“On the Street, the Only Person You Gotta Bow Down to Is Yourself”: Masculinity, Homelessness, and Incarceration

Abstract

Despite the well-established link between homelessness and incarceration, very little qualitative research has focused on the social processes that underlie this nexus. In this article, I draw on 19 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men who reported pre-prison housing instability, supplemented with 5 interviews with formerly-incarcerated men experiencing homelessness, to explore the gendered nature of the homelessness-incarceration nexus. I propose the concept of “liberative instability”—defined as an unfettered lifestyle characterized by double-edged freedom and independence—to explore the changing meaning of homelessness in men’s narratives of their life course. Additionally, I explore how themes of masculinity and liberative instability are embedded in men’s narratives of freedom and confinement as they reflect on their experiences with homelessness and incarceration. These findings animate existing quantitative research by highlighting that the homelessness-incarceration nexus cannot be understood fully or disrupted without considering the significance of age-graded cultural scripts regarding masculinity.

Keywords:

• Homelessness
• incarceration
• masculinity
• the life course

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr. Bryanna Fox and the anonymous reviewers at Justice Quarterly for their constructive comments. I am also thankful to Alex Sinha and Catherine Tan for their valuable input on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To avoid placing undue pressure on potential participants, I did not attempt to recruit participants in person if I had already mailed them a letter but had not received a response indicating interest in participation. Because I cannot know how many (and which) men wanted to participate in the study but were unable to because their letters of interest never reached me, it is impossible to reach any meaningful conclusions about a possible selection bias in the sample.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janani Umamaheswar

Dr. Janani Umamaheswar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University. Her research interests are in the areas of incarceration, gender, the life course, and qualitative research methods. Dr. Umamaheswar’s work has been published in journals such as Journal of Family Issues, Incarceration, Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology; Punishment & Society; Crime, Media, Culture; and Women & Criminal Justice.