2019/02/18 by Andrea Leverentz
Social Sciences · Health Professions · #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis #Homelessness and Social Issues #Crime Patterns and Interventions
paper · doi:10.1093/socpro/spz005
Neighborhood and place are key concerns in prisoner reentry and desistance literature. Residential change may serve as a turning point for those who want to desist from offending or minimize visibility as a “known” offender by law enforcement and neighbors. Yet choices of where to live are often dictated more by limited housing options than by preferred neighborhood characteristics. In addition, people are more or less stably housed upon release, and more or less socially tied to places. Still, much of the established research relies on residential neighborhood as a construct. I apply the concept of activity spaces, or how people use and move about space, to extend our understanding of the meaning of place for returning prisoners. Drawing on repeated semi-structured interviews with men and women returning to the community from a county correctional facility in Boston, I employ a typology of three types of activity spaces that are common among this sample: neighborhood-anchored, utility- or affective-anchored, and unanchored activity spaces. These activity spaces reflected their relationship to place and reflect varying levels of connection to a “neighborhood.” I discuss the implications of these patterns for how we think about the impact of neighborhoods and place on reentry.