Reentry Programs In The United States: Critical Discourse Analysis

This study raises basic questions about reentry programs in the United States and the discourses of reentry that currently frame policy, research, and programs. Reentry programs might be needed most when the separation from family is most severe (in terms of length of sentence, distance from home, visiting policy, beliefs about the redemptive capacity of prisoners, programming opportunities, prison culture, etc.). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) views discourse as the means by which power is exercised symbolically (Halliday, 1985; Janks, 2010; Thompson, 1990).

CDA looks to disclose the ways discourses are produced and distributed (Halliday, 1985), as well as how they work symbolically to disguise power (Thompson, 1990) and control others

through commonsense regulations, expectations, and procedures (Foucault, 1978). Federal Bureau of Prisons' (FBOP; 2011) mission statement that states, in part, "It is the mission of the FBOP to protect society by confining offenders in. Terms such as safe, humane, and secure disguise a dehumanized view of prisoners (i.e., a view that attributes no value to their interior lives) within a discourse of "caring for" prisoners. According to the FBOP, the beneficiaries of prison programs are society and the economy: "It is the mission of the FBOP to protect society." The Virginia Department of Corrections (2010) presents two of the top three goals for its Virginia Adult Reentry Initiative (VARI) in a similarly objectifying grammar: Goal 1: To enhance public safety by shifting the organizational culture from a primary focus on risk control to include risk and recidivism reduction through offender change Goal 3: To employ a system of research based practices and programs that reduce the criminal thinking and behaviors of offenders A second way discourses consolidate power is through the establishment of truth regimes.
Reentry discourses that use behavioral grammars to position prisoners as objects to be studied and corrected by the system are, of course, pervasive. The reentry discourse establishes a criminogenic truth that precisely measures the deficits of prisoners and prescribes treatment whereby the treatment itself constitutes a system of control. Between 2009 and 2012, the federal government alone funded 145 demonstration grants (with awards of up to US$750,000 each), 144 mentoring grants (with awards of up to US$300,000 each), and 44 co-occurring disorder treatment grants (with awards of up to US$600,000 each; Council of State Governments, 2013).
Nevertheless, others (Thompkins, Curtis, & Wendel, 2010) see an emerging reentry industry as the logical frontier for the "increasingly punitive and widespread sentencing policies of the last two or more decades that have accompanied the dramatic expansion of the prison industry" (p.427). The systems charged with overseeing the release of prisoners to post prison supervision (dubbed "reentry") and with policing the behaviors of the former prisoner during periods of quasi-incarceration, while supposedly at the same time helping to prepare them for reintegration back into the community.
We are reminded of how incarcerated parents are represented as whole human beings in Nordic policy and how the rights of children to remain connected to their parents in prison, in the present, are protected in Nordic policy. Researchers and practitioners need to become more aware of the way prisons dehumanize parents and how behavioral and future-oriented reentry discourses serve to maintain the myth of the unlinking of families. A mandate to support incarcerated parents in their being parents in the present would reframe the discourse for prisoners, their families, practitioners, policy makers, and researchers.