The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family [1st ed.] 978-3-030-12743-5;978-3-030-12744-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxiii
Introduction (Marie Hutton, Dominique Moran)....Pages 1-11
Front Matter ....Pages 13-13
Prisoners’ Families’ Research: Developments, Debates and Directions (Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson, Karen Souza, Friedrich Lösel)....Pages 15-40
Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions About Prison Visitation (Joshua C. Cochran)....Pages 41-64
Developments and Next Steps in Theorizing the Secondary Prisonization of Families (Megan Comfort)....Pages 65-79
Who Are Prisoners’ Family Members? Towards an Holistic and Intersectional Framework (Johnna Christian)....Pages 81-97
A Holistic Approach to Prisoners’ Families—From Arrest to Release (Rachel Condry, Peter Scharff Smith)....Pages 99-118
Opportunities and Challenges for Work on Behalf of Families Affected by Imprisonment: The Experience of Families Outside (Nancy Loucks)....Pages 119-138
Front Matter ....Pages 139-139
Experiences of Male Partners of Women Prisoners (Tomer Einat)....Pages 141-163
The Traumatic Bereavement of Children Experiencing the Loss of a Loved One to Death Row (Sandra Joy, Elizabeth Beck, Ashley Hurley)....Pages 165-180
Relatives of Registered Sex Offenders: Considering the Costs of Providing Family Support (David Patrick Connor)....Pages 181-202
Partners of Incarcerated Men: Questioning Caring Stereotypes (Karen Souza, Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson, Friedrich Lösel)....Pages 203-226
Front Matter ....Pages 227-227
A Comparison of the Position of Grandmother Carers for Children with Parents in Prison in the UK, Trinidad and Tobago, Romania and Ghana (Ben Raikes, Romeo Asiminei, Karene-Anne Nathaniel, Eric Awich Ochen, George Pascaru, Gloria Seruwagi)....Pages 229-250
Families’ Experiences in a Prison Visitors’ Centre (Rebecca Foster)....Pages 251-272
Prison Visitation as Accessible Engagement: Encounters, Bystanders, Performance, and Inattention (Dominique Moran, Tom Disney)....Pages 273-294
Acorn House Revisited: ‘Think Family, Up and Down and Side to Side’ (Ben Raikes, Kelly Lockwood)....Pages 295-315
Front Matter ....Pages 317-317
The Rights of Children with an Imprisoned Parent in the Republic of Ireland (Aisling Parkes, Fiona Donson)....Pages 319-340
Hearing Children’s Voices in Studies of Familial Incarceration: Experiences from a Canadian Study (Else Marie Knudsen)....Pages 341-364
The Rights of Children of Imprisoned Parents (Helen Codd)....Pages 365-384
A Labour of Love: The Experiences of Parents of Prisoners and Their Role as Human Rights Protectors (Marie Hutton)....Pages 385-405
Front Matter ....Pages 407-407
Reflecting on the Value(s) of Family Interventions for People Subject to Punishment in the Community (Becky Clarke, Rachel Kinsella, Craig Fletcher)....Pages 409-429
Mothering Under Community Criminal Justice Supervision in the USA (D. R. Gina Sissoko, Lorie S. Goshin)....Pages 431-455
Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Behaviour (Sytske Besemer, Laura Bui)....Pages 457-478
Intergenerational Social Exclusion in Prisoners’ Families (Kirsten L. Besemer, Susan Dennison)....Pages 479-501
School Experiences of Children of Prisoners: Strengthening Support in Schools in England and Wales (Julia Morgan, Caroline Leeson)....Pages 503-518
Back Matter ....Pages 519-525

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family Edited by Marie Hutton · Dominique Moran

Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology

Series Editors Ben Crewe Institute of Criminology University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Yvonne Jewkes Social & Policy Sciences University of Bath Bath, UK Thomas Ugelvik Faculty of Law University of Oslo Oslo, Norway

This is a unique and innovative series, the first of its kind dedicated entirely to prison scholarship. At a historical point in which the prison population has reached an all-time high, the series seeks to analyse the form, nature and consequences of incarceration and related forms of punishment. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology provides an important forum for burgeoning prison research across the world. Series Advisory Board Anna Eriksson (Monash University) Andrew M. Jefferson (DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture) Shadd Maruna (Rutgers University) Jonathon Simon (Berkeley Law, University of California) Michael Welch (Rutgers University) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14596

Marie Hutton · Dominique Moran Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family

Editors Marie Hutton School of Law, Politics and Sociology University of Sussex Falmer, UK

Dominique Moran University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ISBN 978-3-030-12743-5 ISBN 978-3-030-12744-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933327 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: GettyImages-601007075 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This interdisciplinary handbook is itself the product of an interdisciplinary collaboration. The idea for it emerged as part of a three-year research project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and entitled Breaking the Cycle: Prison Visits and Recidivism. Carceral geographer Dominique Moran was Principal Investigator, Psychologist Louise Dixon was co-investigator, and socio-legal scholar Marie Hutton and geographer Tom Disney were research assistants. In concentrating on the socio-spatial context of prison visitation in a UK facility, the cross-disciplinary dialogue, particularly between the present editors Hutton and Moran, demonstrated the value of bringing together a range of perspectives to better understand the relationships between prison and the family. Our thanks go to the authors, whose contributions make up this volume. We are enormously grateful for your hard work, and also for the insightful comments of peer reviewers. We offer our appreciation to our publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, to the series editors for Studies in Prisons and Penology Yvonne Jewkes, Ben Crewe and Thomas Ugelvik, and to our institutions, the University of Birmingham and the University of Sussex, for supporting this endeavour. Marie would like to offer thanks to her Mother, Kathleen for her never-ending love and support during this process. The greatest debt of gratitude is owed to the many members of prisoners’ families who have graciously and generously shared their experiences both

v

vi     Acknowledgements

with us and with other contributors to this volume, and without whom this collection would not have been possible. We dedicate this book to you. University of Sussex University of Birmingham

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Marie Hutton and Dominique Moran Part I  Contemporary Issues: Understanding Prisoners’ Families 2

Prisoners’ Families’ Research: Developments, Debates and Directions 15 Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson, Karen Souza and Friedrich Lösel

3

Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions About Prison Visitation 41 Joshua C. Cochran

4

Developments and Next Steps in Theorizing the Secondary Prisonization of Families 65 Megan Comfort

5

Who Are Prisoners’ Family Members? Towards an Holistic and Intersectional Framework 81 Johnna Christian

6

A Holistic Approach to Prisoners’ Families—From Arrest to Release 99 Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith vii

viii     Contents

7

Opportunities and Challenges for Work on Behalf of Families Affected by Imprisonment: The Experience of Families Outside 119 Nancy Loucks

Part II  Different Perspectives: Widening the Lens 8

Experiences of Male Partners of Women Prisoners 141 Tomer Einat

9

The Traumatic Bereavement of Children Experiencing the Loss of a Loved One to Death Row 165 Sandra Joy, Elizabeth Beck and Ashley Hurley

10 Relatives of Registered Sex Offenders: Considering the Costs of Providing Family Support 181 David Patrick Connor 11 Partners of Incarcerated Men: Questioning Caring Stereotypes 203 Karen Souza, Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson and Friedrich Lösel Part III  Engaging with the Prison 12 A Comparison of the Position of Grandmother Carers for Children with Parents in Prison in the UK, Trinidad and Tobago, Romania and Ghana 229 Ben Raikes, Romeo Asiminei, Karene-Anne Nathaniel, Eric Awich Ochen, George Pascaru and Gloria Seruwagi 13 Families’ Experiences in a Prison Visitors’ Centre 251 Rebecca Foster 14 Prison Visitation as Accessible Engagement: Encounters, Bystanders, Performance, and Inattention 273 Dominique Moran and Tom Disney

Contents     ix

15 Acorn House Revisited: ‘Think Family, Up and Down and Side to Side’ 295 Ben Raikes and Kelly Lockwood Part IV  Recognising the Rights of Prisoners’ Families 16 The Rights of Children with an Imprisoned Parent in the Republic of Ireland 319 Aisling Parkes and Fiona Donson 17 Hearing Children’s Voices in Studies of Familial Incarceration: Experiences from a Canadian Study 341 Else Marie Knudsen 18 The Rights of Children of Imprisoned Parents 365 Helen Codd 19 A Labour of Love: The Experiences of Parents of Prisoners and Their Role as Human Rights Protectors 385 Marie Hutton Part V  Beyond Imprisonment 20 Reflecting on the Value(s) of Family Interventions for People Subject to Punishment in the Community 409 Becky Clarke, Rachel Kinsella and Craig Fletcher 21 Mothering Under Community Criminal Justice Supervision in the USA 431 D. R. Gina Sissoko and Lorie S. Goshin 22 Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Behaviour 457 Sytske Besemer and Laura Bui 23 Intergenerational Social Exclusion in Prisoners’ Families 479 Kirsten L. Besemer and Susan Dennison

x     Contents

24 School Experiences of Children of Prisoners: Strengthening Support in Schools in England and Wales 503 Julia Morgan and Caroline Leeson Index 519

Notes on Contributors

Romeo Asiminei  is Head of Department of Sociology and Social Work at Universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza, in Iași, Romania. He was a lead researcher on the Children of Prisoners Interventions and Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health (COPING) Project. Elizabeth Beck is a Professor in the School of Social Work at Andrew Young School of Policy Studies within Georgia State University, USA. Her research interests are in the areas of mass incarceration, forensic social work and restorative justice. Dr. Beck is author of 25 peer review articles, one law review article and three books. Her book In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families, published by OUP received the American Library Association CHOICE award for Outstanding Academic Title of 2007. She has an edited volume also published by OUP, Social Work and Restorative Justice: Skills for Dialogue, Peacemaking, and Reconciliation. Her forthcoming book The Homelessness Industry: A Critique of US Social Policy is published with Lynne Rienner Press. From 2006 to 2010, she was Principle Investigator to the Georgia Council for Restorative Justice, examining Defence Initiated Victim Outreach as a restorative justice strategy often used in death penalty cases. She is PI of the Professional Excellence Programme, which provides training for the Division of Families and Children Services, and The Child Welfare Community Collaborative. Beck is also involved in a number of community-based and criminal “in” justice initiatives. She teaches in Phillips State Prison with the Common Good Atlanta programme. She has consulted on numerous capital cases, served as an expert in state and federal cases and provided training to hundreds of capital defence teams. xi

xii     Notes on Contributors

Kirsten L. Besemer is a lecturer in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Her research examines through what mechanisms incarceration may impact on prisoners’ families and communities. Kirsten previously worked at the Institute for Social Policy Housing, and Equality research. In this role, she conducted research on poverty and social exclusion in the UK. Sytske Besemer is a developmental criminologist and psychologist and investigates intergenerational transmission of criminal and other behaviours, interactions between parents and children and other aspects around crime over the life-course. She was educated at Leiden University, VU University Amsterdam, and the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. She conducted post-doctoral research at UC Berkeley and now works as a criminal justice researcher at Uber. Laura Bui  is Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law, Manchester University. She is a chartered psychologist with an educational background in psychology and criminology. Her research examines social narratives and sociopsychological mechanisms of youth antisocial and violent behaviour. Johnna Christian is an Associate Professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark. She has published research about family visitation at prisons, the social and economic implications of maintaining ties to incarcerated people and re-entry and reintegration after incarceration. She is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Moving Beyond Recidivism: Expanding Approaches to Research on Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration (NYU Press) and is a member of the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network. Becky Clarke is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests include the gendered and racialised experiences of penal and welfare policies, processes of ‘othering’ and criminalisation and the construction of knowledge (and ignorance). Joshua C. Cochran, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Criminal Justice. His research interests include theory, punishment and prisoner re-entry. His work has appeared in Criminology, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Justice Quarterly, the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, in a recent book, with Daniel P. Mears, Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Sage), and in a forthcoming book, The Fundamentals of Criminology and Criminal Justice Inquiry: The Science and Art of Conducting, Evaluating, and Using Research

