Release day

An estimated 610,000 people are released from prison in the US each year. The extant literature documents the challenges many returning citizens face as they navigate institutional and social processes rooted in stigma and discrimination. The dulling experience of low-wage work, insecure housing, and weak family ties are the much-documented bleak reality. Limited research examines reentry from a sensory perspective. Sensory criminology seeks to privilege the sensory to uncover new ways of understanding processes of punishment. This chapter shares the many sensory inputs that are experienced on the day of release from prison. We gain an awareness of how release day is experienced, and a glimpse at what release day may mean for those experiencing it. To understand the sensecape of release day, three interviews were conducted with 10 returning citizens over the course of one year. The recordings of the interviews were transcribed and the transcriptions were analyzed to elicit the sensory essences that comprise the release day experience. This chapter explores how the day of release is experienced through the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touch described by participants, and uncovers the exhilaration and anxieties that comprise release day.