In recent years, many scholars and justice organizations have increased their attention on the social impacts of the “War on Drugs” and mass incarceration. The political and social warfare waged against inner-city drug use in the late twentieth century, and the subsequent exponential growth of the prison system, have become objects of study for many researchers. As a result, the harm that the politics of race, crime, and incarceration has inflicted on individuals, families, and communities is now widely recognized as a political and social atrocity of hypercriminalization and mass imprisonment, especially for disparately impacted people of color. The scholarship has largely focused on individual-level collateral consequences such as diminished access to employment, housing, and social capital. In her recent work, Keesha Middlemass demonstrates that there is still much left unknown about the effects of serving time and, more specifically, the impact of a felony status on an individual’s subsequent life experiences and outcomes. Her work Convicted and Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry demonstrates how tightly the grip of a felony conviction holds onto those caught in the clutches of the criminal justice system.Middlemass illustrates how changes in the political climate and associated shifts in public policy have historically stifled, and presently continue to stifle, progress for returning offenders. Her work uncovers the sociopolitical complexities of mass imprisonment and mass reentry, but it also takes the conversation a step further by expanding the scope to include policies of other social-economic institutions that treat convicted offenders punitively. By juxtaposing these policies with the narratives of former offenders, it paints a larger, more detailed picture of the countless ways convicted felons are legally and socially disabled and handicapped from successful reentry. Combining data from qualitative fieldwork with critical historical policy analyses, Middlemass describes an intricately woven web of criminalization and marginalization that involves and transcends the criminal justice system and begs the question “why.”The book’s methodological approach to understanding former offenders’ experiences with reentry offers a more intimate depiction than what can be found in the reentry literature, which is dominated by quantitative assessments. Scholars have been successful in providing evidence for the widespread marginalization offenders face upon release when returning home. However, Middlemass demonstrates a more comprehensive social and political hostility through a unique multi-method approach that incorporates four methodological strategies: ethnography, observation, interviews, and archival research. A key contribution of her work lies in the way she aligns the lived experiences and narratives of former offenders with historical and contemporary policies that shape those experiences. Middlemass also identifies more micro-level hurdles than can be found in other literature. Her contribution is important considering the current reentry scholarship has presented a more statistical, aggregate picture of the disadvantages that formerly incarcerated individuals face upon reentry. The ethnographic and interviewing methods utilized in her study are able to illuminate more intimate and subtle day-to-day struggles that are sometimes overlooked, ignored, or otherwise omitted in other reentry scholarship. Additionally, Middlemass makes a compelling case for the use of narratives in reentry work. It may indeed be true that there is much to be learned about the extent of the reach of the criminal justice system through adjacent public institutions, simply because the experiences of former offenders are seldomly considered in scholarly analyses.Using a reentry organization located in Newark, New Jersey, Middlemass conducted observations and fifty-three interviews of participants in prisoner reentry, which only included convicted felons. Through her work, Middlemass describes how societal antipathy manifests in both micro- and macro-level forms and shows how her participants confront the public’s aversion to former offenders as they transition home. She finds that the impact of the aggression that former offenders face from individuals and institutions, collectively, results in consequences that become counterproductive. That is, social hostility undermines goals expressed both in reentry discourse and in public safety that institutional officials claim to support when access-limiting policies are put into place. As her study shows, former offenders are very familiar with the feeling of being unwelcomed. For example, some of these feelings come from the lack of social capital, familial tensions that have accumulated while an offender was incarcerated, or the pressure of assuming a certain degree of financial responsibility to loved ones with very limited access to gainful employment. Moreover, these negative attitudes are often exacerbated by exclusionary policies and practices that block convicted felons from accessing critical institutional resources that are essential to their survival and reentry success. The result is a cycle that often involves disappointment and a sense of hopelessness with no foreseeable relief in sight. Reoffending via crimes for survival, then, becomes the only viable option.Middlemass’s work essentially hinges on one major unanswered question that lurks in the shadows of our current criminal justice system: “Is a felon ever allowed to serve his or her time, pay his or her debt, and reenter society?” (15). For many of her participants, the answer is “no.” Still, Middlemass seeks to answer the question by framing her analysis through social disability theory. She argues that a felony conviction effectively functions as a shortcut that net-widens punishment in two ways: temporally, beyond the conclusion of a criminal sentence, and politically, beyond