Notes on Contributors     xiii

(Cambridge University Press). He was recently awarded the Distinguished New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Corrections and Sentencing (2017) and the New Scholar Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2018). Helen Codd is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. She has an extensive international record of research and publications in relation to prisons, prisoners and prisoners’ families, her work having been cited with approval by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights. Questions of diversity and rights have underpinned her research throughout her career and she has recently spoken as an invited ‘Global Human Rights Champion’ at the UN. She has a strong record of collaboration and consultancy with third sector voluntary organisations and NGO’s and has been appointed by the UK Ministry of Justice as a MAPPA Strategic Management Board Lay Adviser. Megan Comfort  is a Senior Research Sociologist with the Youth, Violence Prevention and Community Justice programme at RTI International and affiliated faculty in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work focuses on the intersection of criminal justice involvement, family relationships, health, and well-being. As one of the early researchers studying the repercussive effects of mass incarceration, she has published extensively on how people are affected by the imprisonment of a family member or loved one. She is the author of Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and a co-author with Tasseli McKay, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir of Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019). Rachel Condry  is an Associate Professor of Criminology and a Fellow of St Hilda’s College at the University of Oxford. Her work focuses broadly on the intersections between crime and the family, which has included research projects on the families of serious offenders, prisoners’ families, parenting expertise in youth justice and adolescent to parent violence. Her most recent book draws together the work of international researchers on the topic of prisoners’ families (Prisons, Punishment and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? co-edited with Peter Scharff Smith, OUP 2018). Rachel is a co-editor of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, and a trustee for the Howard League for Penal Reform. David Patrick Connor is a criminologist based in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. For three years, Dr. Connor served as an Assistant Professor of

xiv     Notes on Contributors

Criminal Justice at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. Primarily recognised as an expert on sex offender legislation, Dr. Connor is regularly consulted by correctional agencies and interviewed by media outlets about such laws. His other work often focuses on the experiences of individuals involved in the criminal justice system, including justice system professionals, justice-involved people, survivors and their families. Susan Dennison is a Professor and Deputy Head of School (Research) in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University as well as Deputy Director of the Griffith Criminology Institute. She is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow, examining the impact of parental incarceration on the development and well-being of incarcerated parents, their children, and their children’s caregivers. With her current Australian Research Council grant, she is investigating the ways that maternal criminal justice system involvement shapes developmental outcomes for children. More broadly, her research focuses on the contexts affecting children’s developmental systems and life outcomes as well as using evidence-based research to inform policy and prevention for at-risk children. Tom Disney  is a Human Geographer with interests around interventions into the lives of families and young people, and the institutionalisation of childhood. His research focuses on various forms of institutions that intersect with families and young people, exploring how these groups are shaped by and negotiate these interactions. His Ph.D. research explored the everyday experience of orphanages in Russia, providing an ethnographic perspective on spaces of orphan care. Tom worked as a research fellow on the ESRC project ‘‘Breaking the Cycle’: Prison Visitation and Recidivism in the UK’, and then on a major RCUK longitudinal, ethnographic study of child protection practice in the UK, which explored how social workers establish and sustain relationships with families in order to keep children safe. Tom is now Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Northumbria, UK. Fiona Donson is an academic member of staff at the School of Law, University College Cork, Ireland. She is the Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice and Human Rights which is a specialised research centre within University College Cork. She researches and teaches in the areas of Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Penology and Human Rights. Fiona’s current research includes administrative law; she is the author of Law and Public Administration in Ireland (with Dr. Darren O’Donovan) published in 2015 by Clarus Press and an expert on administrative justice in Ireland. She is also researching the rights of children of incarcerated parents with

Notes on Contributors     xv

Dr. Parkes; their co-edited book Parental Imprisonment and Children’s Rights will be published by Routledge in 2019. Fiona also has a human rights practice background. She was a human rights practitioner in Cambodia between 2002 and 2007 where she was responsible for projects on child rights, particularly working on child labour and juvenile justice. Tomer Einat  is a professor in the department of criminology at Bar Ilan University, Israel, a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Political Science, Law and International Relations, the Journal of Political Science, Law and International Relations, and the International Journal of Research in Applied Natural and Social Sciences, and the Chair of the Israeli Society of Criminology. His major areas of research are Penology, Prisons and Alternatives to Incarceration, Criminal Justice, and the Subculture of Male and Female prisoners. Professor Einat has published six books and more than 50 academic manuscripts on various criminological, Penological and Criminal Justice topics. Craig Fletcher is an Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is currently undertaking his Ph.D. looking into the impact of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and is interested in subjecting wider systems of punishment and ‘rehabilitation’ to critical analysis. Rebecca Foster  is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, working on an NIHR funded study exploring peer support for individuals experiencing homelessness and problem substance use. Prior to this, Rebecca worked as a social researcher in the Scottish Government’s crime research team and completed a Ph.D. in Criminology at the University of Glasgow, part of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Lorie S. Goshin  is an assistant professor of nursing at Hunter College in the City University of New York. She received a Masters in Parent-Child Nursing from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. and post-doctoral research scientist training at Columbia University. Dr. Goshin’s research explores the health of criminal justice-involved people and their family members, with a special focus on pregnant or parenting women and their minor children. She began working with incarcerated people while providing nursing care in a county juvenile jail. She has been honoured for her research by the American Public Health Association, the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses, the National March of Dimes, and the Foundation for New York State Nurses.

xvi     Notes on Contributors

Marie Hutton  is a lecturer in law at the University of Sussex. Driven by her own experiences of familial imprisonment, Marie’s research focusses on the lived experience of family contact in prisons and human rights from a socio-legal perspective. Sandra Joy is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Rowan University, located in Glassboro, New Jersey. She has been on the faculty at Rowan since 2002, teaching courses such as Race & Crime, Race & Social Change, and The Sociology of Death, Dying, & Bereavement. In 2002, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University and in 1990 she received her MSW from Norfolk State University. Dr. Joy is also a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a dozen years of experience as a mental health and substance abuse therapist. For more than two decades, whether Dr. Joy was working in the mental health field or within academia, she has maintained her work as a community activist. She has been an abolitionist in the anti-death penalty movement throughout this time and serves on the Board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP). Dr. Joy is the author of Coalition Building in the Anti-Death Penalty Movement: Privileged Morality, Race Realities (2010) and Grief, Loss, and Treatment for Death Row Families: Forgotten No More (2014). Rachel Kinsella  is a Researcher in the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit in Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests include the gendered inequalities in the criminal justice system and youth justice, and using research to inform criminal justice policy and practice. Else Marie Knudsen is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at Trent University in Canada. Her main research interests are the criminal justice system and the sociology of punishment, with a particular focus on the experiences, impacts and policy context of parental incarceration. She holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics (2017), an M.Sc. in Social Policy (2006) and an MSW (2002). She worked as a social worker in Toronto for several years, first as a child protection investigator, and later engaged in policy and advocacy work with a criminal justice policy organisation. Caroline Lanskey  is a Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice and Deputy Director of the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Her research addresses the criminal justice experiences of young people and families with a particular focus on imprisonment, education, citizenship, and well-being. Earlier work on the experiences of prisoners’ families has included

Notes on Contributors     xvii

the research project, ‘Risk and Protective Factors in the Resettlement of Imprisoned Fathers with their Families’ and an evaluation of an in-school programme for prisoners’ children. She is currently Principal Investigator of the Families and Imprisonment Research (FAIR) study, a prospective longitudinal study of resilience following parental incarceration. Caroline Leeson  is Associate Professor in Early Childhood Studies at York, St John University with interests in the welfare of looked after children, children with a parent in prison, children’s centre leadership and reflective practice. Before working in HE, she worked as a safeguarding social worker and as leader of a family centre. Kelly Lockwood is a Criminology Lecturer at the University of Salford. Her work focuses on feminist narrative methodologies, disrupted mothering and gender and the criminal justice system. Kelly is particularly interested in how motherhood is understood and experienced by women in prison. Friedrich Lösel  is an emeritus professor and past director at the Institute of Psychology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), and at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University (UK). He has published 418 articles or chapters and 38 books, research reports or special issues on topics such as juvenile delinquency, offender treatment, football hooliganism, school bullying, psychopathy, resilience, developmental prevention, prisoners and their families and extremism. He is a recipient of the ASC Sellin-Glueck Award, Lifetime Award of the European Association of Psychology and Law, Lifetime Awards of the ASC Divisions of Experimental Criminology and of Developmental & Life Course Criminology, Joan McCord Award of the Academy of Experimental Criminology, German Psychology Prize and Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Nancy Loucks  is the Chief Executive of Families Outside, a Scottish voluntary organisation that works on behalf of families affected by imprisonment. Prior to this she worked as an Independent Criminologist, receiving her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and in 2012 was appointed as Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Law, Crime and Justice. Nancy was awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours List for services to Education and Human Rights. She co-chairs the Justice & Care work stream for the Independent Care Review for Scotland; is Secretary General to the Board of Children of Prisoners Europe; and is on the inaugural Board of the International Coalition for Children of Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP).

xviii     Notes on Contributors

Lucy Markson obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Cambridge. She is a research associate on the Families and Imprisonment (FAIR) research study at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and a forensic psychologist for Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. Her research focuses on the impact of paternal imprisonment on families. She is also interested in the role of psychology in prisons. Dominique Moran is Professor in Carceral Geography at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her interdisciplinary research in carceral geography engages with criminology, legal studies, prison sociology and psychology to explore carceral practices in a variety of contexts including the UK, Finland, Norway, Denmark and the Russian Federation. She is interested in the spatiality of imprisonment and has pursued this through ESRC-funded studies of contemporary prison design and the socio-spatial context of prison visitation. She is author of Carceral Geography (2015) and an editor of Carceral Spaces (2013), Historical Geographies of Prisons (2015), and Carceral Spatiality (2017). Julia Morgan is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health and Well-being at Greenwich University and her research interests focus on marginalised children both in the UK and Globally. She has carried out research with children of prisoners, children who live and work on the street and missing children. Before working in HE, she worked as a health professional, a researcher on a child development study and was the manager of a family support centre. Karene-Anne Nathaniel  is a lecturer in Social Work at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad & Tobago. Her areas of interest include social work education along the continuum of pedagogy to gatekeeping and continuing professional education and macro practice. Her interests in violence against women and children and families affected by incarceration is subsumed within a wider concern for all vulnerable populations, in particular, the challenge of educating and training practitioners for impactful practice where there is greatest need. Eric Awich Ochen  is based at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. His expertise is in Social Policy, Qualitative Social Research and Social Theory. Aisling Parkes is an academic member of staff at the School of Law, University College Cork, Ireland. She is a founding member and co-director of the newly established Sports Law Clinic at the School of Law, UCC.

Notes on Contributors     xix

She specialises in researching and teaching in Children’s Rights, Child Law, International Disability Law and Sports Law. Aisling’s book—Children and International Human Rights Law: The Right of the Child to be Heard was published by Routledge-Cavendish in 2013 and focuses on the legal implementation internationally of the voice of the child including the right to freedom of expression. Aisling has conducted research of an interdisciplinary nature in a range of different areas connected to international children’s rights including the rights of children with parents in prison (together with Dr. Fiona Donson), the rights of children in care, the right of the child to be heard and children’s rights in sport. Aisling’s work has been published in a range of international peer-reviewed journals including Child Care in Practice, Child and Family Law Quarterly, Journal of Social Welfare and Family and the Probation Journal. Aisling has been actively involved in the design and delivery of a course on Article 12 and listening to children to legal professionals and members of the judiciary across Europe for the past number of years. George Pascaru works for the organisation Alternative Sociale in Iasi, Romania. His specialism is supporting vulnerable children and their families. He was a researcher on the Children of Prisoners Interventions and Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health (COPING) Project. Ashley Hurley  was only 15 years old when her father was accused of killing her stepmother and sent to death row. For more than fifteen years, Ashley dealt with the trauma that comes with being a parentified child of a father on death row. Two years ago, Ashley’s father’s sentence was commuted to a sentence of life without parole after the state where he is incarcerated abolished the death penalty. Now in her thirties, Ashley is married with two daughters, yet continues to be her father’s primary support person. She maintains her ongoing position as an unapologetic abolitionist against the death penalty. Ben Raikes is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Huddersfield. His research is focused on the impact of imprisonment on children and families. He was a researcher on the large-scale European Commission funded Children of Prisoners Interventions and Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health (COPING) Project from 2010 to 2013. He is one of the founder members of the International Coalition for Children with Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP). Gloria Seruwagi is a public health specialist, based within the Makerere University School of Public Health in Kampala, Uganda. Her professional and research interests are clustered around health policy and systems focusing

xx     Notes on Contributors

on reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health. Gloria trained as a social worker with graduate training in public health and became a lecturer at Makerere University, Uganda. She has key interests in issues affecting marginalized populations and multi-sectoral system strengthening to improve their outcomes. While the focus of her work is mostly with women, children and youth she also continuously engages with critical stakeholders at all levels—from household to national and global. These include local, sub-national and national leadership; policymakers, development partners and programme implementers. Gloria is particularly interested in contributing to bridging the research-policy-practice gap. D. R. Gina Sissoko  is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York Graduate Centre. Gina studies how systemic inequalities, stress and trauma affect mental health in marginalised communities. In her research, Gina focuses particularly on the intersections of race, gender and systemic oppression with the ultimate goal of informing clinical and community interventions. Peter Scharff Smith  is Professor in the Sociology of Law at The Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, Oslo University. He has previously done research at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the University of Copenhagen, Cambridge University, and Royal Danish Defence College. He has published books and articles in English, Danish, Norwegian and German on prisons, punishment and human rights, including works on prison history, prisoners’ children, and the use and effects of solitary confinement in prisons. He has also written books and articles on the Waffen-SS and the Nazi war of extermination at the Eastern front. His publications include more than ten research monographs and edited collections and more than 70 articles and book chapters. Peter’s latest book is Prisons, Punishment, and the Family. Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? (co-edited with Rachel Condry), OUP 2018. Karen Souza  achieved her Ph.D. in psychology from City, University of London. Her dissertation focused on youth bystander reporting of peer violence. She was employed at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge from 2006 to 2013 and is currently an affiliated researcher at the Institute on the Families and Imprisonment Research (FAIR) study. She has published on the topics of sentencing, effects of imprisonment (with a focus on families), evidence-based corrections, and restorative justice. She has also worked in a correctional institution as a mental health consultant. Karen is currently a lecturer at Marymount University in the USA.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2 Fig. 14.3 Fig. 14.4

Causal model of visitation and recidivism Flowchart of work strands Prison visits as face engagements within a situation-at-large Types of interaction Mutual unfocused interaction disguised as civil inattention Focused attention via CCTV

