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Accessible and comprehensive, Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities delves into the most pressing legal issue of prisoner reentry. . . . Thompson provides a much needed look at this dire social issue through an expert legal lens. This is an important book and I highly recommend it to legal scholars, policy makers, criminologists, and concerned citizens.
—Joan Petersilia, author of When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry

"Thompson provides a compelling argument that we cannot understand reentry, and indeed criminal justice policy broadly, without analyzing its racial dimensions. He also provides us with a clear road map that helps us to access the state of reentry today, and what we need to do politically and programatically to develop a system that is committed to both public safety and racial fairness."
—Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project

"Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities marks the debut of a powerful new voice destined to play a key role in our national criminal justice debate. Anthony Thompson tackles one of the most challenging public policy dilemmas of our time: What to do with some 600,000 people who leave prison every year? Along the way, he deftly exposes the media's complicity in creating in creating our national prison boom, exposing how the Fourth Estate has not only contributed to the insane growth of our prison system, but also exacerbated our ongoing reentry crisis. His focus on the media represents a valuable contribution to the ongoing public debate about the future of our criminal justice system."
—Jennifer Gonnerman, author of Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett

"Thompson brilliantly sheds critical light on the insidious racial underpinnings of what may be the most important and understudied criminal justice question of our time."
—David Cole, author of No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, African Americans made up approximately twelve percent of the U.S. population but close to forty percent of the U.S. prison population. This shocking disparity is due, in part, to the introduction of tough sentencing laws passed in the 1990s, some in response to the widespread use of crack cocaine, which was sold and used by far more black than white Americans. Now, in the latter half of the decade, the nation is in the midst of the largest multi-year discharge of prisoners in its history. What is likely to happen to these ex-offenders? In Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities, Anthony C. Thompson looks for the answer.

Not surprisingly, most African Americans released from prison return to their home communities. However, as Thompson reports, many of these communities are struggling—many are in dire need of health care, adequate and affordable housing, drug treatment programs, social services, and jobs. And ex-offenders have even greater needs than other residents of these strained communities. Most of those who were drug addicts have not received treatment. Nor, for the most part, have they received any useful vocational training. When viewed in its totality, Thompson writes, this is a recipe for disaster. At this time, nearly half of all ex-offenders return to prison within three years and that percentage could easily increase in the years ahead.

For Thompson, any discussion of ex-offender reentry is, de facto, a question of race. After laying out the troubling statistics, he identifies the equally troubling ways in which media and politics have contributed to the problem, especially through stereotyping and racial bias. He reports on the growing number of black women being sent to prison and looks at governmental responses to reentry, including the shifting roles of parole officers and the use of courts in reintegrating ex-inmates into communities. Well aware of the potential consequences if this country fails to act, Thompson concludes with concrete, realizable ideas of how our policies could, and should, change.

Anthony C. Thompson is Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law. He is a former Deputy Public Defender in Contra Costa County, California. He serves on the Board of Directors of the National Council for Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, California, and is Co-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Reentry Institute of John Jay College in New York City.