“I’m Not Free. I’m Just Not Wearing Orange"

Abstract

Reintegration after release from prison occurs under conditions of risk-based governance. While existing scholarship has examined the structural apparatus of this governing logic, the identity work change requires, and what is at stake when belonging is withheld, none fully accounts for how these dimensions converge over time or what that convergence cumulatively produces. Grounded in over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Ontario, Canada, I demonstrate how post-release governance erodes the conditions under which stable belonging becomes possible. I build on Wacquant’s (2001) carceral-assistential complex to trace this erosion inward across three registers of social life: the tactical navigation of restrictive supervision at the behavioural register, the collapse of self-understanding under continuous evaluative demands at the moral register, and the dissolution of personhood through the convergence of hypervisibility and material neglect at the ontological register. My findings empirically expand and deepen Wacquant’s account by tracing what the carceral-assistential complex produces over time in the people subject to it. I also introduce two concepts to criminology and the sociology of punishment. Self-reform labour describes the sustained, largely unrecognized work of performing change for institutional audiences with the authority to grant or withhold recognition. Permanent provisionality – built on Spiegel (2021) and grounded in the carceral-assistential complex – describes the cumulative impact of this governing logic: a suspension between acceptance and exclusion where recognition is held perpetually in view but never within reach. Through the lens of permanent provisionality, I bring risk governance, desistance, and recognition scholarship into conversation to demonstrate that the foreclosure of belonging is the organizing logic of reintegration. This arrangement is difficult to identify and contest because the system makes the damage appear as an individual failure. I conclude with policy implications, limitations, and directions for future research.