Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect 83 Social Justice Vol. 44, No. 1 (2017) 83 Back to Nothing: Prisoner Reentry and Neoliberal Neglect Alessandro De Giorgi * We come back to nothing. We left from nothing and we’re back to it. —Darryl (ieldnotes, December 14, 2011) I n 2015, in the United States more than 7 million people—close to 3 percent of the nation’s total population—were living under some form of penal control. Within this mass of unfree citizens, 2.2 million individuals, equaling the fourth largest city in the country, were conined in federal penitentiaries, state prisons, and local jails (Kaeble & Gaze 2016, 1). According to recent estimates, children born in 1990 of an African Ameri- can father without a high school diploma face a 50 percent probability of experiencing the incarceration of their male parent before reaching age 14 (Wildeman 2009, 273). Black men born between 1975 and 1979 who did not graduate from high school had a 70 percent chance of spending some time in prison by age 35 (Western & Wildeman 2009, 231). As criminolo- gist Bruce Western has illustrated, the cycle of imprisonment and reentry has become a “modal life event” for a vast population of marginalized Black and Latino youth, for whom the experience of incarceration has become more likely than such life-course milestones as getting married, attending college, or serving in the military (Western 2006, 20–32). his extreme concentration of the state’s penal power among poor urban communities of color has led critical scholars to describe the historically unprecedented carceral expansion of the last few decades as the consolidation of a racial- ized paradigm of punitive governance of the poor in a neoliberal society * Alessandro De Giorgi (email: alessandro.degiorgi@sjsu.edu) is Associate Professor at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. He received his PhD in Criminology from Keele University (United Kingdom) in 2005. His teaching and research interests include critical theories of punishment and social control, urban ethnography, and radical political economy. He is the author of Rethinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics (Ashgate, 2006) and editor of a special issue of Social Justice on “Beyond Mass Incarceration: Crisis & Critique in North- American Penal Systems” (2015).