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81 Fed. Probation 32 (2017)
A Longitudinal Survey of Newly-Released Prisoners: Methods and Design of the Boston Reentry Study

handle is hein.journals/fedpro81 and id is 34 raw text is: 
32   FEDERAL   PROBATION


Massachusetts


             Bruce   Western
        Harvard   University
            Anthony Braga
  Northeastern University
               Rhiana Kohl
Department of Correction


GROWTH IN AMERICAN prison and
jail populations over the last 40 years has
propelled the  U.S. incarceration rate to the
highest in the world and made  incarceration
commonplace   for residents of poor inner-city
communities.   The  U.S. penal  system now
houses around  2.2 million people in state and
federal prisons and local jails, and incarcera-
tion rates are highest among racial and ethnic
minorities and the poor (Glaze & Kaeble 2014;
Western, 2006).
   Historically high rates of incarceration pro-
duced  large cohorts of prison releases-over
600,000  annually-who entered a relatively
small  number   of  mostly  poor  neighbor-
hoods,  often equipped with few social policy
supports. Large  numbers  of prison releases
motivated  research on the effects of incarcera-
tion on crime and  other social and economic
outcomes,  including employment, health, and
the  well-being  of children with  incarcer-
ated  parents (Travis, Western, &  Redburn

  Department  of Sociology, 33 Kirkland Street,
  Cambridge MA 02138. E-mail: western@wjh.har-
  vardedu. This research was supported by grant
  5R21H-D073761-02 from NIH/NICHD   and SES-
  1259013 from the National Science Foundation. We
  gratefully acknowledge the significant assistance
  of the Massachusetts Department of Correction
  and the invaluable research assistance of Catherine
  Sirois and Jaclyn Davis.


2014; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010, Wildeman  &
Muller, 2012).
   Despite a large body  of research study-
ing the  effects of incarceration, relatively
few  studies have  examined   in detail the
process  of leaving prison and  entering  a
community.   Specialized data collections of
post-incarceration experiences have mostly
been ethnographic, making field observations
on relatively small groups of men and women,
often networks of research subjects in a few
neighborhoods   (e.g., Harding et al., 2014;
Fader, 2013; Leverentz, 2014). While qualita-
tive research has been invaluable in its account
of life in poor communities under conditions
of high incarceration, it often struggles to rep-
resent the heterogeneity of prison releasees.
Panel surveys have collected data on relatively
large samples of released prisoners. In some
cases, like the Fragile Families Study of Child
Well-Being, formerly incarcerated men  were
interviewed  in a general population survey
design  (Teitler et al., 2003). In other cases,
like the  Urban  Institute's Returning Home
study, specialized samples of newly-released
prison and jail inmates were interviewed over
a one or two year follow-up period (LaVigne
&   Kachnowski,  2003). With  both  general
population  and specialized data collections,
formerly-incarcerated  respondents  showed


high rates of study attrition and other kinds of
nonresponse.
   A longitudinal data collection from a sam-
ple making   the transition from prison  to
community   offers at least three contributions
to research on  the effects of incarceration.
First, a major challenge for research is the
problem of under-enumeration. The formerly-
incarcerated are a significantly under-counted
population  that  resists observation with
traditional methods of social science data col-
lection. Pettit (2012) describes the incarcerated
as invisible men whose under-enumeration
distorts conventional measures of poverty and
inequality. After release, they may be on the
run'  as Goffman  (2014) describes, evading
both researchers and social control agencies.
Large-scale data collections are typically built
around  close attachment to mainstream social
institutions like stable households, steady
employment,   and, among   the poor, enroll-
ment  in social programs. Men  and  women
released from prison are a large, hard-to-reach
population that are often only weakly attached
to households, often residing with family and
friends or in homeless shelters, and revolving
in  and out of institutional settings (Travis,
2005;  Goffman,  2014; Metraux,  Roman,  &
Cho,  2007). Employment is   often unstable
and  undocumented,  and  social programs are


Volume  81 Number   I

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