Dissertation Title: Bureaucracies of Innocence: Reentry and Remedy After Wrongful Conviction

Committee: Kimberly Hoang (Chair), Julian Go, Robert Vargas, Reuben Jonathan Miller (Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice)

Utilizing ethnographic methods, my dissertation examines how freed and exonerated people access post-incarceration support, as well as the processes and mechanisms that comprise pursuing wrongful conviction statutory compensation and civil damages in Illinois. I argue that these processes become an integral part of experiencing reentry for many freed and exonerated people, creating a social life of innocence as individuals learn about, pursue, and attain these remedies. While laws and policies created to rectify wrongful conviction and incarceration might be well-intentioned, they also create divergent paths toward attaining ‘freedom’ after incarceration, maintaining and (re)producing social, economic, and political inequities. Largely contingent on their innocence claims and judicial determinations of innocence, these organizational and institutional structures shape how freed and exonerated people understand and navigate post-incarceration life.