Halfway Home

Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

By: Reuben Jonathan Miller

Narrated by: Cary Hite

Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation's carceral system" (Heather Ann Thompson).

Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record.

Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America's most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.

As The Color of Law exposed about our understanding of housing segregation, Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they've paid their debt to society.

Informed by Miller's experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller searchingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens.

PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist

Winner of the 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences

2022 PROSE Awards Finalist

2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner for Cultural Anthropology and Sociology

An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love

As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air

©2021 Reuben Jonathan Miller (P)2021 Little, Brown & Company

Critic reviews

"Striking a unique balance between memoir and sociological treatise, this bracing account makes clear just how high the deck is stacked against the formerly incarcerated." (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

"For incarcerated persons in the United States, release does not equal freedom. Miller’s first book is an important, harrowing ethnographic study that reads like a keenly observed memoir, which, in part, it is. His own father and brothers having been imprisoned, Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago, is candidly close to his research on mass incarceration and its after effects. This is essential reading for all who care about justice in contemporary America.” (Library Journal, starred review)

"Through vivid stories and evidence of this afterlife...Miller describes 'a new kind of prison'...in heartbreaking prose.” (National Book Review)

Fantastic Book

I first read this book as I embarked on a 10 month project documenting the lives of formerly incarcerated folks for a documentary. During that 10 months of traveling all across The US, speaking to all manners of the Reentry community, and continuing to read and listen daily to new information, this book still remains one of the best written materials we came across.

It prompted my team and I to reach out to Dr. Miller and interview him for the project. His knowledge and ability to translate it to understandable terms rendered his interview by far the most important interview of the entire project. I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about incarceration, racial disparities, or the American Government's relationship to it's own people (most notably those in poverty).

Wonderful

This is wonderfully written and informative. It makes you re-examine the assumptions on how to fix mass incarceration in this country, and what it really does to people. Excellent work, and thank you for publishing it.

Phenomenal. Informative. Consistently engaging.

This book is simply amazing. Thank you for such poignant documentation. Eye and Mind opening book.

good book!

really eye opening book. the research is well balanced with the story and really drives home the point. well narrated too!

Call to Action

Enlightening, thought provoking, and educational. A call to action of the most difficult kind, to change hearts and minds.

Halfway home is a unique book educating us

I used Halfway Home in my college class. Students were so moved by the stories by Dr. Miller that they wrote impassioned papers and engaged in rich, thoughtful discussions.

Very Impressed

I loved this book. It is a very pertinent piece. I would recommend this book to anyone who has been involved with the criminal justice system or has any family or friends involved with the criminal justice system in the US.

illustrates a broken system.

Held my interest. Engaging story describing a disfunctional trilogy of race, poverty and incarceration. Another institution in need of reform. Reform far beyond the reach of our current national discourse and attention span. Narration was very good, easy listen.

A Stupendously Important Book

Not just another indictment of the criminal justice system, but a brilliant analysis of all the forces that lead to crime and a prescription for finally ending four centuries of American racism.

Wonderful. Human. Telling.

Easy listen, filled with heart and truth. Just honest truth about what it means to be arrested and imprisoned in the United States, or to be in any way related to someone who is. Its so important to put this in our heads, to know the full reality of our environments, and this book tells this story beautifully.