“Prisons Were Made for People Like Us”: British Pakistani Muslim Experiences Upon Release From Prison

Mohammed Qasim ,Colin Webster

doi:10.1177/0032885520916880

Abstract

British Muslim young men who offend upon reentry from prison reported that “Prisons were made for people like us.” At one level, this meant that the challenges they faced were likely to be intractable and insurmountable, regrettably returning them to prison. At another, their social integration after release from prison was hampered by something more than their individual choices and agency. Cycling between neighborhood, offending, and prison, it was their characteristic social relations and the peculiar social structural constraints placed upon them as a group that best explained their experiences upon release from prison.

Highlights

IntroductionConcern about the social integration of ex-prisoners around the world has increased as prisoner numbers have risen (Baldry et al, 2006; Melossi, 2015)
Our chosen approach delineates prisoner reentry processes drawing upon work from the political economy of crime and punishment tradition, from Rusche (1933/1998) to De Giorgi (2006) and Wacquant (2009)
Among the group of British Pakistani young men we studied, for example, we asked whether Miller’s (2014) conclusion from his ethnographic study of a United States prisoner reentry program was correct—Did social welfare and criminal justice state institutions collude to manage urban poverty among marginalized populations? Among our study group, there was a complete absence of any formal attempt to rehabilitate them as exinmates

Summary

Introduction

Concern about the social integration of ex-prisoners around the world has increased as prisoner numbers have risen (Baldry et al, 2006; Melossi, 2015). This growing movement to better prepare offenders about to return to their. Plans to move into employment, education or training, stay off drugs and out of prison do not always go as planned, as many find that life away from prison can be if not more, challenging than the life they experienced in prison In some cases, their plans are unrealistic; in others, the obstacles faced related to housing, employment, family support, and relationship with partners can cause the ex-inmate to struggle with life away from the prison and to start questioning whether prison life was more difficult than life away from prison (Hartfree et al, 2008)

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Discussion

Conclusion