the bounds of the criminal justice system. In other words, the justice system imposes a sentence for convicted felons, but these individuals are also “punished” beyond a prison sentence by the impact of policies that discriminate against felons and impact their quality of life following prison release. Social disability as a theoretical framework can be used to conceptualize a felony conviction as a social impairment that impedes the body and being of the person who bears it all while alternative accessibility options remain unavailable. This social disabling is manufactured by entities both within and outside of the criminal justice system, which makes the totality of punishment difficult to identify, monitor, or control. In this way, the mark of a felony conviction holds an unexamined retributive power that allows society to dish out on- and off-book civil sanctions indefinitely and in an unknown number of ways. Cumulatively, these policies are largely responsible for creating the conditions in which a felony can be understood as a social disability. As Middlemass shows, there are numerous administrative codes that prevent former offenders’ access to housing, employment, and education and force them into second-class citizenry, where they effectively become what she calls “contemporary outlaws” (3).Middlemass provides policy chapters highlighting housing, education, and employment as major areas of disenfranchisement for former offenders, often overlapping and working in tandem against the well-being of the formerly incarcerated upon reentry. Middlemass begins by analyzing the failure of public housing, focusing on how the increased politicization of crime during the “War on Drugs” era allowed policy makers to expand ways to subjugate drug offenders and felons by nullifying their eligibility for subsidized housing programs such as Section 8. Federal housing regulations also penalize recipients for housing convicted felons, leaving former offenders ineligible to benefit both directly and indirectly from affordable housing programs. Given the bleakness of job prospects that is outlined in the chapter examining employment, former offenders are often unable to afford consistent and stable housing without assistance. Additionally, the increased practice of utilizing criminal background checks makes housing discrimination against convicted felons an acceptable and justifiable practice under the popularized public safety discourse. These and other punitive housing policies and practices make homelessness a common problem among former offenders, which puts their safety, security, and rehabilitation in jeopardy while they face a myriad of other problems associated with returning to civilian life after incarceration.Moving her focus to education policy, Middlemass shows how shifts in the political discourse changed how policy makers regarded the role of education in rehabilitation. Again, the “tough on crime” political rhetoric made it easier to justify cutting funding to education programs for convicted offenders, both in and outside of prison. This means that valuable education programs within correctional institutions began to disappear, and access to education funding also dwindled. Federal laws removed convicted felons’ access to Pell Grants, and, even when a former offender receives vocational training, convicted felons are often restricted from obtaining occupational licenses or prevented from securing jobs due to their felony status. The immense difficulty of educational pursuits (in addition to the uncertainty of its payoff in the form of employment) makes schooling an impractical option. Finally, with regard to employment, Middlemass tells an all-too-familiar story of what is known throughout reentry scholarship: employers do not generally seek, nor are they required to hire, convicted felons. In summary, even with a strong desire to succeed, participants in the study struggle to understand how society expects them to reenter when access to housing, education, and employment are restricted.Throughout the book, the author illustrates how the emergence of these disenfranchising policies are not coincidental historical misfortunes. Instead, Middlemass traces the trajectory of disenfranchisement of “criminal” populations within each policy realm to roots in politics of white supremacy and calculated discrimination against Blacks. She sees the current hypermarginalization of convicted felons directly tied to the historical criminalization and targeting of Blacks, who constitute the overwhelming majority of those in the criminal justice system and, therefore, the majority of those navigating reentry as convicted felons. In this way, Middlemass highlights a need for reentry-related reforms to address the racial and cultural impact that the social disenfranchisement of felons has had on the communities most affected.In short, Middlemass illustrates the egregious mismatch between the notion of reentry and the structural reality of how (un)achievable that ideal truly is. Additionally, Middlemass cleverly unearths an obvious yet overlooked reality: If the racialized politics and policies of the “War on Drugs” / “Tough on Crime” era and mass incarceration disproportionately and devastatingly impacted Black offenders and their communities, then the politics and policies of reentry are inherently racialized. The current state of reentry politics and policy does not promote public safety, but instead engenders failure and all but guarantees continued high rates of recidivism for the 95 percent of all offenders who eventually come home. Therefore, the way in which our legal and sociopolitical systems strategize to deal (or not deal) with the socially debilitating effects of the non-reentry reality will ultimately determine the future of those who are already most marginalized by both the justice system and the network of adjacent social entities that function as a petite penal institution.