50 136 280 281 287 289

xxi

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 11.1 Table 11.2 Table 11.3 Table 12.1 Table 12.2 Table 19.1 Table 20.1 Table 23.1 Table 23.2 Table 23.3 Table 23.4 Table 23.5

Empirical studies of visitation/family contact and recidivism Demographic characteristics of family members of RSOs Types of activities undertaken by family members of RSOs Women’s socioeconomic situations Women’s health Women’s sources of support Comparison of countries by prison population and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita Participants in each country List of participants Brief description of the five projects reviewed General household characteristics at the time of first imprisonment Social exclusion indicators and measures Incidence of social exclusion in year of imprisonment, per household with at least one affected child, compared with other households with children Comparing social exclusion of child’s household in first interview after parental/household or close family imprisonment; and five years later (N = 313) Comparing social exclusion of child’s household in first interview after parental/household or close family imprisonment, and five years later (N = 313), with a comparison group of households with a child using a randomly chosen 5-year interval (N = 2967)

45 185 185 214 215 216 232 236 389 412 485 489 491 493

494

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1 Introduction Marie Hutton and Dominique Moran

Prison and the Family ‘Prison’ and ‘the family’ are apparently incongruous concepts. ‘Prison’ is the outcome of a sentencing decision taken about an individual who is punished through separation from mainstream society, and by extension through disconnection from prior living arrangements and companions. Although the incarcerated may form new attachments to prison life itself, the basic function of imprisonment is delivered precisely through this separation and disconnection. Family is different. Long viewed as one of the essential and universal units of society, although ‘family’ traditionally means persons who are related by blood, marriage or adoption, less conventionally it also conveys a sense of ‘that climate that one ‘comes home to’ …[a] network of sharing and commitments, …regardless of blood, legal ties, adoption or marriage’ (Franklin 1990, 1029). Although family life may not always deliver these things, the concept of family is all about collectivity and togetherness, closeness and home—the very things which are broken apart by incarceration. M. Hutton (*)  School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Moran  University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_1

1

2     M. Hutton and D. Moran

Prison and the family sit in an uneasy relationship. The fact of imprisonment of a family member disrupts the family unit from which they are removed, and the prison makes its presence felt far beyond its own walls, through its carceral influence on the family, and on the wider communities within which families are located. Families arguably ‘disrupt’ the prison too—the legal rights of prisoners to maintain contact with loved ones give rise to visitation and other forms of family interaction—supportive of well-being, but often viewed as a threat to the security of the prison itself. The World Prison Brief estimates that some 11 million people are currently incarcerated worldwide (Walmsley 2016), many of whom will have families. In this era of mass incarceration, the experiences of these families should be a concern for all. Traditionally, prisoners’ families have been designated the ‘forgotten’ victims of crime. The first large-scale study of prisoners’ families entitled ‘Prisoners and their Families’ was conducted by Pauline Morris in England and Wales (Morris 1965). Morris concluded that: Too often in prison work, the family is thought of as some external appendage, remote and irrelevant to the processes of treatment and training, rather than as a continuous influence upon the man in custody. (Morris 1965, 9)

What Morris highlighted so cogently is that all too often in the past, prisoners’ families were viewed as an adjunct to studies of the impact of imprisonment, not worthy of study in their own right. Since this early study, the scholarly landscape has expanded somewhat with an ever-emerging body of work that engages specifically with the lived experiences of those connected to an imprisoned person. Thus, we have seen classic studies that have expanded our understandings of how the female partners of prisoners engage with the prison and manage their partners’ imprisonment (Fishman 1990; Girshick 1996) including Comfort’s groundbreaking study that introduced the influential concept of ‘secondary prisonization’ (Comfort 2007). A large corpus of work has focussed on the children of imprisoned parents (Boswell and Wedge 2002; Murray et al. 2009, 2012; Hairston 2003). Just recently, we have seen an important large-scale project, the Children of Prisoners: Interventions and Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health or COPING project that interviewed more than 200 children across four countries: Sweden, Romania, Germany and the UK (Jones et al. 2013). A body of research that recounts the experiences of the parents of prisoners is also emerging (Halsey and Deegan 2012, 2015; Granja 2016) including recent work on the parents of young people in prison (McCarthy and Adams 2017).

1 Introduction     3

A constant theme through much of this work is that prisoners’ families often endure both financial and emotional hardship during a prison sentence, echoing Christian’s finding that ‘staying connected to a prisoner is a time, resource, and labour intensive process’ (Christian 2005, 32). In ‘Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment ’, Mauer and Chesney-Lind designated this burden the ‘collateral consequences’ (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002). Additionally, families of prisoner can often be subjected to a ‘courtesy stigma’ as coined by Goffman (1963, 44), a form of guilt by association (Davies 1980) that can lead to their pathologisation (Knudsen 2016). This can be especially so where a loved one is imprisoned for a particularly serious crime (May 2000; Condry 2007). Increasingly, we see NGOs with a focus on offering advice and support to prisoners’ families such as, in England and Wales, Prison Advice and Care Trust and children’s charities like Barnardo’s (Glover 2009). Pan-Europe there is Children of Prisoners Europe, a conglomerate of partners across Europe working to raise awareness and advocate on behalf of the children of imprisoned parents including the yearly ‘Not my Crime Still my Sentence’ initiative. At an international level, there is an increasing recognition of the human rights of prisoners’ families in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and through the application of international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the literature on this topic (e.g. Codd 2008; Scharff Smith 2014; Lagoutte 2016; Donson and Parkes 2018), particular attention is paid to the extent to which parenthood should be considered in sentencing practices (Donson and Parkes 2016; Minson 2015).

Approaches and Perspectives This book positions itself at this troubling and painful interface between prison and the family. Conceiving of family as both ties of kin, love and marriage, and the sense of closeness cleaving to them, it seeks to represent an array of experiences which demonstrate the complexity and significance of this relationship. This is an international and interdisciplinary collection, with contributions from both established and early career scholars representing a range of geographical contexts and from a variety of disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) perspectives. Although appreciating that for some incarcerated persons, prison itself can become ‘home’, and the co-imprisoned can become ‘family’, it focuses primarily on the relationships between prisons and families who engage with prisons in order to maintain ‘family’

4     M. Hutton and D. Moran

with incarcerated persons. At a basic level, it explores the ways in which, when the prison starts to intrude into the family through the incarceration of a family member, the family is affected, by the dislocation of a member from the family unit and by the diverse and associated challenges this situation generated. But more than this, this collection also explores the ways in which prison and the family exist in parallel to and in (often very uneasy) relation with each other, either through lengthy association arising from long sentences, or through a connection that spans communities and generations. In these cases, contributions probe the ways in which prisons and families, each ever present to the other, allow each other mutual entry, and accommodate each other, often with the mediation of organisations positioned between them to facilitate this relationship. Accordingly, the collection explores a range of perspectives on this situation. Divided into five sections, it deals first with contemporary issues in understanding prisoners’ families. In this section, key thinkers in this field survey the state of the art in scholarship of prison and the family. Criminologist Caroline Lanskey, developmental psychologist Lucy Markson, psychologist Karen Souza and psychologist and criminologist Friedrich Lösel open the collection with their chapter Prisoners ’ Families Research: Developments, Debates and Directions which maps the international research landscape. Discussing reasons for its historically low profile, in relation to a narrow binary of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’, they illustrate the subsequent disciplinary shaping of research by psychology, sociology, criminology and social work, and draw attention to methodological and ethical issues and to the link between prisoners’ family research and a social justice agenda. Criminal justice specialist Joshua C. Cochran follows with a chapter on Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions About Prison Visitation in which he examines the state of theory and research related to understanding the impacts of visitation on recidivism, providing an updated and expanded theoretical and conceptual framework related to visitation and recidivism to help guide future theory, research and policy. With Developments and Next Steps in Theorizing the Secondary Prisonization of Families, sociologist Megan Comfort reflects on her own highly influential concept, discussing its original application and the developments in its use since its conception. In so doing, her chapter raises the limitations of the framework, as well as unexplored contexts in which the analytical lens of secondary prisonization could potentially yield a more extensive understanding of the connections between criminal justice involvement, social inequality, and family health and well-being. Criminologist Johnna Christian follows, with a chapter entitled Who Are Prisoners’ Family Members? Towards a Holistic and Intersectional

1 Introduction     5

Framework which asks who, specifically, are prisoners’ family members beyond spouses and significant others, and why are extended kin and friend networks important for incarcerated individuals? How do family members with multiple incarcerated individuals in their lives meet the demands of their situation? Where do prisoners’ family members fit within the broader structure of social stratification, and how does this impact their ability to provide resources and support to the incarcerated individual? Extending answers to some of those questions, criminologists Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith’s chapter A Holistic Approach to Prisoners’ Families—From Arrest to Release makes a case for the need to consider prisoners’ family members as more than prison visitors who only become visible when they enter the prison. Drawing upon evidence from empirical research in Scandinavia, the UK and elsewhere to show how children and adult relatives of prisoners are affected by each individual stage of the criminal justice process, they show that this approach has both significant implications for understanding the experiences of prisoners’ families and important consequences for how we think about the collateral effects of criminal justice and punishment. Finally, in her chapter Opportunities and Challenges for Work on Behalf of Families Affected by Imprisonment: The Experience of Families Outside, criminologist Nancy Loucks outlines the work of a small organisation that has developed an international reputation for its groundbreaking work to support children and families when a loved one goes to prison. Sharing its successes and challenges, the chapter covers the range of challenges families face. Collectively, these chapters set the scene for the contributions to come, laying out the state of the art in scholarship on prison and the family. In the following section, we ‘widen the lens’, with four chapters from Tomer Einat; Sandra Joy, Elizabeth Beck and Ashley Hurley; David Connor; and Karen Souza, Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson and Friedrich Lösel. Taken together, they cover a range of specific types of imprisonment and their implications for the family. In Experiences of Male Partners of Women Prisoners, criminologist Tomer Einat uses data from Israel to explore the motivations and justification of men who remain married to their imprisoned wives, analysing the significance of marital relationships to women prisoners’ partners and describing the dynamics of marital relationships between men and incarcerated spouses from the men’s perspective. In their chapter The Traumatic Bereavement of Children Experiencing the Loss of a Loved One to Death Row, Sandra Joy and colleagues focus on individual and family groups who have/had a loved one on death row (in the USA). They review the impact and effects on these individuals and family

6     M. Hutton and D. Moran

groups, discussing the stigma, complicated grief, disenfranchised grief, and non-finite loss that affect these family members. They also explore strategies to promote resilience, ranging from therapeutic interventions, engagement in advocacy to end the death penalty and restorative justice. Criminologist David Connor’s contribution, Relatives of Registered Sex Offenders: Considering the Costs of Providing Family Support, focuses on a specific set of challenges facing prisoners’ families. Using in-depth qualitative interviews with a wide range of family members, his chapter details the potentially negative consequences faced by these relatives as a result of providing family support to their loved ones. Concluding this section, psychologist Karen Souza and colleagues’ chapter Partners of Incarcerated Men: Questioning Caring Stereotypes discusses data from the UK which show that for some women, the shift in roles and associated responsibilities of a male partner’s incarceration promoted their own independence. Taking a feminist approach to the dialectics of inequality, they reflect on the disempowering conditions created by expectations on partners to support and care for their loved ones in prison. The following section takes us inside the prison, considering the specific nature of families’ engagement with it. Reporting on multi-site comparative data, social work scholars Ben Raikes, Romeo Asiminei, Alexandra Cuza, Karene-Anne Nathaniel, Eric Awich Ochen, George Pascaru and Gloria Seruwagi present A Comparison of the Position of Grandmother Carers for Children with Parents in Prison in the UK, Trinidad and Tobago, Romania and Ghana. In this chapter, they consider the ways in which grandmothers, determined to care for the children of their own imprisoned children, provide this care at considerable cost to themselves, both financially, in health terms, and in the face of a lack of practical, emotional or financial support, compounded by stigmatisation within their communities. In this chapter, they consider the difficulties of maintaining contact both between their own children and grandchildren, and between themselves and the imprisoned parent, and the stress arising from these multiple challenges. Reporting on her research in Scotland, criminologist Rebecca Foster’s chapter Families’ Experiences in a Prison Visitors’ Centre explores the important but often overlooked spaces of prison visitors’ centres, reflecting on how the existence of such a designated space offers families the opportunity to establish their own informal support networks, which have perhaps unexpected degrees of underlying nuance and complexity. Taking us further inside the prison, geographers Dominique Moran and Tom Disney consider the specific social interactions taking place within the prison visiting room. In Prison Visitation as Accessible Engagement: Encounters, Bystanders, Performance

