No one knows exactly how many people in the United States have been convicted of felonies, but we do know that hundreds of thousands of former offenders are released from prison each year. Once out, they encounter an uncertain future and myriad pressures: meeting basic needs, satisfying the terms of any supervision, and trying to rebuild or maintain frayed relationships.
In Convicted and Condemned, Keesha Middlemass describes the conditions people with felony convictions face after release, using their own words. Middlemass conducted fieldwork at a nonprofit reentry organization in Newark, interviewing dozens of people and conducting participant observation. The resulting book powerfully illustrates the ways in which felony convictions persist and continue to entangle people long after they have served their custodial sentences, portraying a conviction as a “social disability.”
Convicted and Condemned does a masterful job of using interview transcripts to present the challenges people face in their daily lives, centering most chapters around a specific need: housing, education, jobs. Interviews are especially well-suited to helping the reader understand how people with convictions view the pressure they are under and the systems they are dealing with. In discussing their efforts to find work in a world where a felony conviction can bar people from entire occupations (by law) or businesses (by employers’ choices), interviewees describe gut-wrenching choices between bad options: remaining unemployed and unable to pay off legal debts or meet parole requirements, returning to criminal activity, or lying on job applications to hide their convictions. And they display nuanced understandings of how convictions matter and for whom: “Work comes first, […] I did what they tell me, got clean, but nothing; it's just crazy, all racial shit, really. White guys [who are convicted felons] do better” (p. 150). And throughout the book, Middlemass highlights important patterns that emerge from the full set of interviews, such as a comparison between people's post-prison behaviors and the symptoms of more typically-diagnosed forms of post-traumatic stress disorder that deserves further research.
This approach also yields concrete policy proposals tailored to the problems people actually face. Chapter 2 proposes a strikingly practical but game-changing intervention: what if the state Department of Corrections, which has every prisoner's identifying information, issued them an official state ID upon release, freeing them from the difficulty of trying to piece together enough documentation to get a non-prison ID card? Centering the voices of the real experts on criminal convictions—the people who live with those convictions—has the dual benefit of reminding readers just what is at stake in criminal policy debates, and producing insights that might not otherwise emerge. Understanding the actual challenges people encounter, and how they themselves would prefer to solve those problems, can help policymakers and citizens frame a successful response.
Where the book seeks to diagnose the social and policy roots of these challenges, it sometimes falters. The analysis of the problems convicted people face is sharp and detailed; the attribution of blame for these problems often falls back on “society” rather than specific actors, or assumes that policymakers were all instrumental and perfectly forward-looking when they put in place the systems that gave rise to mass incarceration. The book sometimes feels like it is reaching beyond what the data at hand can tell us about the broader systems at play.
One example of the strengths and weaknesses of the book's approach comes from the housing chapter, when a woman reports her experience applying for a Section 8 housing voucher: “Before the background check comes back, I get put on the [wait] list, but then I get denied. I mean they say come back, but look, you know, they know, and I know that I can't get Section 8. I'm denied” (p. 99). This person's report of her own experience with housing authorities, how it affects her life, and the way she attributes it to her conviction is important to understand, and the reliance on interview data is perfectly-suited to portraying it. But the book then generalizes this example to report that public housing authorities in the region routinely use waiting lists to effectively “[deny] an applicant on the basis of a felony” (p. 98), without citing other evidence. It is entirely possible that Newark-area housing authorities are denying or delaying housing benefits to people due to their convictions. But Section 8 is a non-entitlement program that does not receive enough funding to serve everyone who is eligible, and housing authorities across the country have years-long waiting lists that are often closed to new applicants regardless of their records. It is not clear that the chapter's implied solution—requiring housing authorities to ignore or reconsider Section 8 applicants’ criminal histories—would actually ensure that many more people with felony convictions would get the housing that they need. That said, limitations like this do not negate the value of this chapter, or the book, at all. Regardless of the extent to which people with felony convictions are being systematically, disproportionately waitlisted, the book starkly describes how housing instability structures their lives. As one interviewee pointed out, “When you ain't got a place to sleep, you ain't thinking about nothing else, you can only think about a place to sleep. You sure ain't thinking about voting and stuff like that” (p. 102).
Convicted and Condemned makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the carceral state, and I hope to see more ethnographic work like it. It provides a richer understanding of the lives of people dealing with criminal convictions, and it generates policy proposals and hypotheses that should inform both policymaking and future research.
