Bio

Andrea Leverentz’s research centers on the impact of crime and incarceration on individuals and communities. Her book, The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma: How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance (Rutgers University Press 2014) looks at how women talk about and manage competing messages about what it means to return to their communities post-incarceration, and how their experiences are shaped by their roles as women, Black women, mothers, daughters, sisters, romantic partners, and employees. Currently, she is analyzing interview and observational data from an NSF-funded project on the neighborhood context of prisoner reentry, both from the perspective of men and women returning from prison and from residents of receiving communities. Together, these data provide valuable information to better understand the impact of community context and residential change on desistance, how communities view and respond to returning prisoners, and how people who have been incarcerated understand and experience their neighborhood context. In addition, she is analyzing how these experiences are raced and gendered.