1 Introduction     7

and Inattention, they reflect on data generated in a UK prison, deploying Goffman’s dramaturgical lexicon to understand the ways in which surveillance by prison staff, both in person and via CCTV, and observation by other prisoners and visitors affect the nature of visits themselves. Finally, in Acorn House Revisited: ‘Think Family, Up and Down and Side to Side’, social work scholar Ben Raikes and criminologist Kelly Lockwood consider the Acorn House overnight stay facility at Askham Grange women’s open prison in the UK, and the expansion of its remit from accommodating imprisoned women’s children, to any person who is significant to the imprisoned mother. The chapter draws on interviews with mothers and children, detailing the impact of this provision. In the following section, which focuses on recognising the rights of prisoners’ families, a range of chapters from Ireland, Canada and the UK present a perspective informed by socio-legal scholarship. First, legal specialists Aisling Parkes and Fiona Donson’s chapter The Rights of Children with an Imprisoned Parent in the Republic of Ireland draws on a qualitative study carried out in the Republic of Ireland which gauged the extent to which the rights of children coming through the prison gates to visit their incarcerated parent(s) were recognised and protected in practice. The chapter considers how a shift in prison policy identifying family ties as a key rehabilitative opportunity produced a change in prison rhetoric, but not necessarily rights-focused results for children themselves. With Hearing Children’s Voices in Studies of Familial Incarceration: Experiences from a Canadian Study, social work researcher Else Marie Knudsen describes the state of research into children’s self-reported experiences of parental incarceration and the value of researchers asking children themselves about their experience. This chapter draws on a recent qualitative study of Canadian children of prisoners and their own opinions, beliefs, advice and experience of parental incarceration. Knudsen finds that using an approach which centres children’s own voices and values them as competent reporters on their own lives generated rich, useful and unique insights into parental incarceration. Next, legal expert Helen Codd considers The Rights of Children of Imprisoned Parents, outlining key sources of rights for children of incarcerated parents, before exploring children’s rights when a court is considering imposing a custodial sentence on a parent, and the specific issues raised when considering whether a child should reside with a parent in a custodial setting. She concludes with a lucid discussion of good practice in promoting and protecting the rights of children with incarcerated parents, questioning the limitations of rights-based approaches in themselves. Concluding this section with A Labour of Love: The Experiences of Parents of Prisoners and Their Role as

8     M. Hutton and D. Moran

Human Rights Protectors, socio-legal scholar Marie Hutton moves beyond the traditional focus on the children and romantic partners of prisoners, drawing on in-depth interviews with parents of adult children in England and Wales to elicit their lived experience of caring for their imprisoned child. Locating the burden of care carried by these parents within a human rights framework, the chapter examines the previously unconsidered role parents of prisoners can play as human rights protectors for their imprisoned child, and the human rights implications of the psychological harm this labour can cause. In the final section, ‘beyond imprisonment’, chapters consider the wider implications of relationships between prison and the family—often deploying non-traditional definitions of the ‘family’. First, sociologists Becky Clarke, Rachel Kinsella and Craig Fletcher contribute Reflecting on the Value(s) of Family Interventions for People Subject to Punishment in the Community which draws on empirical research with a diverse range of practitioners working within local community-based criminal justice interventions in an urban city in England. They consider the definition of ‘family’ in this context, and in particular how such work is conceptualised for criminalised individuals who have histories of being in the care system or who experience being homeless; and the ways in which the rationale and impact of such projects are understood by commissioners and practitioners who fund and deliver these interventions. Next, psychologists D.R. Gina Sissoko and Lorie S. Goshin’s chapter Mothering Under Community Criminal Justice Supervision in the United States addresses the dearth of research into the experiences of mothers on probation or parole, their children, the maternal– child relationship or their unique parenting challenges. They review the broader literature on community supervision to determine its potential impact on mothers and their children, with an emphasis on the intersecting issues of race, class, mental and physical health, trauma and substance use. With Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Behaviour, developmental criminologist and psychologist Sytske Besemer and criminologist Laura Bui observe that although children whose parents engage in criminal behaviour are at increased risk of engaging in this behaviour themselves later in life, relatively little is known about the causal effects of parental crime on children’s behaviour. They argue that this topic merits further study, especially outside of the USA and Europe, to uncover potential causal relationships. In the following chapter, Intergenerational Social Exclusion in Prisoners’ Families, criminologists Kirsten Besemer and Susan Dennison use a 14-year nationally representative data set of Australian families affected by imprisonment to address important gaps in knowledge about families of prisoners and social

1 Introduction     9

exclusion. Considering a range of household types, they find that prisoners’ families’ households are significantly more socially excluded than other households with children. Finally, public health and childhood specialists Julia Morgan and Caroline Leeson’s chapter School Experiences of Children of Prisoners: Strengthening Support in Schools in England and Wales recognises that children who experience a parent spending time in prison are more likely to face increased poverty, caring responsibilities, bullying and stigmatisation, mental health problems and risk of offending; alongside reduced school attendance and attainment. Exploring the impact of parental imprisonment on children’s school experiences, the chapter offers recommendations to strengthen support in schools for this group of children. Finally, a brief note on terminology. In collating the diversity of the contributions here, our purpose as editors has been to produce a handbook that makes a significant contribution to knowledge about who prisoners’ families are and what this status means in practice—in other words, recognising the autonomy and value of prisoners’ families in their own right, not just in relation to someone else. Regarding the ‘someone else’ according to whom they are conventionally defined, we are mindful of and critically engage with the performative power of language, and we are cognisant of the movement, particularly active in the USA, to move from a ‘language of labellers’ to a more humanising vocabulary. Contributions here deploy authors’ own choice of terminology (‘incarcerated person’, ‘prisoner’ and so on) rather than any terms prescribed by us for the volume as a whole.

References Boswell, Gwyneth, and Peter Wedge. 2002. Imprisoned Fathers and Their Children. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Christian, J. 2005. “Riding the Bus: Barriers to Prison Visitation and Family Management Strategies.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21(1): 31–48. Codd, Helen. 2008. In the Shadow of Prison: Families, Imprisonment and Criminal Justice. London: Willan. Comfort, Megan. 2007. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Condry, Rachel. 2007. Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Davies, R.P. 1980. “Stigmatization of Prisoners’ Families.” Prison Service Journal 40: 12–14. Donson, Fiona, and Aisling Parkes. 2016. “Weighing in the Balance: Reflections on the Sentencing Process from a Children’s Rights Perspective.” Probation Journal 63(3): 331–346.

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Donson, Fiona, and Aisling Parkes. 2018. “Rights and Security in the Shadow of the Irish Prison.” In Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? edited by Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith, 196. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fishman, Laura T. 1990. “Women at the Wall.” In A Study of Prisoners’ Wives Doing Time on the Outside. Albany State: University of New York Press. Franklin, Kris. 1990. “A Family Like Any Other Family: Alternative Methods of Defining Family in Law.” New York University Review of Law & Social Change 18: 1027–1078. Girshick, Lori B. 1996. Soledad Women: Wives of Prisoners Speak Out. Wesport, CT: Praeger. Glover, Jane. 2009. Every Night You Cry: The Realities of Having a Parent in Prison. Essex: Barnardo’s. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Granja, Rafaela. 2016. “Beyond Prison Walls: The Experiences of Prisoners Relatives and Meanings Associated with Imprisonment.” Probation Journal 63(3): 273–292. Hairston, C. 2003. “Prisoners and Their Families.” In Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Reentry on Children, Families, and Communities, 259– 284. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press. Halsey, Mark, and Simone Deegan. 2012. “Father and Son: Two Generations Through Prison.” Punishment & Society 14(3): 338–367. Halsey, Mark, and Simone Deegan. 2015. “‘Picking Up the Pieces’: Female Significant Others in the Lives of Young (ex) Incarcerated Males.” Criminology & Criminal Justice 15(2): 131–151. Jones, Adele D., Bernard Gallagher, Martin Manby, and Oliver Robertson. 2013. COPING Project (Children of Prisoners: Interventions and Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health ), edited by Adele D. Jones and Agnieszka E. WainainaWozna. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield. Knudsen, Else Marie. 2016. “Avoiding the Pathologizing of Children of Prisoners.” Probation Journal 63(3): 362–370. Lagoutte, Stéphanie. 2016. “The Right to Respect for Family Life of Children of Imprisoned Parents.” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 24(1): 204–230. Mauer, Marc, and Meda Chesney-Lind. 2002. “Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Incarceration.” New York, The New Press 4: 137–139. May, Hazel. 2000. “‘Murderers’ Relatives’” Managing Stigma, Negotiating Identity.” Journal of Contemporary ethnography 29(2): 198–221. McCarthy, Daniel, and Maria Adams. 2017. “‘Yes, I Can Still Parent: Until I Die, He Will Always Be My Son’: Parental Responsibility in the Wake of Child Incarceration.” Punishment & Society 21(1): 89–106.

1 Introduction     11

Minson, Shona. 2015. “Sentencing and Dependents: Motherhood as Mitigation.” In Exploring Sentencing Practice in England and Wales, 137–153. London: Springer. Morris, Pauline. 1965. Prisoners and Their Families. London: Allen & Unwin. Murray, Joseph, David P. Farrington, and Ivana Sekol. 2012. “Children’s Antisocial Behavior, Mental Health, Drug Use, and Educational Performance After Parental Incarceration: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 138(2): 175. Murray, Joseph, David P. Farrington, Ivana Sekol, and Rikke F. Olsen. 2009. “Effects of Parental Imprisonment on Child Antisocial Behaviour and Mental Health: A Systematic Review.” Campbell Systematic Reviews 4: 1–105. Scharff Smith, Peter 2014. When the Innocent are Punished. Basingstoke and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Walmsley, Roy. 2016. World Prison Population List. London: International Centre for Criminal Policy Research.

Part I Contemporary Issues: Understanding Prisoners’ Families

2 Prisoners’ Families’ Research: Developments, Debates and Directions Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson, Karen Souza and Friedrich Lösel

Introduction After many years of relative obscurity, research on prisoners’ families has gained significant momentum. It has expanded from case-oriented descriptive analyses of family experiences to longitudinal studies of child and family development and macro-analyses of the effects on communities in societies of mass incarceration. Now the field engages multidisciplinary and international interest although it arguably still remains on the periphery of mainstream criminological, psychological and sociological research agendas. This chapter discusses developments in prisoners’ families’ research and its positioning in academia and practice. It does not aim to provide an all-­ encompassing review of the literature; rather, it will offer some reflections on how and why the field has developed as it has and on its future directions. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first discusses reasons for the historically small body of research on prisoners’ families and for the growth in research interest over the past two decades. The second analyses patterns and shifts in the focus of research studies and considers how the field has been shaped by intersecting disciplinary interests of psychology, sociology, criminology and socio-legal studies. The final part reflects on substantive and ethical issues that are likely to shape the direction of prisoners’ families’ research in the future. C. Lanskey (*) · L. Markson · K. Souza · F. Lösel  Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_2

15

16     C. Lanskey et al.

From ‘Out of Sight’ to ‘In Mind’ For much of the twentieth century, prisoners’ families (defined as the partner and children of prisoners) received only marginal research interest (Murray 2005; Comfort 2007; Smith 2014). The small number of studies published drew attention to their social invisibility and the hardships they experienced. Prisoners’ families were called ‘hidden’ or ‘forgotten’ victims (Bakker et al. 1978; Matthews 1983; Cunningham and Baker 2003). In contrast over the past 25 years, there has been a dramatic increase in numbers of publications. A recent SCOPUS search revealed a tenfold increase in articles and books on ‘prisoners’ families’ from 1990 to 2015. However, the increase is not evenly spread across countries. The large majority of publications originated from the USA and the UK; a number were from Australia, Canada and Western Europe; and—as in other fields of criminology—there were few from Eastern Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. Looking at countries which have seen a growth of research, it is difficult to know for sure why prisoners’ families attracted little academic interest for so long. Our review of attempts to explain the omission points to four factors: state-aligned orientations of mainstream criminological research, individual interests and motivations of influential criminological researchers and practitioners, social policy and related sociological theorising on the individual and consumer society, and the social stigmatisation of prisoners’ families. Assumptions about what falls within the remit of criminological research are a likely contributing factor to the invisibility of prisoners’ families to the research gaze. In particular, the limitations of a research field which has positioned itself alongside the state’s perspective on criminal justice have been highlighted. If the process of custodial sentencing is conceived of as a binary activity in which the state convicts an offender, then the offender’s family is systemically ‘out of sight’. As Matthews (1991) commented, ‘Prisoners families…remain out in the cold. No agency has any statutory responsibilities towards them…they are just not on anybody’s agenda’ (1991, 8). Wilson-Croome (1991) stated that probation officers in England and Wales did not view offenders’ families and their children as part of their responsibilities and would not have felt qualified to provide support: ‘many probation officers… would neither see it as their key role to work with the children of the family nor feel confident that they have the skills and experience to do so’ (1991, 41). Similar critiques of the narrow focus on offence and offender in criminal justice policy and practice have been made across several jurisdictions, e.g. Germany (Römer 1967), the USA (Comfort 2007), Denmark (Smith 2014). It follows that research

