Fathers, Prisons, and Family Reentry (eBook)

This book conceptualizes family reentry in terms of the untapped potential evident in the lived experiences of incarcerated fathers. It draws on postphenomenological concepts and real-life examples from Europe and the United States to frame a method for keeping fathers intimately engaged in the day-to-day lives of their children, even from afar.

---

Fathers, Prisons, and Family Reentry: Presencing as a Framework and Method asks scholars, policy makers, advocates, and practitioners to rethink family reentry in a new light, to seek to understand both the urgent and intolerable loss as well as the real and present potential of families. There are almost one million parents of minor-aged children currently serving time in U.S. prisonsmost of them fathers. Based on post-phenomenological analyses, William Muth offers a new framework for conceptualizing family reentry as a present phenomenon. It seeks to reveal the intense ways incarcerated fathers and their families live their present-absence, and draws on these intensities to define a new role for researchers and practitioners: nurturing the potential of families in the here and now. The current situation is intolerable. A credible family reentry approach is urgently needed. This book is an attempt to address these families as they potentially are, and might become, if we would be willing to ';meet them half-way,' in the words of the poet Alice Fulton.