Chapter 8 Studying Out Institutional Ethnographic Fieldwork as Post-incarceration Activism

The Prisoner Re-entry Conundrum

Critical scholars have quickly grown weary of the “prisoner re-entry industrial complex” (Speck 2010; Wacquant 2010; Beckett and Murakawa 2012), in which stakeholders who previously profited from the prison-industrial complex scramble to monetize services for people being released from prison. Such efforts are particularly insidious because they shift surveillance from a contained environment (prisons, which are often in remote locations) to halfway houses, sober living homes, and other community-based programs. I have argued elsewhere that this “government at a distance” (Miller and Rose 2008; Haney 2010) mode of surveillance that has infiltrated our homes and communities perpetuates a series of invisible punishments (Travis 2002) that extend the time and spaces into which crime-processed people continue to be marginalized (Welsh Carroll and Rajah 2014).3

For people working on the ground to help formerly incarcerated people, the story is even more complex. In the United States, grassroots prison activist groups—policy think tanks, advocacy organizations, and social service providers—many of which are led by formerly incarcerated people, have grown rapidly in recent decades (Toney 2007). In the United States, concerns about mass incarceration are inextricably linked to slavery, a connection made visible by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow (2010). Yet the message of such advocacy programs that also provide social services is easily compromised. Programs such as the one where I began the research presented here often take on government contracts via community supervision agencies in which the program is paid money “per head” to house recently released people.4 By accepting government funds, programs become—however reluctantly—complicit in the mass surveillance scheme.

I began my research by volunteering with New Beginnings,5 a small community-based program that provides housing for women recently released from prison and jail and their children.6 Despite its location in a large urban area of California, the program is one of only a handful in the region that provides these services specifically for women. New Beginnings’ founder and director is a woman who herself had cycled in and out of jail and prison for years before “getting clean” from drugs and opening her home to other women who were trying to do the same. Over time, she purchased three other homes in the area and rented office space nearby to serve as the program’s headquarters. The converted garage of one of the homes also functions as the office for a local chapter of a national activist coalition working to end mass incarceration. Through the coalition, New Beginnings offers training to its residents to become activists on issues of mass incarceration and prisoner re-entry. Such efforts are part of a large-scale movement to enlist formerly incarcerated people in activism against the overuse of incarceration as punishment, the conditions of prison confinement, and the “collateral consequences” of incarceration, such as restrictions preventing people with criminal records from voting, obtaining employment and permanent housing, and receiving public assistance (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002; Mauer and McCalmont 2013; Toney 2007). The Ban the Box Campaign, which advocates fair hiring practices for people with criminal records, is a recent example of such efforts on a national scale (Ban the Box Campaign, n.d.).

In other ways, New Beginnings is unable to fully meet its activist goals. I define activism as the empowerment of marginalized individuals to bring about change not just on a broader scale but in their lives as well. The program lacks the resources to be able to do this in a holistic way for its residents. From New Beginnings’ perspective, it tries to pick its battles by strategically using its limited resources to help the women, on the one hand, and to launch more visible advocacy campaigns, on the other. As I argue here, however, such empowerment efforts are crucial not only to improving the on-the-ground conditions of formerly incarcerated people but also to fuelling sustainable activism led by people who have directly experienced incarceration. The women who participated in my study are reflective of the broader status quo for people with criminal records: for the lucky few who are able to obtain and maintain employment, they are stuck in low-wage work with little opportunity for upward mobility; they cope with chronic health issues from years of inadequate medical care in prison and jail and on the streets; and in combination with these difficulties, maintaining sobriety from drugs or alcohol and keeping up with mental health needs such as counselling and medication are daily struggles (Richie 2001; Holtfreter, Reisig, and Morash 2004; Braithwaite, Arriola, and Newkirk 2006). Thus, it is difficult to enlist and sustain the participation of formerly incarcerated people in activist activities when they have such a tenuous grasp on their own basic needs.

Entering the Research Setting

New Beginnings’ bare-bones staffing structure—typical of small non-profits—confirms that all too often, the people who are best equipped to be activists for social justice causes are too overwhelmed with social service work to advocate for needed changes (see, for example, Poppendieck 1998). As a wealth of literature has described, the actual doings of case management frequently involve copious amounts of paperwork (Taylor 2013). New Beginnings’ case manager seldom leaves her office during work hours. She is preoccupied with managing the abundant paperwork that accompanies the contracts that the program holds with government agencies to provide housing to the women, in addition to completing the reports required for the private foundation funding the program receives. With the little time she has left over, she meets with women in her office and makes referrals and appointments on their behalf.

