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The literature on community policing makes one thing plain: there is no clear definition of what community policing actually is. The identity of “criminals” and “exoffenders” is similarly uncertain. This paper takes advantage of this confusion and offers some contextual data regarding former prisoners and how they have been led to view the world. This rendering does not leave community policing out of the picture—far from it. By and large, former prisoners live in the persistent embrace of police agencies. For “ex-offenders,” escaping from the corrections sphere is as unlikely, and in some instances, as unappealing, as escaping from oneself. This paper forgoes all but a few anecdotal accounts of former prisoners who peacefully coexist (and sometimes thrive) in association with progressive policing. Instead of dwelling on some of the attendant details of their personal stories, this paper moves up one level of abstraction to describe aspects of a perceptual schema common to persons subjected to punitive incarceration and reentry.

This paper, unfortunately, is not the how-to guide that may be implied by the title. What it intends to be is a discussion of both what is and of what might be in the world of criminal justice and prisoner reentry. I justify this broad, ambitious statement of purpose by saying simply that there is no “crime” without “criminals,” and this working paper is a piece of their story: a story of weeds who might be seeds.