From Risk to Healing: Advancing the Radical Healing Framework In Reentry Research and Practice with Transition-Age Black Males

Transition-age Black men returning from incarceration encounter profound and persistent risks to health, stability, and social reintegration, including housing insecurity, labor market exclusion, surveillance, and psychological distress. These inequities are not incidental but are produced and sustained through structural racism and carceral logics. Despite this, dominant reentry research and policy frameworks continue to prioritize risk reduction and recidivism, often overlooking culturally grounded processes that promote healing, agency, long-term well-being, and desistance.

This roundtable advances Radical Healing as a theoretically grounded and practice-relevant framework for reentry, contributing to social work theory, research, and intervention development. Drawing on life history narrative interviews with formerly incarcerated transition-age Black males, the session examines four interrelated mechanisms of the Radical Healing Framework: 1) Cultural Authenticity and Self-knowledge; 2) Emotional and Social Support; 3) Radical Hope; and 4) Critical Consciousness. It explores how these processes shape reentry experiences and health and well-being.

Each paper offers a distinct but complementary perspective. Paper 1 examines identity reconstruction and cultural authenticity as protective mechanisms, highlighting implications for culturally responsive clinical and group-based interventions. Paper 2 focuses on emotional and social support, emphasizing relational and community-based processes of healing and identifying opportunities for peer-led and community-driven program models. Paper 3 explores radical hope as a form of future orientation and meaning-making, and considers its relevance to strengths-based intervention design. Paper 4 examines the development of critical consciousness and its role in navigating structural barriers, with implications for empowerment-based practice and structural competence in social work.

Across these papers, participants’ narratives illuminate how healing-centered processes unfold within, and in resistance to, structural racism. The roundtable will explicitly engage multiple viewpoints, including strengths-based versus deficit-oriented frameworks, individual versus structural approaches to reentry, and the role of social work in addressing multilevel racism-related risk factors. Panelists will also reflect on theoretical and methodological considerations, including the use of life history narrative approaches to center lived experience and generate practice-relevant knowledge

This session is designed to be interactive, with time allocated for dialogue among presenters and participants to critically examine how the Radical Healing Framework can inform social work practice, policy, and future research. Key implications include integrating culturally grounded healing-centered mechanisms into reentry programming, developing community-based, peer-led, prevention-oriented interventions, and enacting policy reforms to address structural barriers to successful reintegration.

Aligned with the mission of the social work profession, this roundtable advances equity-focused, healing-centered approaches that move beyond risk management toward transformative social work responses to reentry.