Boston Reentry Study

January 27, 2014
Boston Reentry Study

Under what conditions will men and women released from prison find work, unite with their families, and desist from crime? As incarceration - concentrated among the most disadvantaged - has climbed to historically high levels, these questions have become basic to understanding contemporary crime and poverty. The Boston Reentry Study, led by Bruce Western (Professor of Sociology and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy), Anthony Braga (Senior Research Fellow in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School), and Rhiana Kohl (Executive Director of Strategic Planning & Research at the Massachusetts Department of Correction), aims to study the transition from prison to community by collecting data on former Massachusetts state prisoners, newly-released to the Boston area.
 
Studying the transition from prison to community is particularly challenging because the formerly-incarcerated are an acutely disadvantaged, hard-to-reach population that are only loosely connected to stable households. The Boston Reentry Study has two key objectives: to sustain a high rate of study retention over the course of a year of follow-up with released prisoners, and to explain the reentry process of released prisoners in the areas of employment, family life, and criminal desistance.
 
The great scale of US incarceration has made the penal system a key institutional influence on many dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage. High rates of incarceration have had far-reaching effects on poor urban communities, but the scientific challenge is substantial. Because they are typically weakly attached to households but closely connected to penal and other institutions, released prisoners are commonly overlooked and undercounted in studies of urban inequality and poverty. Understanding an acutely disadvantaged population that is jointly at risk of social and economic failure and under-enumeration is thus a key task for the analysis of contemporary urban poverty.