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Abstract
Mounting evidence reveals that the criminal justice system fails people in nearly every conceivable aspect of social, economic, and political life. Yet, its individualistic, punitive, and retributive models of “correction” continue to be practiced despite critical and abolitionist criminological scholarship that has repeatedly shown how it is not only individuals that need healing, but social structures, systems, and relationships that also require repair. With growing empirical interest in carceral reforms and reentry, few scholars have looked to criminalized people who have turned into active social-change makers. Thirty-two desisting formerly incarcerated participants varying by race and gender from across the US were interviewed for this project. Findings reveal that activism supplies the directly-impacted with dignity and robust forms of human (cultural), symbolic, and economic capital. Their transitions from carceral subjects to insurgent change-agents are marked by critical social connections, education, and action. Although desistance scholarship has illustrated the value of community engagement for reentering people, it has not specified precisely what the work entails - this project begins to address that problem. Participants differentiate peer and individual healing-work from activism. They describe how the work in their various capacities paradoxically interweave as crucial components of a transformative intervention, providing emancipatory healing for themselves, others, and society. In the experiences of shared oppression and collective action, carceral citizens are made legible as one distinct positionality within a carceral status system of oppression/privilege that intersects with race, class, and gender. Thus, granting clemency for some, and grave consequences for others. The findings highlight how racism, poverty, sexism, and other numerous social harms shaped their early life experiences and their collisions with the state. As activists, they aim to dismantle these imbalances in power. Reaching across lines of difference, as carceral citizens, they construct new identities through their mobilizations for self-determination. Implications of this study suggest that the unconsciousness, submissiveness, and low-expectations perpetuated by conformist and carceral treatment logics, are ineffective for any vision of safety or justice. Those models of recovery may be replaced with transformative interventionist approaches that spark consciousness, solidarity, and hope for healing. Formerly incarcerated activist stories in this project serve as evidence that returning people can survive, and even thrive, as they fight to bring about conditions of justice -- broadly.