2  Prisoners’ Families’ Research: Developments …     17

communities which worked to the priorities of policy makers were not therefore likely to consider the experiences of prisoners’ families as a mainstream research topic. Alongside state-oriented mindsets of criminologists, the interests and concerns of people occupying influential positions in research and practice may also have played a role. Heidensohn (1985) cited W.H. Whyte’s acknowledgement that he did not include the family in his analysis of ‘Street Corner Society’ because it was just not as exciting for him in comparison with other avenues of inquiry: ‘for quite unscientific reasons I have always found politics, rackets and gangs more interesting than the basic unit of human society’ (Whyte 1955 in Heidensohn 1985, 131). Shaw (1991) recounts a comment by a senior criminal justice practitioner that the criminal justice system had more important concerns than prisoners’ children: ‘To talk about prisoners’ children when we should be out there fighting crime is cotton wool’ (1991, 27). Of course, this is only a single voice, but exemplifies how researchers who attempted to raise the profile of prisoners’ families were faced with the challenge of igniting the interests of many senior academics and practitioners. Further conjecture about the limited concern with the experiences of prisoners’ families draws on sociological and feminist analyses of wider trends in society, namely the diminishing social influence of the family and the low status accorded to domestic and caring work traditionally associated with women. In her study of prisoners’ families in England, Morris (1965) echoing the theorising of Parsons (1951) referred to the declining social status and influence of the family and the increased focus on the individual. She noted the argument that a shift in the family’s function from a unit of production to a unit of consumption had brought with it a focus on the individuals within the family rather than on the family itself. Policy interest was directed towards individual family members and their capacities as wage earners and consumers. Yeatman (1986) argued that sociological theorising had played its role in this orientation away from the family as a unit of analysis because of its tendency to analyse in terms of a dichotomy between the individual and society. Through this theoretical lens, the family is often subsumed within the wider category of ‘community’ and partially loses its identity as a distinctive subject of study (see Yeatman 1986). The low social and economic value accorded to domestic and caring work and the associated status of women in society may also have contributed to the lack of concern for prisoners’ families. Aungles (1994) argued that the role and function of caring had been undervalued in public discourse because of the conflation of ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’. The merging of

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these terms masked the ‘significant material aspects of the labours of loving’ (1994, 3) involved in ensuring the physical and emotional well-being for the person being cared for. As a result, the economic contribution of caring was not one that was recognised and engaged with in the consumer-oriented economic thinking of the time. Seen from this perspective, the family-­ related hardships facing women and children (the majority configuration of prisoners’ families) would likely be a minority research interest. Limited social and political engagement in family matters may also be partly attributable to the politics of liberalism and related ideological distinctions between the public and the private spheres of society. Family life belonged to the private sphere, a space for personal freedom. It was not considered to fall within the remit of public policy, hence the concept of ‘laissez-­ faire’ (Yeatman 1986). Where social issues needed to be addressed, the trend was not for the state to work with families but to intervene and take over the family’s traditional roles, e.g. of education and welfare (Morris 1965). The dynamics of social stigmatisation may also have contributed to a lack of social, political and parallel academic concern with prisoners’ families. Not infrequently, families were considered to be undeserving of help because they were associated with the imprisoned parent and the crime committed. Seen as complicit in an offending lifestyle, their eligibility for social support was considered to be less than others: ‘poverty is part of the punishment these families deserve’ (Morris 1965, 10). These attitudes may be seen as part of the wider ‘populist punitiveness’ that Bottoms (1995) identified and the associated concept of ‘responsibilisation’ (Garland 1996) of the offender: ‘It must surely be the father’s responsibility to think of the consequences of his actions’ (Shaw 1991, 27). Aware of their social stigmatisation and faced with the potential of hostile social responses, many prisoners’ families have kept themselves away from the public eye and have not actively sought support for fear of ostracism and victimisation (Lanskey et al. 2018). In response to anticipated and actual hostility from others, prisoners’ families collectively have been little inclined to catch the attention of policy makers or researchers. Obviously, there have been several intersecting social phenomena which may have contributed to the limited research interest in prisoners’ families: some are specific to their situation and others are related to broader social and political trends. It may also have been a question of number: prisoners’ families were a minority social group and any detrimental effects of imprisonment they experienced were of little social significance. This argument is reinforced by observations of reactions to the rapid and uneven expansion of prison populations globally in the twenty-first century. Although many of the factors discussed above have resonance still today, research and

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policy interest in prisoners’ families have increased in countries which have witnessed a growth in imprisonment rates: in the USA, Oceania and various European countries (see Walmsley 2016). With mass incarceration came recognition that many more families were ‘living in the shadow of prison’ and related calls to understand the wider ramifications of this new and significant social phenomenon: ‘research is needed to assess more systematically the losses in human and social capital… Until this research is undertaken in a serious and systematic way, the potential impact of the incarceration of parents on children will remain an unrecognized and therefore neglected consideration in the policy framework that surrounds the increased reliance on imprisonment…’ (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999, 123). In response to such appeals, the field of prisoners’ families’ research has grown and diversified substantially in many countries with mass incarceration over the past twenty years. There remain, however, countries with high imprisonment rates, where there is very little recorded research on prisoners families. A possible barrier to dissemination may be the language of the research publication; however, the absence of state interest and punitive public opinion are also cited as factors (see, for example, Chui 2010 on the lack of public policy attention to prisoners’ families in Hong Kong, and Pallot and Katz 2014 on public attitudes towards parent offenders in the Russian Federation).

Generating Insights: Developments in Prisoners’ Families’ Research This section charts some of the principal routes of enquiry of research on prisoners’ families. It distinguishes between intrinsic and instrumental research interests; the former addresses the experiences and consequences of imprisonment for families, and the latter investigates the contribution of families in supporting prisoners during and after their prison sentence. Within each of these two broad categories of enquiry, there are distinct subgroups and across the research field as a whole there are common interests in identifying diversity and understanding context.

Intrinsic Research Interests Many of the earliest studies described above were concerned with documenting the experiences of imprisonment for families and children and raising awareness of the hardships they faced. Subsequent studies in this

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primarily psychosocial line of enquiry have focussed on identifying the risks associated with negative outcomes of parental imprisonment and factors that protect against these risks. A more recent group of studies with intrinsic interests has had a sociological orientation and theorised the experiences of prisoners’ families from the perspectives of penal power, punishment and social justice.

Risks of Imprisonment for Families and Protective Factors A large strand of research on prisoners’ families has been concerned with the negative effects of imprisonment on families. The earliest studies were cross-sectional in design and described families’ material living conditions and lifestyles, health and welfare, personal and social relationships, support networks and contact with the criminal justice system. These studies documented a range of difficulties for families which were collectively termed ‘collateral consequences of imprisonment’ (Tonry and Petersilia 1999; Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999). They illustrated how family relationships could be strained by the separation (McDermott and King 1992; Noble 1995) and highlighted the stresses associated with single parenthood (Morris 1965). They documented how the family home could be lost, particularly when mothers were imprisoned, as children were taken into care or sent to live with relatives (Caddle and Crisp 1997). The studies consistently revealed the financial and material deprivations families endured when the imprisoned parent was the main income earner. These difficulties continued after release due to the challenges of finding employment with a criminal record (Braman 2004; Naser and Visher 2006). Research has also highlighted the frequent social stigmatisation and isolation of families of prisoners (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Miller 2003) and a range of emotional and mental health problems associated with the stresses they experience (Fishman 1990; Wildeman et al. 2012). A subset of these studies has focussed particularly on understanding the outcomes of parental imprisonment for children. They have found that children can suffer from anxiety and depression associated with parental separation (Murray and Murray 2010) and often experience emotional ambivalence and stress about the imprisonment (Boswell 2002). They have recorded experiences of stigmatisation and bullying by peers at school during and after the parent’s imprisonment (e.g. Boswell 2002; Pugh 2004).

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They have highlighted the detrimental effects of little or no contact with the imprisoned parent (Edin et al. 2004; Lanskey et al. 2016) and of long prison sentences (Hairston 1989, Arditti et al. 2003). Studies across criminal justice jurisdictions continue to document little change in the hardships that prisoners’ families experience (e.g. Lösel et al. 2012b; Comfort 2016; Oldrup and Frederiksen 2018). In order to distinguish between imprisonment-induced and pre-existing problems and strains resulting from separation by imprisonment in comparison with other forms of separation, researchers have drawn on data from longitudinal studies such as the Cambridge Study for Delinquency Development, the Pittsburgh Youth Study or the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. These studies have measured family circumstances, personal well-being and relationships before, during and after imprisonment and have also included comparison groups of families from similar socio-economic contexts who have experienced separation for other reasons, e.g. hospitalisation or death (Murray and Farrington 2008). Further longitudinal analyses have also been undertaken in the Netherlands (Besemer et al. 2011; Rakt et al. 2012) and Sweden (Murray et al. 2007), and meta-­analyses have been conducted to identify the collective impact of imprisonment from smaller-scale studies. Researchers have investigated the potential effects on parental (mainly paternal) imprisonment on children’s behaviour, mental health, school achievement, drug use and involvement in the criminal justice system (e.g. Murray et al. 2012a, b; Wakefield and Wildeman 2014). Although causal links are difficult to establish, Murray et al. (2012b) have identified behavioural problems as a consistent outcome across studies and Wakefield and Wildeman (2014, 24) have concluded that parental incarceration often ‘makes a bad situation worse’. While the overall picture has been shown to be negative, it is not uniformly so. For example, some associations have been found between parental imprisonment and child criminal convictions (Bijleveld and Wijkman 2009), but there is variation across countries: parental imprisonment predicted offending in sons (but not daughters) in England, but not the Netherlands (Besemer et al. 2011). However, Rakt et al. (2012) found a relationship between fathers’ imprisonment and child convictions in the Netherlands, especially when the child was under 12 years. In Sweden, measures of parental criminality predicted children’s offending better than parental imprisonment (Murray et al. 2007). Researchers have surmised the mixed findings could be due to national variations in social attitudes, responses to ex-prisoners, differences in the characteristics of prison populations and the respective family care systems. Cumulatively, this body of

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research has highlighted the importance of taking into account national and social contexts and penal policy for understanding the effects of imprisonment. A complementary strand of research has aimed to identify factors that safeguard against negative outcomes of parental imprisonment. These studies have investigated the protective impact of family relationships and social support networks and have found that strong, supportive and accepting family relationships before prison can endure through the prison sentence and beyond (e.g. Hairston 1995; Morris 1965; Nelson et al. 1999; Lösel et al. 2012b). Support from other community members and organisations has been found to be significant too (e.g. Lösel and Bender 2003; Visher et al. 2004) although not all families access formal support (Lösel et al. 2012b). More recently studies exploring protective factors have moved from considering the role of individual factors to a more holistic analysis of their cumulative impact. These analyses have considered resilience to adversity at an individual level (e.g. Markson et al. 2016) and at a family level (e.g. Arditti 2015). Within each of these strands, there have been studies which have added nuance to knowledge of the effects of imprisonment, such as the differential outcomes for children of having a mother or father in prison; the impact of particular convictions, e.g. sex offending (Condry 2007), drug offences (Allard 2012), and long- and short-term sentences on family life (Andersen 2016). Other studies have documented race-specific experiences of imprisonment in some countries, for example, in the USA (see Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Wakefield and Wildeman 2014) or in Australia (see Halsey 2010; Dennison et al. 2014). The importance of taking both race and gender into account has been highlighted by Thomas and Christian (2018) in their analysis of Black women’s experiences of imprisonment and of supporting others in prison in the USA. The heterogeneity of prisoners’ families’ experiences identified in this body of research has signalled a need to be cautious about too general assumptions about what constitutes ‘good practice’ with regard to prisoners’ children and families (Knudsen 2016). Similar to research on the ‘cycle of violence’ in abused children (Widom et al. 2015), this group of research studies suggests that different developmental pathways are due to the interplay of risk and protective factors and processes of resilience (Lösel and Bender 2017a). Such differentiation has also highlighted the importance of understanding the multiple layers of influence on family life. Some studies have specifically adopted a psychosocial analytical framework drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model (see, for example, Poehlmann et al. 2010; Arditti 2005) to capture the range of micro-, meso- and macro-level influences.

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Penal Power, Punishment and Social Justice There is a long history of prisoners’ families’ research explicitly concerned with social inequality and matters of social justice (e.g. Bloodgood 1928; Wakefield and Wildeman 2014). In 1928, Ruth Bloodgood in her review of a study of prisoners’ families in Kentucky, USA, argued that society was in neglect of its duties as a result of its individualistic concern with the offender only: ‘in all our machinery for the discipline and reformation of the prisoner the obligation of society to his wife and children has been completely ignored’ (1928, 534–535). Since Bloodgood’s critique of the state’s role, a large body of research on prisoners’ families has drawn attention to the social inequalities they experience and commented on the inadequacy of existing government policy. It reveals how the poorest groups in society are often most affected by imprisonment. Wakefield and Wildeman (2014), for example, identified racial disparities in the experiences of children of prisoners in the USA because outcomes were generally worse for African American children. They said that the absence of a consideration of parental imprisonment in research on child well-being had obscured ‘the most powerful effects of high incarceration rates on inequality today and in the future’ (2014, 5). Western and Pettit (2010) contended that the prison itself was implicated in the destabilising of already fragile families and communities for it exacerbated the difficulties of finding employment and maintaining strong family ties. Condry (2018) in her analysis of the ways in which prison produces and reproduces disadvantage for the families of prisoners argued for acknowledgement of prisoners’ families as citizens in their own right, not just as prison visitors. A similar social justice orientation is to be found in socio-legal research studies on the rights of prisoners’ families and of prisoners’ children particularly. These studies have identified how sentencers in many jurisdictions (England and Wales, Scotland, USA, Ireland) take minimal account of the impact of parental imprisonment on children and families (e.g. Minson 2015; Loucks and Loureiro 2018; Donson and Parkes 2016; Abramowicz 2012; Andersen 2016). These and other authors have referred to rights frameworks such as the UK’s Human Rights Act (1998) and the United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child (1989). They have drawn attention to systemic restrictions on when and how children’s needs can be considered in decisions to impose a custodial sentence and to practical issues related to the availability of sufficient information to allow sentencers to take their interests into account (Minson et al. 2015; Epstein 2014). They have also highlighted the challenge of applying children’s rights at