Because of these limited resources, New Beginnings relies heavily on student interns to carry out the daily work of supporting the women. Even the interns, however, are severely limited in what they can do: they cannot provide the women with transportation to and from their appointments because their schools’ liability policies forbid the transportation of clients in students’ cars. Transportation is a major element of post-incarceration work, both in the sprawling metropolitan region where I conducted this research and, arguably, even more so in many suburban and rural areas (Morani et al. 2011). For the women at New Beginnings, it is not unusual to spend two hours on public transportation to attend a family court hearing regarding child custody matters, to check in with their parole agent or probation officer, or to participate in state-mandated substance abuse counselling. Frequently, women must do this important work on their own. Worse still, women often must make difficult choices if one form of work—making it to a family court date, for example—conflicts with another, such as getting or keeping a job that will show she is a fit parent (for a deeper examination of these dilemmas, see Welsh Carroll and Rajah 2014).

Thus, researcher-activist allies who have the (relative) luxury of time to do such things must be willing to do the sort of ethnographic fieldwork that can inform where pressure should be applied to change the various institutions with which formerly incarcerated people often interact. As Frampton et al. (2006, 35) have suggested, “By being located outside of and yet constantly in interaction and struggle with ruling regimes, activists can explore the social organization of power as it is revealed through the moments of confrontation” (see also G. Smith 1990). Early on in my fieldwork at New Beginnings, I identified a need—transportation to institutional appointments—and began to fill it. This opened ample opportunities for such “moments of confrontation.” An excerpt from my field notes early in the research illustrates how my position evolved:

I sense that my role when we are out in the field is often to demonstrate that the woman has support and an additional form of supervision that will keep her “on the right track.” In reality, I am realizing that I often help the women to be active participants in their own re-entry process, something that they receive little support to do. Most of the women do not understand the copious forms they are told to fill out; some are reluctant to ask clarifying questions to understand what is going on, for risk of being perceived as troublesome. I have noticed that this happens a lot in the welfare application process and in family court. From my experience as a social worker, I know that a quiet client may be perceived as a compliant one, but that silence can also be interpreted as not caring. Other women are quick to become angry and impatient. In these instances, I try to help the woman to understand the process, to validate her frustration but also to keep her calm. I realize that my active involvement in these situations distorts interactions and prevents me from observing what would happen if I weren’t there or did not intervene. On the other hand, as a feminist researcher committed to empowerment, I have an ethical responsibility to assist the women in getting the help they need (May 30, 2012).

By immersing myself in the research setting, I sought to take advantage of what Burawoy (1998) has called research as intervention: to produce a situational knowledge of women’s post-incarceration work that could then be connected with the work that frontline staff do within public service institutions. Furthermore, I sought to bring into view certain aspects of the post-incarceration experience that are left out of “official” accounts of the process. A rich literature now exists on the most common factors that determine whether a formerly incarcerated person will succeed “on the outside” or whether they will return to prison (MacKenzie 2006; Bushway, Stoll, and Weiman 2006). Likewise, much research exists on the collateral consequences of having a criminal record (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002). Yet there is a dearth of research on how formerly incarcerated people experience—and are processed by—institutions outside the formal purview of the crime-processing system.

On Positionality, Reflexivity, and When to Be a “Well-Dressed White Lady”

Although there is consensus among qualitative researchers that being reflexive is an important part of the process, there is little guidance about how to go about doing reflexivity (Mauthner and Doucet 2003). Like others doing research on crime-processed girls and women (McKim 2008, 2014; Haney 1996, 2010; Leverentz 2006, 2011), my positionality necessitated ongoing reflection and discussion with my research participants.7 New Beginnings is in a low-income neighbourhood in which 99 percent of the residents are people of colour (US Census Bureau 2010). As a white female doctoral student from a middle-class background with no personal history of incarceration, I wanted to be alert to the ways in which my presence in the women’s lives might be an asset and/or a liability. This has been a struggle shared by feminist prison activist groups, some of which employ a rhetoric of “sisterhood” (Lawston 2009) that risks glossing over significant differences.

