In the U.S., there are around 800,000 people on parole, and Black men and women areoverrepresented in correctional populations nationally and in the state of Michigan (Council of Criminal Justice, 2025; Kajstura & Sawyer, 2024; Sawyer & Wagner, 2024). Existing research shows that a common concern for returning citizens is completing parole supervision and dealing with the collateral consequences of incarceration (Jones, 2018; Vallas & Dietrich, 2014; Wang, 2023). To make matters worse, returning citizens also experience a more clandestine barrier of digital inequality (Blomberg et al., 2021; Digital Equity Act of 2021, 2021; Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al., 2019; Reisdorf et al., 2022; Seo et al., 2020). The intersection of collateral consequences and digital inequality hinders returning citizens from completing supervision conditions and heightens their recidivism risk (Arguelles & Ortiz-Luis, 2021; McDougall et al., 2017; McDougall & Pearson, 2020), and reintegration challenges become even more salient across racial groups, as Black returning citizens experience collateral consequences, personal barriers, and digital inequality more often (Digital Equity Act of 2021, 2021; Gurusami, 2019; Kajstura & Sawyer, 2024; The Sentencing Project, 2018). Yet, the existing research on returning citizens’ digital inequality is limited and fails to examine Black returning citizens’ digital inequality despite their multiple marginalizing statuses. The current study builds on the Digital Rehabilitation Model framework (Reisdorf & Rikard, 2018) and the work of other digital inequality scholars (Gilbert, 2010; Helsper, 2012, 2021) by using the Intersectional Digital Rehabilitation Model as a framework to qualitatively explore 73 Black returning citizens’ experiences with digital inequality. The study also uses an intersectional approach and methodology to explore potential nuances in the digital inequality of 14 Black men and 14 Black women in the sample. The study’s results revealed that Black returning citizens experience socio-digital inequalities, meaning that their experiences with racism, sexism, and felony discrimination compound with their experience of digital inequalities, and this not only makes it harder for them to access and use technology but also to meet supervision requirements and get their other personal needs met. However, the findings also indicate that participants’ digital inequality should be viewed along a spectrum because they had positive experiences as well and recognized that technology could serve a convenient and helpful purpose in their reentry process so long as they can access it and have the skills to use it. Furthermore, there were not very many nuances that emerged in the narratives of the Black men and women, except that the men more often described negative online job search experiences and perceptions of the cost of rideshare services, whereas the women more often described negative experiences using technology for health and transportation-related needs but more positive experiences with rideshare services. Taken together, the results indicate that correctional facilities and organizations working with returning citizens can and need to do more to increase their access to quality, affordable technology, and digital skills, as technology is becoming increasingly entrenched in the reentry process.
Read
