Despite decades of critical reframings, policy and practice on prisoner (re)entry often remains situated within a framework of individual responsibility that fails to acknowledge the structural drivers of criminalization. Attending to individual symptoms rather than root social, political and economic causes, such approaches may ultimately reinforce the inequalities and injustices that fuel imprisonment. This article presents a case study of an alternative approach. It examines A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization in South Los Angeles, California, that offers housing and support to women coming home from prison through a critical and holistic framework-one that attends simultaneously to the physical, mental and social contexts that shape lived experiences before, during and after prison. Drawing from seven years of observation and participation, supplemented by ten in-depth interviews, I argue that a critical, holistic approach can have a significant positive impact for people returning home from prison.

People with criminal records seeking employment face a dilemma: how to discuss their conviction(s) in a job interview. Convicted job seekers are encouraged to draft, revise, and rehearse their "conviction scripts" and to approach their delivery as a Goffmanian performance. Drawing from participant observation within a nonprofit employment program in Southern California, this article analyzes job seekers' attempts to craft narratives that will satisfy employers' curiosities and concerns, with the assistance of professional coaches. I find that rather than challenge criminalizing practices or stigma itself, job seekers are encouraged to dissociate from criminal stigma and develop narratives that reinforce dominant frameworks of personal responsibility, remorse, and rehabilitation.They also regularly veer, however, from these conventions, in search of narratives that more accurately explain and contextualize their decisions. I argue that the act of scripting convictions is thus a political process in motion, a negotiation of power, with real life consequences. While at present, conviction scripting tends to reproduce the inequalities that underlie the criminal punishment system, the article concludes by exploring how criminalized people could craft scripts that contribute to their liberation. [stigma, criminalization, race, criminal records, employment] RESUMEN Las personas con registros de antecedentes penales que buscan empleo enfrentan un dilema: cómo discutir sus condena(s) en una entrevista de trabajo. Las personas que buscan empleo habiendo sido condenadas son animadas a redactar borradores, revisar, y practicar sus "textos de condena" y abordar su presentación oral como una presentación teatral Goffmaniana. Basado en observación participativa dentro de un programa de empleo

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