I communicated to the women that I viewed them as “expert knowers” (D. Smith 2006, 224; Bisaillon 2012, 613) of how things work in their own lives and that I wanted to learn from them through interviews and observations. I shared that I had training as a social worker and that I was willing to help them in any way I could. Several of the women were immediately accepting of me, while others warmed up to me as soon as they realized I was willing and able not only to drive them to their various appointments (a relative luxury at New Beginnings) but also to sit with them during these appointments and offer support. Once word got out about this, many women started calling me and asking to participate in the study.8

Through my own previous professional experience as well as other researchers’ experiences (see McKim 2008, 2014), I was aware that client-staff dynamics are complicated at programs like New Beginnings. In interviews, when asked who had helped them the most since they had been released from jail or prison, several women talked about the director of New Beginnings as being “like a mother” to them at a critical time in their lives. Yet many women also spoke critically of the “tough love” approach that the director frequently utilized to ensure compliance with the program’s rules. Over time, I heard about several such conflicts that often resulted in women leaving the program. I took care during my fieldwork to distance myself from New Beginnings’ staff as much as possible to not appear to be an authority figure. I accomplished this by not spending much time at the program after the first few weeks, instead only coming to the program to pick up someone for an appointment. In exchange for permission to conduct my research, I wrote grant applications and concept papers under the instruction of New Beginnings’ grant writer and the director. I did much of this work either remotely or in the office space away from the homes where the women resided.

In the field, I dressed in casual attire—T-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers—to blend in as much as possible at New Beginnings and to draw minimal attention to myself when I accompanied women to places such as the welfare office or the parole office. I was rarely asked to explain my presence, but when pressed, I would state that I was a friend. While I was particularly attuned to how one’s criminal record might shape encounters with other public institutions, race and class dynamics also became readily visible.

In later stages of my fieldwork, I began dressing up on occasions in which I thought my professional standing as a social worker might be utilized to the benefit of the women, such as when I accompanied women seeking to regain custody of their children to family court. Out of growing frustration with the public assistance/welfare system, I occasionally wore professional attire to the welfare office to expedite the women getting what they needed.

On one particularly trying day, I took this approach when I accompanied Dawn, a Black woman in her early twenties who was a central figure in my fieldwork, to the welfare office to find out why her welfare benefits were in the process of being terminated. By the time of this incident, I had repeatedly witnessed Dawn’s ability to be an effective advocate for herself without any intervention on my part. Yet in this instance, it was clear that the mundane and all-too-typical nature of Dawn’s issue—some important paperwork was sent to the wrong address—meant that it might not be dealt with in a timely fashion. Thus, with Dawn’s permission, I decided to intervene, first by speaking to the office intake worker and then by demanding to speak with the office supervisor (as Dawn’s caseworker was unavailable), who quickly apologized and corrected the issue in the computer system.

As we left the office and walked back to my car, Dawn joked that she was glad to have a “well-dressed white lady” with her on that day. We both laughed at the absurdity that what we had accomplished in half an hour together was something that likely would have taken Dawn several hours and possibly even days—since we went to the office on a Friday afternoon—to get addressed on her own. Had I not been with her, Dawn likely would have waited until the office closing time, at which point an exasperated caseworker would have either fixed the issue or told Dawn to come back on Monday, when she would have waited several more hours.

Dawn intuitively knew she could not have effectively demanded to speak to the office supervisor without being perceived as a typical angry client—poor, Black, and female—and thus easily tuned out and “lost in the shuffle.” In this way, Dawn, while she might have been frustrated or even angry about this institutional mishap, performed the emotional labour (Hochschild 1979, 1983) necessary to manage this situation. For women of colour, scholars have noted that there seem to be two possible paths in such circumstances, neither of which is desirable. Some women work to stay calm during infuriating situations, knowing that outward displays of anger and frustration likely will only make their situations worse (Harlow 2003); others deliberately adopt a “loud Black woman” persona (Ong 2005; see also Mirchandani 2003) that plays into stereotypes but also allows them space to assert themselves. During fieldwork, I observed women adopting both types of approaches, to varying success. My presence in this situation allowed Dawn to not have to make this unpleasant choice. Further, it was not only my ability to look and act white, professional, and middle-class (and thus clearly not a client / welfare recipient) that expedited our time at the welfare office on that day, but it was also that I had accumulated intimate knowledge about how the welfare office functions—knowledge that is typically off-limits to clients—and was able to communicate this effectively to the office supervisor.

“Studying Out”: Tracing Ruling Relations from the Client Perspective

During eighteen months of fieldwork, I conducted in-depth interviews with twenty-four women and engaged in participant observation with ten of them. Early on, I identified encounters with the welfare system as a common and particularly tricky form of post-incarceration work and thus selected it for further examination. All but one of the women who participated in my study went to apply for welfare during their first couple of weeks in the program. They were urged to do so by New Beginnings’ case manager because if they qualified, the food stamps the women received would be used to purchase food for the program’s houses.

