Prisoner reentry as myth and ceremony

The varied papers gathered by Douglas Thompkins and his collaborators in the special Forum of Dialectical Anthropology on prison reentry offer a kaleidoscopic set of views "from below" of the post-custodial trajectories of American convicts. Prison Industrial Complex is based on a loose analogy with MIC, the "Military Industrial Complex" alleged to have driven the expansion of America's warfare economy during the Cold War era. The multisided and multiscalar involvement of the state in the production and regulation of urban marginality implies that, to properly anatomize the structure and functioning of post-custodial oversight. The ceremonial deployment of reentry programs effectively decouples the web of economic, social, urban, and justice policies that absolve the prison from the handling of convicts after incarceration. The so-called Prison Industrial Complex is organizationally antithetical, not analogous, to its alleged precursor, the Military Industrial Complex; it composes a negligible part of the contemporary economy, and not one of its central planks.