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...
University of California Press