To learn more about the work done in the welfare system, I simultaneously began volunteering with a legal aid group that trains law students and lawyers looking to do pro bono work to provide advocacy to individuals applying for welfare. When I approached the director of the program about my research, she invited me to go through the training and then volunteer. Volunteers are trained on the local (county-level) welfare system in the morning, then go to a welfare office in the afternoon. Assistance work typically takes the form of helping first-time welfare applicants apply for benefits, advocating for recipients who are at risk of losing their benefits, and assisting former recipients who need to reapply. By spending one day a week working with this group simultaneous to my time at New Beginnings, I gained an intricate knowledge of the county welfare system. In doing so, I sought to produce an “insider’s critique” (D. Smith 1990, 204) of how the welfare system processes formerly incarcerated women (see Welsh Carroll 2015). I make use of institutional ethnography’s approach to analytical mapping to render a partial illustration of this process from the women’s standpoint, with an emphasis on the set of relations women are drawn into when they walk into the welfare office. This map brings into view multiple opportunities for protest and action.

I then used this knowledge to help women advocate for themselves when applying for welfare benefits. For example, in the instance mentioned earlier, I was able to help expedite the re-opening of Dawn’s case because I had been able to gain an insider’s understanding of how things work in the welfare office. As I stated above, such knowledge is off-limits to welfare applicants. Termination proceedings had been initiated in Dawn’s case because the quarterly reporting form she was required to fill out and submit, updating her employment and income information, had been sent to the wrong address. I knew from my volunteer work that lost quarterly reporting forms are a common problem in the welfare system: either the forms are lost in the mail or, once they are returned to the welfare office, they are not recorded in client files. This can often be fixed simply by filling out a new quarterly reporting form, giving it to a worker, and making sure that they update their computerized files with the correct address. I also knew, however, that had we not known what to do—and what forms to ask for at the office—Dawn would have had to wait for a hearing date to be set for her to contest the termination. Dawn likely would have had to repeat the application process, losing a month or more of her aid as a result.

The “administrative logic” (Diamond 1984) of the welfare office prescribes that eligibility workers carry out their work tasks in ways that fit with the mission and goals of the welfare system. The mission of the California Department of Social Services (n.d.) is “to serve, aid, and protect needy and vulnerable children and adults in ways that strengthen and preserve families, encourage personal responsibility, and foster independence.” Unsurprisingly, then, frontline workers typically adhere to the logic of promoting personal responsibility and independence by only assisting when it is requested in the “right” way. Persistently heavy caseloads render any sort of personalized attention to welfare applicants nearly impossible (Kaufman and Welsh Carroll 2021), further reinforcing this logic. An earlier experience I had with Dawn at the same office illustrates this point (see also figure 8.1):

I pick Dawn up at 7am and drive her to the welfare office where she has her food stamps case already open. Dawn just got laid off from her telemarketing job, so she needs to apply for General Assistance, which is the cash aid portion of welfare for single adults with no kids. The office opens at 8am, and Dawn wants to be there before it opens. I quickly realize why: when we arrive 30 minutes before the office opens, a long line wraps around the outside of the building. Once inside, we pass through a metal detector while security guards check our bags. Young men of colour are the dominant demographic here, and they all shuffle through the metal detector while holding their pants up. Once inside, they cluster around the security guard’s desk as they scramble to put their belts back on.

As I watch this scene, Dawn, an experienced visitor to this office, confidently walks over and stands in a line for one of about ten windows lining one wall of the building. Here, as with most of the public service buildings I have visited during my fieldwork, bulletproof glass covers each window, separating the client from the worker. I ask her how she knows which window to stand at, and she points to a cracked, faded sign that says “non-appointments.” Other people walk up after us, confused about which line to stand in, and we direct them. Dawn receives a thick packet of paperwork, which she fills out with me lending as much assistance as I can. I have learned from [the legal aid group where I volunteer] that the welfare application forms are written at a 12^th grade reading level.

Then, we wait . . . [hours later] I notice that the line to get in the building has dissipated, so around lunchtime, realizing that we are in for an all-day ordeal, I go outside to buy us fortifications from a lunch truck. During my absence, Dawn is called back to one of the interview booths. I grab our food and find her at one of about 50 interview booths. She sits across from a middle-aged man of South Asian descent, a window of bulletproof glass separating them (field notes, April 19, 2012).

