Exploring Post-Incarceration Residential Trajectories: Indicators of Housing Stability during the Re-Entry Process

ABSTRACT

Extant research on housing instability focuses on external housing barriers but limited research exists on individual-level indicators of housing stability for individuals returning to society from incarceration. This study addresses this gap with data collected from 70 individuals recently released from incarceration who returned to Bexar County (San Antonio, Texas) that were not placed in specific housing programmes, leaving them to seek housing independently. The study explores residential trajectories and the utility of individual-level characteristics, specifically readiness for change, in relation to housing stability. The findings reveal the importance of assessing the dynamics of each individual living situation since many of the participants are housed but not in stable housing situations. Furthermore, readiness for change (specifically action, self-sufficiency, and human agency) is found to be a significant indicator of housing stability and may represent an important intervention target for re-entry and reintegration programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing stability
• housing instability
• residential trajectories
• re-entry
• readiness for change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The internal consistency is low for agency, forethought, and reflexivity but the combined human agency subscale is conceptually and statistically more robust and therefore used in the analysis instead of the individual metrics.

2. Several of the groups violated the assumption of normality for the one-way ANOVA so the Kruskal-Wallis H test was also conducted. These tests also resulted in no statistical significance.

3. The entire sample was considered in the Mann-Whitney U analysis. The analysis was conducted on the temporary housing vs. stable housing groups and transitioning housing vs. stable housing groups but none of the results were significant.

4. Refer to the list of endorsers of the Ban the Box campaign (bantheboxcampaign.org) which is an initiative by the national grassroots civil and human rights organization All of Us or None.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Texas at San Antonio, Office of the Vice President for Research [GREAT Grant].