Defining Post-release ‘Success’: Using Assemblage and Phenomenography to Reveal Difference and Complexity in Post-prison Conceptions

Abstract

The complexity of men’s experience of prison release is frequently reduced to singular narratives about reoffending risks or reintegration challenges. This paper seeks to enlarge this conventional view by highlighting the heterogeneous ways in which prison release may be experienced and understood. Analysis of men’s experience of release from prison in Victoria, Australia, shows how the concept of assemblage and a phenomenographic methodology can work together to capture and convey this heterogeneity. By assembling the ways ex-prisoners understand and experience release together with the conceptions of post-release support workers this approach highlights conflict and convergence between dif..