“The Civil Rights Movement of Our Time”: Reentry Workers' Moral Identity Work

Based on in‐depth interviews with social workers in prison reentry programs, which aim to help formerly incarcerated people integrate back into their communities, we analyze the discursive construction of moral selves. We show how reentry workers used discourses of religion and social justice to portray themselves as altruistically motivated to do the work. We also show how they rhetorically invoked shared experiences with trauma and incarceration to present themselves as compassionate. Their moral identity work sometimes varied according to their biographies or the organization they worked for (e.g., faith‐based vs. secular), and it sometimes resonated with moral discourses of progressive whiteness or racial uplift. We conclude by addressing contributions to reentry research, conceptualizing and studying identity work, and understanding moral identity work as a generic social process that can be implicated in systemic inequality reproduction.