Reentry as a gendered carceral continuum: Surveillance, neglect, and the extension of punishment

Reentry is commonly presented as a bridge between incarceration and social reintegration. Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study with women incarcerated and released on parole in Portugal, this article shows how reentry operates as a gendered and spatially extended regime of punishment, characterized by the coexistence of surveillance, institutional neglect and abandonment. Rather than enabling social reintegration, reentry reproduces structural inequalities, stigma, and embodied harms across prison and community spaces. Situating the analysis within critical reentry studies and feminist abolitionist scholarship, the article extends these perspectives to a Southern European context, showing how carceral power persists through welfare withdrawal, low-intensity supervision, and the enduring, often invisible impacts of incarceration. It calls for rethinking reentry as an anti-punitive practice grounded in structural transformation and collective care.