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critical times such as when children witness the arrest of a parent or want to visit an imprisoned parent (Smith 2014). These studies have proposed ways to address current limitations in upholding children’s rights, for example, through the introduction of child impact statements in court (Donson and Parkes 2016) or children’s officers in prisons (Smith 2014). A related and more recent strand of research has been concerned with the sociology of punishment and drawn attention to its collateral consequences with reference to concepts of penal power and punishment (Condry and Smith 2018). Researchers have analysed how the state’s deployment of penal power shapes the lives of imprisoned parents and their families and alters relationships, roles within the family and support networks. They have charted the experiences of families’ direct contact with the prison in particular visiting the parent in prison, travelling to and from prison (Christian 2005), the impact of the carceral space of the visits hall on parenting practice (Moran 2013; Hutton 2016) and the security procedures and the rules and regulations they are subjected to on visits (Comfort 2003). Comfort (2003) illustrates how women with partners in prison undergo a process of ‘secondary prisonization’. This process can be painful, as women are subjected to deprivations of agency during visits, but the partner’s imprisonment may also generate opportunities for women to establish greater control and stability in the relationship (e.g. Souza et al. 2019). Cumulatively, these studies illustrate how family relationships are interwoven with overlapping penal and social powers which prioritise ‘discipline, authority and surveillance’ (Granja et al. 2015, 1216). In these environments, family contact is often defined as a privilege rather than a right and can be restricted if prisoners or their families do not comply with regulations (Granja et al. 2015). Of course, there can be security reasons for a restrictive visit scheme, but the respective rules are not always clear and consistent across institutions. Research has documented too the punitive reach of penal power into the lives of families beyond the prison (Comfort 2007; Lanskey et al. 2018; Kotova 2014; Touraut 2012). Lanskey et al. (2018) conceptualise the hardships that families experience as a result of the parent’s prison sentence as ‘referred pains of imprisonment’. These acute and chronic pains are associated with the ‘depth’, ‘weight’, ‘breadth’, and ‘tightness’ of penal power (see Crewe 2011) and are argued to be evidence of ‘punishment creep’: the overreach of state punishment ‘beyond the legal offender’(Comfort 2007). Reflecting a broader ‘turn to parenting’ as a result of individual, microand macro-social factors (Daly 2017; Lösel and Bender 2017b), other work has explored how the roles of fathering and mothering are affected

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by incarceration (e.g. Boswell and Wedge 2002; Muth and Walker 2013; Roman 2016; Moran et al. 2017). Studies have documented how separation from children may be stressful, and how incarceration may generate feelings of guilt of being a ‘bad’ parent (Clarke et al. 2005; Cunha 2014). Research has identified how the prison environment itself may undermine or support core components of parental identity such as the roles of nurturer, caregiver and economic provider. In some studies, the prison is shown to inhibit parental roles (Clarke et al. 2005). However, other studies have illustrated how the prison environment can provide opportunities for reconfiguring a parental role which had previously disintegrated. For example, Cunha (2014) describes how in prisons where mothers can be with their children, the environment may facilitate new and less pressured experiences of motherhood. Cumulatively, these studies strengthen theoretical reflections on the experiences of parents in prison and their families. Through their analyses of how penal and social powers shape family relationships and lifestyles, they render visible the reach of imprisonment beyond the incarcerated family member. They draw critical attention to the broader social consequences of criminal justice processes and decision-making, and raise questions of social responsibility for the unfavourable consequences of imprisonment for those who have not committed a crime.

Instrumental Research Interests Alongside research focussed on the interests of prisoners’ families in their own right, studies in penology have examined their instrumental role in helping prisoners cope with their time in prison and with their adjustment to life outside on release. They identify the critical importance to prisoners of relationships with families and significant others, the personal and institutional benefits when these relationships are positive and supportive and the difficulties that arise when they are not. They also draw attention to the impact of prison policies on family contact.

Prisoner Survival Families have been found to be frequently a source of strength for relatives during their time in prison; they provide comfort and emotional support to help cope with the stresses and deprivations of imprisonment and practical

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assistance in the form of material provisions (money, clothes, food). Families keep their imprisoned relative in touch with their world outside (Mills and Codd 2008) and can be a source of encouragement and hope for life after release (Maruna 2001). The breakdown of family relationships or an absence of contact with families can conversely provoke anxiety and distress for relatives in prison. There may be moments when the imprisoned family member’s vulnerabilities are heightened such as after bad news from outside or a difficult visit. These events have been linked to drug use in prisons (Farmer 2017) and to self-harm and suicide (Liebling 2002). Strong relationships with families are considered to contribute to order and stability in prisons, and the establishment of positive and frequent communication opportunities with families has consistently been advocated as a political priority (Woolf and Tumin 1991; Farmer 2017). Families have been recognised as playing an important role in alerting prison staff to their relative’s well-being, in particular when they are feeling very vulnerable. Contact and support with family can reduce prisoners’ anxiety too, leading them to be ‘less confrontational’ and more responsive to authority (Dominey et al. 2016). However, the power that the prison holds over family contact can increase prisoners’ anxieties and frustration particularly when it is applied conditionally (Lanskey et al. 2018).

Desistance from Crime Studies have highlighted the strong role that families can play in supporting desistance from crime (e.g. Laub and Sampson 2001; Savolainen 2009; Cid and Martí 2012). They have found that close ties with partners and children support desistance in several ways: an emotional attachment to family members, a rational commitment to family life, a shared belief in conventional values and involvement in the family’s daily routines which took the place of offending activities (Hirschi 1969). Over time, the emotional, social and practical resources that are generated by family relationships have been found to help sustain a non-offending lifestyle (Laub et al. 1998) and promote resilience in resettlement (Markson et al. 2015). The (female) partners of prisoners can also make an important contribution to realistic aims and resettlement (Souza et al. 2015). The picture is not uniform, however; research has highlighted that the type and quality of family ties are significant for whether they help or hinder resettlement and family functioning after the prison sentence (e.g. Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Lösel and Bender 2003; Markson et al. 2015).

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The interest to maintain or improve family relationships that support desistance has generated several research evaluations of interventions to promote the parenting skills of prisoners. Programmes have been targeted specifically at mothers (Baradon et al. 2008, Sandifer 2008) and fathers in prison (Meek 2007; Barr et al. 2014, Bradshaw et al. 2017). Where some studies have suggested beneficial outcomes of interventions (e.g. Rossiter et al. 2015), others have found that there may be counterproductive influences of the prison (e.g. Skar et al. 2014) and raise the question whether the process of ‘prisonization’ overshadows prisoners’ other social roles. These mixed findings suggest the impact of the prison context is relevant to take into account in understanding the extent to which programmes are effective.

Reflection The above review has highlighted clearly the heterogeneity of prisoners’ families and their experiences but also some common patterns and trends. Research has consistently documented an association between imprisonment and various forms of family hardship: material adversity, social deprivation, emotional difficulties, mental health problems and stigmatisation. Imprisonment disproportionately affects families from social groups who are over-represented in prison populations. In many countries, e.g. the USA, the UK and Australia, families from ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by imprisonment (see, for example, Pettit and Western 2004; Dennison et al. 2014; Lammy 2017) as are families who are already socially and economically disadvantaged (Pettit and Western 2004). Research has also highlighted the relevance of taking into account broader societal and cultural contexts, and how the policies and social attitudes they generate can amplify or constrain the stigmatising and marginalising effects of parental imprisonment. The current field of prisoners’ families’ research invites three observations. First, there is much synergy across the different strands described here. Of particular note is the wide-ranging consideration of relationships between prisoners and their families from different perspectives, for example, from the prisoner, the prison, the family as a whole and individual family members (e.g. children and partners). Together these studies have identified the significance of relationships for the well-being of the prisoner and family members, for the maintenance of family relationships during and after the prison sentence, for the future resettlement of the imprisoned family member and for order in prisons and in society.

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Second, it is interesting to consider the extent to which research has focussed on the children of prisoners reflecting criminological interests to identify risk factors for children’s own involvement in the criminal justice system and sociological and psychological interests to understand the impact of parental imprisonment on children’s well-being and future lifestyles. Perhaps the ‘hidden victims’ narrative has carried greater weight with regard to prisoners’ children as it complements traditional representations of childhood innocence (Ariès 1962). Public opinion might be more disposed to responding to children’s needs than other family members and be supported too by the existence of rights frameworks such as the United Nations Rights for the Convention of the Child (1989). Third, the review of research highlights ambivalences in the role of the state towards prisoners’ families. On the one hand, studies have suggested criminal justice agencies’ interactions with prisoners’ families may result in negative labelling and stigmatisation and raise normative questions about the adverse effects of processes of state punishment on families. Conversely, studies have identified the beneficial effects that a period of imprisonment may generate for families in terms of addressing previously negative relationships and lifestyles (Comfort 2007). The state can have both punitive and welfare impacts on the lives of prisoners’ families.

Extending the Field of Vision This final section reflects on the future directions for prisoners’ families’ research and offers some critical reflections on the field. It describes the gaps in knowledge and understanding that remain and asks what else needs to be brought into the field of vision. It considers the spaces and shadows created by existing research designs and reflects on what is seen and what is missed by the above-mentioned analytical frameworks. Finally, it considers the implications of a normative lens for the research vision. It discusses the relationship between prisoners’ family research and social justice interests from both a substantive perspective and a methodological perspective. Studies have identified the diversity of experiences of prisoners’ families from different social groups, and there is an ongoing need for greater differentiation in our understanding of different configurations of families. How do experiences of families differ with different family members in prison, with children, or siblings for example? What role does gender play in the experiences of male and female partners and male and female children? What is the longer-term legacy of imprisonment? How does it affect the

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composition of families over time? Further questions may be asked about variations across different cultural groups and the varying influences of penal and social policies within different political, social and economic contexts. As much of the research has originated from Europe, Australia and the USA, there is comparatively little understanding of the experience and impact of imprisonment on families in Africa, South America and Asia. As in other fields, replication and differentiation of knowledge are a key issue (Lösel 2018). Shifts in prison populations are mirrored by shifts in the demographics of prisoners’ families. There are large numbers of foreign national prisoners in many European countries (Walmsley 2016). In most countries, the rate is between 25 and 50%, and in Switzerland, three-quarters of inmates are foreigners (Statista 2018). The recent ‘migration crisis’ in Europe may further increase this trend which will have consequences for our topic: families with members incarcerated in a different country may face additional challenges, in particular, regarding contact and communication. Some of the commonly accepted findings of existing research may need to be reviewed in the light of experiences of these new groups, for example, in the role that families play in helping relatives to cope with imprisonment or desistance. In addition, the specific needs of young adult offenders require more attention (e.g. Lösel et al. 2012a). As the average age of the prison population increases, questions arise also around the families with an elderly family member in prison. How do they cope with illness and death? To what extent are families taken into account in prison policies and practices related to endof-life care? There is a need therefore for research awareness of changes in the demography of prison populations and how experiences of families may vary accordingly. It would be inaccurate to represent the evolution of prisoners’ families’ research as a linear trajectory; nevertheless, many researchers have aimed to extend the approach of earlier studies. From a methodological perspective, longitudinal studies have deepened understanding of findings from cross-sectional studies by facilitating measurement and prediction of effects of imprisonment over time and the design of studies with control groups has aided efforts to isolate the effects of imprisonment. The substantive focus of research has developed out of the findings of earlier studies too, for example, the shift from an analytical focus on hardships (e.g. Morris 1965) to an analysis of resilience (e.g. Arditti 2015; Markson et al. 2015). It is relevant also to consider how analytical frames and definitional constructs employed in research studies might open up or close down thinking about prisoners’ families. For example, recent analyses of power have been

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able to illuminate some of the structural dynamics affecting families that individualised psychological frameworks have not. Similarly, an ‘intersectionality’ framework facilitates analysis of how parental imprisonment intersects with race and gender and class (Foster and Hagan 2009). Conversely, analytical frameworks might restrict ways of thinking about prisoners’ families too. If research focuses on social contextual factors to what extent does it preclude consideration of individual agency? Does research on family interventions reinforce a deficit or pathological conceptualisation of prisoners’ families including the family member in prison? Does the idea of intergenerational transmission of crime capture accurately the dynamics of relationships between family members? Does it present a risk of stigmatisation and too narrow thinking about prisoners’ families? How is ‘family’ itself defined in a rapidly changing world of intimate relationships? Does it encompass the varying configurations of self-identified families of prisoners? Jardine (2017), for example, has advocated a broader conceptualisation of family in order that the range of people affected by imprisonment is not underestimated. From Ruth Bloodgood’s commentary in 1928, researchers have raised normative questions related to prisoners’ families’ experiences. The extent to which they have overtly engaged with a social justice agenda has varied, however. Some have considered the issue in concluding discussions and recommendations for policies, and others have framed their research explicitly within a normative paradigm such as those which have conducted rightsbased analyses (Minson 2015; Donson and Parkes 2018; Hutton 2018; Smith 2018). This normative dimension reflects a wider moral trend in sociological research since the beginning of the twenty-first century (see Feagin 2001). A normative lens whether applied throughout a research project or in the concluding discussion invites reflection on the actions and consequences of state authority. It provides a means to challenge what Becker (1967) refers to as ‘hierarchies of credibility’ that are aligned with the powerful in society and to propose new approaches. Indeed, Smith (2014) argues for a research agenda that is concerned to ‘inform and even create a process towards reforming state institutions and practices in the area of penal policy and practice’ (2014, 20). A normative perspective also encourages consideration of how research engages with and depicts prisoners’ families. To what extent does research objectify, pathologise or oversimplify prisoners’ families’ experiences? Are we at risk of providing insufficient support for prisoners’ families or disempowering and stigmatising them further through the highlighting of deficit and difference? These questions invite reflection on the manner in which prisoners’ families participate in research as well as the choice of topic, the

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analytical frameworks used, and the presentation and discussion of findings. Viewing decisions about research focus and methodology through a normative lens in this way helps to ensure that research is not in and of itself contributing to the social marginalisation it may seek to address.

