for a conception

of ‘‘reentry as a rite of passage.’’ He asserts that given the ritualistic aspects of entry

into prison, we need a corresponding ritualistic accompaniment to exit from prison

because reentry implies ‘‘a symbolic element of moral inclusion’’ (p. 4).

My reflections in this report from the field have considered prison programs

operated by community-based organizations as boundary-crossing programs that

may help to breach symbolic boundaries. In everyday prison life, prisoners who

participate in these programs may experience what we might call daily micro-rituals

of moral inclusion in their interactions with community-based organizational staff

members. These everyday micro-rituals may change the prison’s dominant meaning

Reflections on institutional boundary work and boundary…

123

world, with profound implications for how prisoners relate to each other and view

themselves in relation to ‘‘free society.’’ As such, these types of boundary-crossing

programs reveal the inherent fragility of symbolic boundaries and the need for

constant policing of them (Sion 2014). ‘‘Hell No to Attica University’’ was the title,

for example, of a petition introduced by lawmakers in New York after the governor

announced plans to fund the expansion of college-in-prison programs in the state—a

plan he quickly dropped in the face of vehement resistance (Kaplan 2014).

Acknowledgments This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation

Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE1342536. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or

recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the National Science Foundation.

References

Alba, Richard. 2005. Bright vs. blurred boundaries: Second generation assimilation and exclusion in

France, Germany, and the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1): 20–49.

Conover, Ted. 2000. Newjack: Guarding sing sing. New York: Random.

Douglas, Mary. 1966[2002]. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo.

London and New York: Routledge.

Fox, Kathryn J. 2001. Self-change and resistance in prison. In Institutional selves: Troubled identities in a

postmodern world, ed. J. Gubrium, and J. Holstein, 176–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage.

Gaes, Gerald. 2008. The impact of prison education programs on post-release dynamics. In The reentry

roundtable on education. John Jay College of Criminal Justice. http://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/files/

TheEffectivenessofPrisonEducationProgramsNov_09.pdf.

Garland, David. 1990. Punishment and modern society: A study in social theory. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Garland, David. 2001. The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society. Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press.

Gendreau, Paul, Tracy Little, and Claire Coggin. 1996. A meta-analysis of the predictors of adult offender

recidivism: What works! Criminology 34(4): 575–607.

Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates.

Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Haney, Lynne A. 2010. Offending women: Power, punishment, and the regulation of desire. Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Irwin, John. 1970. The felon. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press.

Kaplan, Thomas. 2014. Cuomo drops plan to use state money to pay for college classes for inmates. The

New York Times, April 2, 2014.

Lamont, Michele, and M. Fournier (eds.). 1992. Cultivating differences: Symbolic boundaries and the

making of inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lamont, Michele, and Virag Molnar. 2002. The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review

of Sociology 28: 167–195.

Lattimore, Pamela K., Danielle M. Steffey, and Christy A. Visher. 2010. Prisoner reentry in the first

decade of the twenty-first century. Victims and Offenders 5: 253–267.

Maruna, Shadd. 2011. Reentry as a rite of passage. Punishment and Society 13(3): 3–28.

Mauer, Marc. 1999. Felon voting disenfranchisement: A growing collateral consequence of mass

incarceration. Federal Sentencing Reporter 12(5): 248.

Mocan, H.Naci, Stephen C. Billups, and Jody Overland. 2005. A dynamic model of differential human

capital and criminal activity. Economica 72(288): 655–681.

Pager, Devah. 2003. The mark of a criminal record. American Journal of Sociology 108(5): 937–975.

Sion, Liora. 2014. Boundary crossing and blurring: The case of Tali Fahima. Current Sociology 62(3):

431–448.

Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

R. Riggs

123