ABSTRACT
In the world of reentry, there are a set of blurred boundaries; one of which is exists between the halfway house and the street scene in the neighborhood. This chapter develops the concept of liminality to locate the halfway house as a social border zone at a threshold between worlds. The halfway house enforces drug abstinence and participation in 12 steps, but residents remain intimately connected to the drug world swirling in the surrounding city streets. Many were out there not long before. Friends and family members still live in the area. The men are wedded to the street through a combination of physical proximity and social relationships, and they stay connected when news of drug overdoses and fresh charges flows through interpersonal networks. I lived in the house as an ethnographer, and here I argue that even as the halfway house aims to reintegrate released prisoners to mainstream social life, it institutionalizes ongoing connections to the street it asks residents to leave behind.