Conclusion As the field of prisoners’ families research has gained momentum, its different forms of enquiry have highlighted multiple layers of influence on families’ experiences which reach beyond the penal and into the social sphere, and have raised important questions about the role of punishment in society and intersections between criminal and social justice. Crucially, research has enabled the voices of prisoners’ families and children to be heard and taken into some account in criminal justice debates and political decision-making. There is, however, still a need to capture the multiple experiences of different groups of families with different relationships in different penal contexts and to understand how their lives are shaped by their interactions with criminal justice agents and institutions. A temporal perspective is likely to be important here which identifies short- and long-term effects as is an understanding of power dynamics and individual and collective agency. More broadly, there is scope to analyse the societal impact on the family of growing and changing prison populations, including varying influences of social attitudes and of different penal policies and forms of imprisonment. There is more that can be discussed on research methodology too and what is required in terms of research designs, key concepts and analytical frameworks to generate a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of experiences and outcomes. In particular, more long-term prospective research studies and controlled evaluation of programmes for prisoners’ families are needed. Ethical considerations are also relevant to this discussion so that presentations of research do not objectivise families and, either directly or indirectly, contribute to social stigmatisation and marginalisation. In terms of research aspirations to impact policy, it is cautionary to note that in England and Wales many of the difficulties relating to maintaining contact between prisoners highlighted in the Woolf report of 1991 are still of concern over 25 years later (Farmer 2017) and state support for prisoners’ families remains minimal in many countries. Therefore, the need to continue to draw attention to the short- and longer-term consequences of criminal justice decision-making which positions all apart from the state and the offender on the periphery is likely to be an ongoing task for prisoners’

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families researchers. Many of the above points suggest the value of a stronger comparative dimension to prisoners’ families research in order that questions of similarity and difference, patterns and trends across countries and learning from interventions and policies in different contexts can be identified. Yet there is simultaneously a need to recognise contextual contingency (Godfrey et al. 2007). The horizons for prisoners’ families research are therefore still wide-open.

References Abramowicz, Sarah. 2012. “A Family Law Perspective on Parental Incarceration.” Family Court Review 50(2): 228–240. Allard, Patricia. 2012. “When the Cost Is Too Great: The Emotional and Psychological Impact on Children of Incarcerating Their Parents for Drug Offences.” Family Court Review 50(1): 48–58. Andersen, Lars H. 2016. “How Children’s Educational Outcomes and Criminality Vary by Duration and Frequency of Paternal Incarceration.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 149–170. Arditti, Joyce A. 2015. “Family Process Perspective on the Heterogeneous Effects of Maternal Incarceration on Child Wellbeing: The Trouble with Differences.” Criminology & Public Policy 14(1): 169–182. Arditti, Joyce. 2005. “Families and Incarceration: An Ecological Approach.” Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services 86(2): 251–260. Arditti, Joyce A., Jennifer Lambert-Shute, and Karen Joest. 2003. “Saturday Morning at the Jail: Implications of Incarceration for Families and Children.” Family Relations 52: 195–204. Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Transated by Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage. Aungles, Ann. 1994. The Prison and the Home: A Study of the Relationship Between Domesticity and Penality. Sydney: Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney Law School. Bakker, Laura J., Barbara A. Morris, and Laura M. Janus. 1978. “Hidden Victims of Crime.” Social Work 23(2): 143–148. Baradon, Tessa, Peter Fonagy, Kirsten Bland, Kata Lénárd, and Michelle Sleed. 2008. “New Beginnings—An Experience-Based Programme Addressing the Attachment Relationship Between Mothers and Their Babies in Prisons.” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 34(2): 240–258. Barr, Rachel, Marisa Morin, Natalie Brito, Benjamin Richeda, Jennifer Rodriguez, and Carole Shauffer. 2014. “Delivering Services to Incarcerated Teen Fathers: A Pilot Intervention to Increase the Quality of Father–Infant Interactions During Visitation.” Psychological Services 11(1):10–21.

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Becker, Howard. 1967. “Whose Side Are We On?” Social Problems 14(3): 239–247. Besemer, Sytske, Victor Van der Geest, Joseph Murray, Catrien C.J.H. Bijleveld, and David P. Farrington. 2011. “The Relationship Between Parental Imprisonment and Offspring Offending in England and the Netherlands.” The British Journal of Criminology 51(2): 413–437. Bijleveld, Catrien C.J.H., and Miriam Wijkman. 2009. “Intergenerational Continuity in Convictions: A Five‐Generation Study.” Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health 19(2): 142–155. Bloodgood, Ruth Salter. 1928. Welfare of Prisoners’ Families in Kentucky (No. 182). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Bottoms, Anthony. 1995. “The Philosophy and Politics of Punishment and Sentencing.” In The Politics of Sentencing Reform, edited by C. Clarkson and R. Morgan, 17–49. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boswell, Gwyneth 2002. Imprisoned Fathers: The Children’s View. The Howard Journal 41: 14–26. Boswell, Gwyneth, and Peter Wedge. 2002. Imprisoned Fathers and Their Children. London: Jessica Kingsley. Bradshaw, Daragh, Katrina McLaughlin, and Orla Muldoon. 2017. “Parenting Programmes for Reducing Negative Outcomes for Incarcerated Fathers and Their Families.” The Campbell Collaboration. Available at https://campbellcollaboration.org/library/parenting-programmes-incarcerated-fathers-and-families. html. Braman, Donald. 2004. Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Caddle, Diane, and Debbie Crisp. 1997. Imprisoned Women and Mothers. London: Home Office. Christian, Johnna. 2005. Riding the Bus Barriers to Prison Visitation and Family Management Strategies. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21(1): 31–48. Chui, Wing Hong. 2010. “‘Pains of Imprisonment’: Narratives of the Women Partners and Children of the Incarcerated.” Child & Family Social Work 15(2), 196–205. Cid, José, and Joel Martí. 2012. “Turning Points and Returning Points: Understanding the Role of Family Ties in the Process of Desistance.” European Journal of Criminology 9(6): 603–620. Clarke, Lynda, Margaret O’Brien, Hugo Godwin, Joanne Hemmings, Randal D. Day, Jo Connolly, and Terri Van Leeson. 2005. “Fathering Behind Bars in English Prisons: Imprisoned Fathers’ Identity and Contact with Their Children.” Fathering: A Journal of Theory, Research, and Practice About Men as Fathers 3(3): 221–241. Comfort, Megan. 2003. “In the Tube at San Quentin the ‘Secondary Prisonization’ of Women Visiting Inmates.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32(1): 77–107.

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Comfort, Megan. 2007. “Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3: 271–296. Comfort, Megan. 2016. “‘A Twenty-Hour-a-Day Job’ The Impact of Frequent LowLevel Criminal Justice Involvement on Family Life.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 63–79. Condry, Rachel. 2007. Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Condry, Rachel. 2018. “Prisoners’ Families and the Problem of Social Justice.” In Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment, edited by Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith, 27–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Condry, Rachel, and Peter Scharff Smith (Eds.). 2018. Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crewe, Ben. 2011. “Depth, Weight, Tightness: Revisiting the Pains of Imprisonment.” Punishment & Society 13(5), 509–529. Cunha, Manuela. 2014. “The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 217–233. Cunningham, Alison, and Linda Baker. 2003. Waiting for Mommy: Giving a Voice to the Hidden Victims of Imprisonment. W. London, Canada: Centre for Children and Families in the Justice System. Daly, Mary 2017. “Parenting: Critical Insights from a Sociological Perspective.” Journal of Family Research/Zeitschrift für Familienforschung SI(11); 41–56. Dennison, Susan, Holly Smallbone, Anna Stewart, Kate Freiberg, and Rosie Teague. 2014. “‘My Life Is Separated’ An Examination of the Challenges and Barriers to Parenting for Indigenous Fathers in Prison.” British Journal of Criminology 54(6): 1089–1108. Dominey, Jane, Charlotte Dodds, and Serena Wright. 2016. Bridging the Gap: A Review of the Pact Family Engagement Service. Cambridge: Institute of Criminology. Donson, Fiona, and Aisling Parkes. 2016. “Weighing in the Balance: Reflections on the Sentencing Process from a Children’s Rights Perspective.” Probation Journal 63(3): 331–346. Donson, Fiona, and Aisling Parkes. 2018. “Rights and Security in the Shadow of the Irish Prison: Developing a Child Rights Approach to Prison Visits in Ireland.” In Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment, edited by Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith, 196–212. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edin, Kathryn, Timothy Jon Nelson, and Rechelle Paranal. 2004. “Fatherhood and Incarceration as Potential Turning Points in the Criminal Careers of Unskilled Men.” In Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration, edited by Mary Pattillo, David Weiman, and Bruce Western, 46–75. New York: Russell Sage.

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Epstein, Rona. 2014. “Mothers in Prison: The Sentencing of Mothers and the Rights of the Child.” Prison Service Journal 216: 36–43. Farmer, Michael. 2017. The Importance of Strengthening Prisoners’ Family Ties to Prevent Reoffending and Reduce Intergenerational Crime. London: Ministry of Justice. Feagin, Joe R. 2001. “Social Justice and Sociology: Agendas for the Twenty-First Century.” American Sociological Review 66(1): 1–20. Fishman, Laura T. 1990. Women at the Wall: A Study of Prisoners’ Wives Doing Time on the Outside. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Foster, Holly, and John Hagan. 2009. “The Mass Incarceration of Parents in America: Issues of Race/Ethnicity, Collateral Damage to Children, and Prisoner Reentry.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 623(1): 179–194. Garland, David. 1996. “The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society.” The British Journal of Criminology 36(4): 445–471. Godfrey, Barry S., David J. Cox, and Stephen Farrall. 2007. Criminal Lives: Family Life, Employment, and Offending. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Granja, Rafaela, Manuela P. da Cunha, and Helena Machado. 2015. “Mothering from Prison and Ideologies of Intensive Parenting: Enacting Vulnerable Resistance.” Journal of Family Issues 36(9): 1212–1232. Hagan, John, and Ronit Dinovitzer. 1999. “Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment for Children, Communities, and Prisoners.” Crime and Justice 26: 121–162. Hairston, Creasie Finney. 1989. “Men in Prison: Family Characteristics and Parenting Views.” Journal of Offender Counseling Services and Rehabilitation 14: 23–30. Hairston, Creasie Finney. 1995. Fathers in Prison. In Children of Incarcerated Parents, edited by Katherine Gabel and Denise Johnston, 31–40. New York: Lexington Books. Halsey, Mark. 2010. “Imprisonment and Prisoner Re-entry in Australia.” Dialectical Anthropology 34(4): 545–554. Heidensohn, Frances. 1985. Women and Crime. London: Macmillan. Hirschi, Travis. 1969. Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hutton, Marie. 2016. “Visiting Time”. Probation Journal 63(3), 347–361. Hutton, Marie. 2018. “The Legally Sanctioned Stigmatization of Prisoners.” In Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment, edited by Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith, 230–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jardine, Cara. 2017. “Constructing and Maintaining Family in the Context of Imprisonment.” The British Journal of Criminology 58(1): 114–131.