In an interview with me afterward, Dawn and I discussed the eligibility interview that ensued:

Dawn intuitively senses that a set of ruling relations is contributing to her circumstances (D. Smith 1987, 2006). She is clearly upset that she must provide her welfare worker with a letter from her parole agent. This is an example of an ever-widening net of surveillance that is cast over the poor and crime-involved (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). Dawn and the other women I interviewed resignedly accepted the intrusion of multiple institutions in their lives, but having to disclose their involvement with one (in Dawn’s case, parole) to another (welfare) feels insulting, like a violation of privacy. Yet Dawn is forced to participate in the violation of her own privacy to get the help she needs, even though there is no coordination between welfare and parole to provide special services for formerly incarcerated people.

When Dawn says “you’re slaving us for it” when she talks about the welfare-to-work program she must participate in for twenty hours per week, she alludes to the American legacy of slavery, now visible in the mass incarceration–welfare nexus. In doing so, Dawn instinctively points to another juncture in which the social relations of race and class come into view. Having cycled on and off welfare several times in between periods of incarceration, Dawn recognizes that the program is little more than another form of social control. It is a waste of her time; ironically, it is a distraction from actually getting a job.

Over the course of his interaction with her, the worker seems to soften his approach. We inform him that Dawn had been working until very recently and thus should not have been required to participate in the welfare-to-work program while she was employed:

My experience with Dawn in the welfare office illustrates that even in a “successful” eligibility interview, little is resolved with any certainty: Dawn’s application was processed for General Assistance, but she would have to wait thirty days to start receiving the cash aid. She also must wait and see if her food stamps come through on the third of the month; if not, she will have to call her case manager to reinstate them. Such uncertainty is stressful for any welfare applicant but particularly so for formerly incarcerated people, whose social and economic support networks have often been strained—if not decimated—by a recent period of incarceration (Richie 2001; Leverentz 2006, 2011). Thus, in the welfare office as in other aspects of their post-prison lives, people like Dawn exist in a liminal space in which they are no longer imprisoned but are also not fully free (Werth 2011).

Conclusion

For the most part, the staff and administration of New Beginnings consider the welfare system to be a necessary evil one must endure to get critical financial assistance upon release from prison or jail. Perhaps New Beginnings is reluctant to be too critical of the welfare system because the program relies on the women receiving food stamps to purchase food and other essentials for its homes. Perhaps, too, because New Beginnings’ staff and interns are rarely able to go to the welfare offices themselves, they have a limited understanding of the intricacies of its oppressiveness. Such realities only make a more compelling argument for the complementarity of this sort of research with an activist agenda. My fieldwork with Dawn unearthed her own rich knowledge of how to navigate the welfare office, and my volunteer work with the legal aid program equipped me with an insider’s understanding of what questions to ask and what forms to request—in short, how to access the help one needs. Both sorts of knowledge are typically unavailable to people who have just been released from prison.

In several states, prison and anti-poverty activists are organizing to eliminate the lifetime ban on welfare benefits for people convicted of felony drug offences (Mauer and McCalmont 2013; McCarty et al. 2013).9 In the welfare application process, this ban takes the form of the “Food Stamp Program Qualifying Drug Felon Addendum,” which all food stamp applicants must fill out (Welsh Carroll 2015).

Less contested has been a county-level requirement that all applicants coming from another jurisdiction, including those just released from prison, must first establish “residency” in the county for fourteen days. During the welfare application process—often after having already waited for several hours—some of the women in my study who had just been released from prison were turned away for this reason. The standard processing time for a cash aid application is thirty days. Thus, these women had to wait a total of up to six weeks after their release from prison to receive the cash portion of assistance, leaving them in a financially precarious situation: at risk of returning to criminal activity and/or entering otherwise dangerous situations to survive. It is these types of policies that hinder rather than facilitate former prisoners’ post-incarceration work, and they must be challenged.

In this chapter, I have presented an approach to fieldwork that infiltrates institutional sites of oppression as a means of challenging them. I have shown how I went about doing such research in the American welfare system, which, in many ways, is designed to disempower those who need its resources and to desensitize those who work on its frontlines. This is a slightly different approach than that proposed by George Smith in his paper “Political Activist as Ethnographer” (1990). Following Smith, my approach is grounded “empirically in the actual operations of a ruling regime . . . provid[ing] a scientific rather than an ideological basis for developing political strategy” (647). Like Smith too, my project not only identifies sites for potential protest but also suggests opportunities for researcher-practitioner partnerships that can advance an activist agenda in ways both big and small. As I have shown, however, my approach might be particularly informative for advocates working on the ground on behalf of marginalized individuals—an angle unexamined by Smith and yet largely under-explored in institutional ethnography (see Pence 2001 for an important exception). As I have shown here, such an approach can yield important discoveries—ones that otherwise would remain invisible—about the social relations that are of greatest concern to institutional ethnographers.

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