Ex-prisoners' lived experiences in a reentry court: An institutional ethnography

Jeralyn L Faris, Purdue University

Abstract

Reentry of released prisoners to their home communities is an important issue in political and scholarly debates about criminal justice reform in the United States. Over 67% of 730,000 released prisoners reoffend within three years (West, Sabol, & Greenman, 2011), and the social and economic impacts of these numbers fuel the debates over reform efforts. For 46 months, the author conducted an institutional ethnographic (IE) study of a United States county reentry Problem Solving Court (PSC) as a participant observer. Combining observations, interviews, document analyses, and personal reflections, this institutional ethnography is the first empirical exploration of reentry court procedures as a complex process that actively puts together and mediates relations of the legal system, community stakeholders, and the ex-prisoners. Data include over 2000 single-spaced typed pages from field notes of 210 hours of public courtroom sessions, case manager reports, and ex-prisoners’ written essays that were subsequently read aloud in court. The design of this study utilizes participant observation and informal interviews with ex-prisoners as a tool in the investigation. The stories and descriptions recorded in these interactions help to “identify some of the translocal relations, discourses, and institutional work processes that are shaping the informants’ everyday work” (DeVault & McCoy, 2006, p. 21). Participant observation is a key part of this institutional ethnography because it helps refine the author’s appreciation of several dimensions of the research—the stories, places, time, actions, the dynamics of ruling relations, particular ways of seeing the organization of the reentry court, and the author’s voice in the writing process. From a location inside the reentry court, this inquiry finds the accounts of legal status and requirements presuppose the routine textual and communicative practices that anyone in the social scene—the ex-prisoner, service provider, legal practitioner, or personal supporter—encounters. The investigation examines the ways in which reentry Problem Solving Court (PSC) ex-prisoners navigate ruling relations who produce and activate the routine texts and how the complex of these relations, produced through everyday actions and interactions, coordinate their collective activities. This kind of micro inquiry can be done with other texts to investigate how a specific text enables and/or constrains what gets read and interpreted by PSC team members. The IE maps are research tools created to trace the processing interchanges of different actors in the overall sequence of the reentry court’s institutional work processes. The maps illustrate the chronological sequences of work and texts and the communicative relations that produce the reentry court’s dynamic textually mediated activities. The ethnography is extended from the lived experiences of the people in the court and their accounts of these lived experiences into the court’s work process and its action as an institution to bring prisoners back to the community and establish them as citizens. The central concept in this IE investigation is that the communicative power relations in the court are text-based, and texts are used to coordinate the work of the court.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Buzzanell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Law|Communication|Criminology

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