The most commonly used metric for reentry success is, paradoxically, a measure of failure: recidivism. Formerly incarcerated people “succeed” if they do not return to prison—and fail miserably if they do. Far too often, only two outcomes are recognized, both of which are typically attributed to an individual’s willpower or moral character. Do they want it badly enough?
In a recent collaboration with the Transformational Prison Project (TPP)—a restorative justice organization founded and led by formerly incarcerated men in Massachusetts—we conducted interviews with thirty individuals who are fighting to live normal lives outside of prison. They revealed that neither “success” nor “reentry” are straightforward ideas. For most of them, reentry is proving to be a lifelong process, full of challenges that only supportive communities and repair practices can ease.
Recidivism rates can be misleading. People who are on probation or parole are often reincarcerated for actions that are not crimes for most Americans—missing curfew, showing up late for appointments, even police encounters, regardless of whether accusations are substantiated or charges stick.
And from a research perspective, recidivism rates don’t capture the full picture. They often track instances of reincarceration, not rates at which individuals are reincarcerated. If a handful of people are reincarcerated multiple times, their experiences can disproportionately affect the overall numbers. But more importantly, because recidivism is typically understood in binary terms—either someone reoffends or they don’t—it doesn’t account for the meaningful growth that an individual may have made outside of a facility, even if a misstep landed them behind bars again.
On the flip side, what is considered a success from a recidivism standpoint may not be a success at all. “A lot of people don’t get healing,” explains TPP’s executive director, Noble Williams, who has led restorative justice circles—a structured, collaborative way for groups to discuss harm and decide how to repair it—for over a decade. When people don’t heal, he argues, “they go somewhere and climb under a rock and spend the rest of their life there.” In other words, merely surviving outside of prison does not equal true success. “And they’re successful? They are still hurt and they are still in pain, which still opens up doors for future harms to take place.”
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Inquest—finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence & cited in The Best American Essays 2025—brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
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Recognizing the limitations of the recidivism framework, researchers have turned to a different one: desistance. According to renowned criminologist Shadd Maruna, the concept gained prominence in criminology during the 1990s. It is based on the idea that individuals are capable of change, prompting researchers to ask: How exactly does that change occur? Maruna emphasizes the role of relationship-building. His work resonates with our research and highlights the power of peer mentors, also known as “wounded healers,” and social movements led by directly impacted people that reduce the stigma of incarceration and advance agendas for social and political change. Empowerment is an important part of the equation.
In practice, desistance is not always applied in ways that reflect its full complexity. Kristofer Bret Bucklen, director of planning, research, and statistics for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, frames desistance in terms of measurable outcomes, tracking deceleration (decreased frequency of criminalized behavior), de-escalation (reduced seriousness of criminalized behavior), or cessation (complete ending of criminalized behavior).
As a concept, desistance offers a more nuanced alternative to recidivism, which remains the more common policy metric for reentry success. But like all concepts, how it is applied, or operationalized, matters. Too often, when good ideas are adopted into “correctional interventions,” the result overemphasizes individual agency and defines success in negative terms—primarily, the ending of criminalized behavior, rather than broader social or structural change.
How does desistance fit into a restorative justice approach to successful reentry? While the two can be complementary, one important difference is the fundamental question pursued. Desistance asks how people’s behaviors change; restorative approaches ask if someone is confronting the harms they’ve both experienced and caused. Restorative justice is concerned with whether people are actively working to repair their relationships and contribute to the well-being of their communities. These questions shift the focus of success from behavioral change to a lifelong, open-ended practice of engaging with others and community.
Williams defines success as the ongoing practice of “growing and learning about yourself, and living a better, restorative life.” Bobby Iacoviello, TPP’s director of community outreach, also stresses that success must be understood in the context of individual journeys. He emphasizes that success can sometimes be as simple as choosing to spend a few hours doing something positive—for example, attending a digital literacy class—instead of doing something harmful.
Success should not be defined in punitive terms, but rather by the ability to confront trauma with care and intention. As Williams notes, success means “having the tools to deal” with trauma and triggers. These are not merely individual tools, but collective ones, shared practices cultivated in community.
If success is a practice, how might it change the way we define “reentry” itself? In conversations with thirty formerly incarcerated individuals, ages 20 to 77—including six women and twenty-four men, with an average of 17.22 years of incarceration—we encountered a wide range of answers.
At least twenty-one of our interviewees had been incarcerated in Massachusetts’s state prisons. Others had spent time in federal prisons, jails (pretrial detention), or houses of correction in Massachusetts, which typically house individuals serving sentences of 2.5 years or less per offense. All had received reentry support from TPP, which centers peer support, community building, and restorative practices. Their insights support the argument that the dominant idea of reentry is inadequate, if not fundamentally flawed in its implications.
Most of the people we spoke with faced familiar hurdles after incarceration—finding housing and work, navigating parole and probation requirements, coping with poverty, and managing mental and physical health challenges. Thirty-two-year-old David Delvalle, who spent over seven years in prison and is now a director of the Tufts Prison Initiative of Tisch College puts it bluntly: “Reentry is like being born all over again. . . . If everybody else is walking on a regular flat plane, we’re going uphill.”
Despite enormous challenges, with peer-led, restorative support, most saw reentry as a chance for a new life—a do-over, a way to be a citizen, not an outcast, an opportunity to explore a new world. Twenty-nine-year-old Jody Boykins, who is working on his college degree at Tufts University, spent three years in prison. Out for just over a year when we spoke with him, he described reentry as a process of deep personal growth and reflection:
Like, yes, I can love people, but also not hurt myself to love them, right? It’s just learning how to take care of yourself before taking care of somebody else. Reentry is just community, right? Like you got people around who actually care about you.
Boykins’s response demonstrates how both self-love and reparative community building are crucial parts of successful reentry. Community is not built by ignoring one’s past, but by learning to accept the fullness and complications of one’s experience. It emerges through learning how to be accountable to oneself and others, and—as every person we spoke with told us—is most powerfully done alongside formerly incarcerated peers. Having a caring, supportive, and accepting community does not erase the more practical challenges, but it provides a foundation for facing them.
When does the process of reintegrating into society end? The overwhelming majority of our interviewees gave a surprising answer: never.
This perspective was especially common among TPP’s focus population—“transformational youth,” or individuals sentenced as juveniles or young adults (up to age twenty-one) to life without parole. Following recent changes in Massachusetts parole eligibility, many of these individuals have been released—often after spending decades behind bars and becoming adults entirely inside prison. Reentry can be particularly challenging for them, as they must navigate life on the outside while remaining on lifetime parole.
Thirty-four-year-old Twin Thebaud, who entered prison at sixteen and is on lifetime parole, said, “I’m still trying to [reenter]. I’ve met guys who’ve been out for five, six years, and they are still trying to reintegrate, as much as we could put a smile on to help people around us, to try to fit in. I feel like I may never really fit in.”
Others released under different circumstances echo this sense of ongoing reentry. After thirty-one years in prison and a sentence reduction that led to her release, fifty-four-year-old Angie Jefferson—now on lifetime parole—said: “As long as I’m on parole, I think I’m always going to feel like I am reentering.”
Among those who had spent decades inside prison, some emphasized the degree to which society changed while they were behind bars. They felt they would never stop learning how to live in the world. Sixty-one-year-old Victor Davila, who spent thirty-eight years in prison and had been out for four years when we spoke, described being nostalgic for a nature trail that was replaced by condominiums during his time inside. He likened the loss to his overall sense of disorientation with a world that had sped ahead without him:
When I was a kid, my brothers, my sisters, and I used to have a little fish swimming hole. I went there, that shit ain’t there! Damn, it broke my heart, but it was good while it lasted. That trail [still] lasts in my head. But everything changes; it’s just a change that you gotta try to adapt to.
Fifty-four-year-old Ricardo Feliciano, who spent twenty years incarcerated, described the odd feeling of graduating into an adult world: “I spent most of my life in prison, so now I’m being reborn at the age of fifty-two. . . . My vehicle is a ’52 Grand, fully loaded, but with real low mileage,” he said. This uplifting metaphor captures Ricardo’s reentry journey, honoring his age and complex history while embracing the possibilities of life beyond prison.
Only one person, forty-eight-year-old Blandine Williams, felt like they had successfully and definitively transitioned into society. She came from a middle-class family and had a professional career before spending four years in prison. She was able to return to her previous life after reentry, but found her family did not want to speak about her incarceration. Reentry ended, she said, only after she was able to build a community through TPP where she could speak about her carceral experiences and the trauma they inflicted.
The dominant narrative of reentry, measured narrowly through recidivism and framed around individual responsibility, fails to reflect the lived realities of those returning from incarceration. For many formerly incarcerated people, reentry is not a discrete event marked by a date of release or the end of supervision. It is an ongoing, nonlinear process shaped by systemic barriers, deep personal transformation, and the search for belonging in a society that often remains hostile to their return.
Through them, we see how, with a community-building and restorative approach led by mentors with lived experience, the idea of “successful reentry” can take on a new meaning. Reentry does not map onto a clearly defined beginning, middle, or end. It often means learning to live—for many people we spoke with, for the remainder of their lives—in a grey zone of challenges and opportunities. There are many material and practical challenges, but above all else, reentering “successfully” means having the support of people who care about you, and who can help you continually build the social and emotional tools to move through challenges and toward growth and healing. Only when we broaden our understanding of reentry to include these dimensions can we begin to build systems that truly support people in their return.
Image: Photo by Zulian Firmansyah on Unsplash
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