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Knudsen, Else Marie. 2016. “Avoiding the Pathologizing of Children of Prisoners.” The Probation Journal 63(3): 362–370. Kotova, Anna. 2014. Justice and Prisoners’ Families: Howard League: What Is Justice? (Working Papers 5). Available at http://howardleague.org/wp-content/ uploads/2016/04/HLWP_5_2014_2.pdf. Lammy, David. 2017. The Lammy Review: An Independent Review into the Treatment of, and Outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Individuals in the Criminal Justice System. London: HM Government. Lanskey, Caroline, Friedrich Lösel, Lucy Markson, and Karen Souza. 2016. “Children’s Contact with Their Imprisoned Father and the Father–Child Relationship After His Release.” Families, Relationships and Societies 5(1): 43–58. Lanskey, Caroline, Friedrich Lösel, Lucy Markson, and Karen Souza. 2018. “Prisoners’ Families, Penal Power and the Referred Pains of Imprisonment.” In Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment, edited by Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith, 181–195. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laub, John H., Daniel S. Nagin, and Robert J. Sampson. 1998. “Trajectories of Change in Criminal Offending: Good Marriages and the Desistance Process.” American Sociological Review 63(2): 225–238. Laub, John H., and Robert J. Sampson. 2001. “Understanding Desistance from Crime.” Crime and Justice 28: 1–69. Liebling, Alison. 2002. Suicides in Prison. Abingdon: Routledge. Lösel, Friedrich. 2018. “Evidence Comes by Replication, but Needs Differentiation: The Reproducibility Issue in Science and Its Relevance for Criminology.” Journal of Experimental Criminology 14(3), 257–278. Lösel, Friedrich, and Doris Bender. 2003. Protective Factors and Resilience. In Early Prevention of Adult Antisocial Behaviour, edited by David P. Farrington and Jeremy W. Coid, 130–204. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lösel, Friedrich, and Doris Bender. 2017a. “Protective Factors Against Crime and Violence in Adolescence.” In The Wiley Handbook of Violence and Aggression, edited by P. Sturmey. New York: Wiley. Lösel, Friedrich, and Doris Bender. 2017b. “Parenting and Family-Oriented Programs for the Prevention of Child Behavior Problems: What the Evidence Tells Us.” Journal of Family Research/Zeitschrift für Familienforschung SI(11): 217–239. Lösel, Friedrich., Antony E. Bottoms, and David P. Farrington (Eds.). 2012a. Young Adult Offenders: Lost in Transition? Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Lösel, Friedrich, Gill Pugh, Lucy Markson, Karen A. Souza, and Caroline Lanskey. 2012b. Risk and Protective Factors in the Resettlement of Imprisoned Fathers with their Families. Norwich: Ormiston Children and Families Trust. Loucks, Nancy, and Tania Loureiro. 2018. “Someone Should Have Just Asked Me What Was Wrong: Balancing Justice, Rights, and the Impact of Imprisonment on Families.” In Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology

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of Punishment, edited by Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith, 151–166. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Markson, Lucy, Friedrich Lösel, Karen Souza, and Caroline Lanskey. 2015. “Male Prisoners’ Family Relationships and Resilience in Resettlement.” Criminology & Criminal Justice 15(4): 423–441. Markson, Lucy, Michael E. Lamb, and Friedrich Lösel. 2016. “The Impact of Contextual Family Risks on Prisoners’ Children’s Behavioural Outcomes and the Potential Protective Role of Family Functioning Moderators.” European Journal of Developmental Psychology 13(3): 325–340. Maruna, Shadd. 2001. Making Good: How Ex-convicts Reform and Rebuild their Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Matthews, Jill. 1983. Forgotten Victims. London: NACRO. Matthews, Jill. 1991. “Forgotten Victims.” In Prisoners’ Families, edited by Roy Light, 7–16. Bristol: Bristol and Bath Centre for Criminal Justice. McDermott Kathleen, and Roy D. King .1992. “Prison Rule 102 ‘Stand by Your Man’: The Impact of Penal Policy on the Families of Prisoners.” In Prisoners’ Children: What Are the Issues? edited by Roger Shaw, pp. 50–73. London: Routledge. Meek, Rosie. 2007. “Parenting Education for Young Fathers in Prison.” Child & Family Social Work 12(3): 239–247. Miller, R. Robin. 2003. “Various Implications of the ‘Race to Incarcerate’ on Incarcerated African American Men and Their Families.” In Impacts of Incarceration on the African American Family, edited by Othello Harris and R. Robin Miller, 3–15. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Mills, Alice L., and Helen Codd. 2008. “Prisoners’ Families and Offender Management: Mobilizing Social Capital.” Probation Journal: The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice 55(1): 9–24. Minson, Shona. 2015. “Sentencing and Dependents: Motherhood as Mitigation.” In Exploring Sentencing Practice in England and Wales, 137–153. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Minson, Shona, Rebecca Nadin, and Jenny Earle. 2015. Sentencing of Mothers: A Discussion Paper. London: Prison Reform Trust. Moran, Dominique. 2013. Between Outside and Inside? Prison Visiting Rooms as Liminal Carceral Spaces. GeoJournal 78(2): 339–351. Moran, Dominique, Marie A. Hutton, Louise Dixon, and Tom Disney. 2017. “‘Daddy Is a Difficult Word for Me to Hear’: Carceral Geographies of Parenting and the Prison Visiting Room as a Contested Space of Situated Fathering.” Children’s Geographies 15(1): 107–121. Morris, Pauline. 1965. Prisoners and Their Families. London: George, Allen and Unwin. Murray, Joseph. 2005. “The Effects of Imprisonment on Families and Children of Prisoners.” In The Effects of Imprisonment, edited by Alison Liebling and Shadd Maruna, 442–492. Cullompton: Willan.

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3 Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions About Prison Visitation Joshua C. Cochran

Introduction One response to the era of mass incarceration has been a resurgence of research aimed at understanding the wide range of experiences individuals have during incarceration and the implications of those experiences for prisoner re-entry (e.g. Listwan et al. 2012; Maruna and Immarigeon 2004; Mears and Cochran 2015; Petersilia 2003; Nagin et al. 2009). Prison visitation is one such experience that is especially interesting to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers alike in part because of the potential promise of visitation to help inmates maintain or restore social ties and, in turn, to improve individuals’ transitions from prison life back to society (BruntonSmith and McCarthy 2017; Christian et al. 2006; Hairston 1988, 1991). Studies to date have been particularly focused on recidivism and the extent to which those who are visited, or are visited more, are less likely to recidivate after release (e.g. Bales and Mears 2008; Duwe and Clark 2013; Mitchell et al. 2016). However, looming questions exist that need to be addressed to move this body of research forward. In particular, important questions remain about the causal impacts of visitation, the mechanisms through which visitation operates to impact recidivism, factors that might moderate visitation effects, barriers to visitation, and whether there are plausible alternatives to visitation. J. C. Cochran (*)  School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_3

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The goal of this essay is to help advance theory and research on visitation by providing a detailed “roadmap” for future studies that seek to further disentangle visitation effects on recidivism and, more broadly, research that seeks to better understand the effects of visitation on ex-prisoners and families during the prisoner re-entry process. I argue for a more holistic approach to visitation research that considers not just a singular outcome (recidivism), but that seeks to better understand important predictors of and barriers to visitation and the intervening theoretical mechanisms that might link visitation to recidivism. More specifically, I provide an overview of prior empirical research on visitation and its effects on recidivism. I then construct a new theoretical and conceptual framework that adds to earlier work (see, e.g. Cochran and Mears 2013; Turanovic and Tasca 2017) related to visitation and recidivism aimed at guiding future theory, research, and policy. The framework consists of identifying key research gaps and proposing five key questions on which future theory and research centred on visitation ideally would focus.

The (Theoretical) Salience of Prison Visitation for Recidivism General interest in visitation stems from the perceived benefits of visits for inmates’ social connectedness and, in turn, the implications of that connectedness for in-prison (e.g. prison coping and adjustment) and post-­release experiences (e.g. reconnecting with family, avoiding criminal activity) (Christian 2005). The focus of this essay is on the latter and, specifically, recidivism. Here, prior scholarship has developed a diverse, somewhat complex set of hypotheses. Generally, visitation is thought to impact recidivism in at least two ways: (1) via effects on prison life or (2) via effects on more proximate prisoner re-entry outcomes. These effects, in turn, will have implications for future criminal behaviour. First, visitation may have a range of beneficial effects during incarceration. Most prominently, scholars argue that visitation can restore, maintain, or strengthen inmates’ ties to their outside-of-prison social networks, which might lead to a cascade of benefits during a prison term and afterwards (Hairston 1988; Breese et al. 2000; Clone and DeHart 2014; Cobbina et al. 2012). Maintaining access to social ties may help fend off some of the harms of social and familial isolation (see, generally, Adams 1992). And reducing severe pains of incarceration might, in turn, help reduce recidivism (Blevins

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et al. 2010; Camp and Gaes 2005; Raaijmakers et al. 2017; Windzio 2006). Social ties can also act as a form of informal social control. Visitation may, for example, help inmates maintain a sense of their social roles outside of the prison or maintain a normative social identity (e.g. Arditti 2003; Datesman and Cales 1983), which may protect inmates from the harms of criminogenic prison subcultures or otherwise encourage normative behaviour both during incarceration and afterwards (see, generally, Clemmer 1940; Sykes 1958; Christian 2005; Cochran and Mears 2013; Tasca et al. 2016). To the extent that these or other mechanisms lead to reductions in misconduct (Casey-Acevedo et al. 2004; Cochran 2012; De Claire and Dixon 2017; Jiang and Winfree 2006; Siennick et al. 2013), this too might directly or indirectly affect recidivism. Studies suggest, for example, that inmates who engage in less misconduct during incarceration are less likely to recidivate after release from prison (Cochran et al. 2014; Trulson et al. 2011). Visitation may influence in-prison experiences in other ways that can lead to benefits for re-entry. Visitation may, for example, improve inmates’ optimism or social perspectives during incarceration about their chances of a successful re-entry afterwards, and such improvements to demeanour and outlook may improve the chances of a successful re-entry transition (EklandOlson et al. 1983; Mancini et al. 2016; Naser and La Vigne 2006; see, also, Maruna 2001). Theory suggests, too, that inmates who can routinely experience visitation may perceive fairer or more legitimate treatment by the prison or the broader criminal justice system and so be less likely to reoffend (see, generally, Franke et al. 2010; Tyler 1990). Not least, visitation may provide important opportunities for inmates to plan the practical aspects of their release and this improved release planning may reduce the chances of a failed reintegration process (Bales and Mears 2008). Second, theory suggests visitation should have a diverse set of more direct impacts on prisoner re-entry. For example, visitation can improve inmates’ access to helpful resources upon release. Studies of ex-prisoners find that family members, friends, and even loosely connected social ties can act as critical sources of social support and social capital (e.g. Liu et al. 2016; see, generally, Mears and Cochran 2015; Visher et al. 2004; Visher and Travis 2003). This social capital may be vital for overcoming many of the challenges and obstacles inherent to returning home after prison (Petersilia 2003; Rose and Clear 2003). For example, recent studies find that, in the period immediately following release from prison, more than 80% of ex-prisoners rely on family members for housing needs and, more generally, more than a quarter of all inmates indicate “support from family” as the most critical dimension to avoiding a re-offence (La Vigne et al. 2004; Visher et al. 2004).

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These and other examples (for review, see Mears and Cochran 2015; Petersilia 2003; Ross and Richards 2009; Visher and Travis 2003) highlight that family members constitute a vital source of assistance for inmates transitioning to life after prison (Berg and Huebner 2011; Cobbina et al. 2012) and visitation may have substantial effects on ex-prisoners’ ties to family. Broadly, then, it stands to reason that if visitation can work to strengthen social ties or otherwise increase individuals’ access to social support during and after a prison term, this can lead to improved opportunities including but not limited to obtaining housing, employment, health care, and also reductions in recidivism. Concomitantly, visitation should be of particular interest to practitioners and policymakers because of these theoretical benefits and because of the fact that visitation may be an especially efficient in-prison programming option. That is, unlike other programmes that can require specialized training, hiring new staff, and other financial costs, most prison facilities already have physical and administrative infrastructures to facilitate visiting among inmates (Cochran and Mears 2013). In some instances, there may be small and relatively efficient changes that prisons might implement to improve visitors’ ability to contact inmates, such as expanding visiting hours, improving parking, and improving opportunities for visitor transportation to state prison facilities from large urban centres within a state.

Empirical Studies of Prison Visitation Effects on Recidivism Despite a rich set of theoretical arguments about visitation, empirical visitation research is still in its nascent stage. A small body of studies exists that examine how visitation affects various prisoner re-entry experiences and outcomes, and only a handful of these studies focus specifically on recidivism. More than that, much of the early work on visitation was limited by data and analytical challenges and recent studies have made important strides to address those limitations. Table 3.1 provides an overview of existing empirical studies of visitation (or alternative methods of family contact) effects on recidivism. As inspection of the table indicates, most of the recidivismfocused visitation research has emerged over the past ten years. Thus, understanding the link between visitation and recidivism is a relatively new and evolving endeavour.

3  Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions …     45 Table 3.1  Empirical studies of visitation/family contact and recidivism Author(s), Year

Location (sample size)

Independent variable

Finding

Holt and Miller (1972) Burstein (1977) LeClair (1978) Bagdon and Ryan (1993) Harer (1995) Ryan and Yang (2005) Bales and Mears (2008) Derkzen et al. (2009) Baumer et al. (2009) Mears et al. (2012) Duwe and Clark (2013) Cochran (2014) Barrick et al. (2014) Duwe and Johnson (2016) Brunton-Smith and McCarthy (2017) Cochran et al. (2018)

California (164)

Home furloughs

Not significant

California (38) Massachusetts (878) Vermont (105)

Conjugal visits Home furloughs Home furloughs

Reduction Reduction Not significant

US Federal (1696) Michigan (90)

Home furloughs Family contact

Reduction Not significant

Florida (7000)

Visitation

Reduction

Canada (6537) Ireland (19,955) Florida (3903) Minnesota (16,420)

Visitation Furloughs Visitation Visitation

Reduction Reduction Reduction Reduction

Florida (11,395) Multi-state (255) Minnesota (836)

Visitation Family contact Visitation

Reduction Reduction Reduction

England, Wales (2617) Florida (16,289)

Visitation

Reduction

Visitation

Not significant

The brief history of empirical visitation-focused research has played out as follows. Some of the earliest empirical studies of inmate visitation came out in the 1970s (Holt and Miller 1972; Adams and Fischer 1976; Burstein 1977; LeClair 1978; see, generally, Hairston 1988), but these studies primarily examined general forms of family contact and not visitation, by assessing furloughs, letters, and telephone calls. The earliest studies, to my knowledge, to focus specifically on visitation and its effects on recidivism include one by Burstein in 1977, which examined conjugal visitation effects on 38 inmates. I know of no other studies of visitation and recidivism after Burstein, until the early 2000s. Earlier studies were thus limited in that they lacked a focus specifically on conventional visitation. In addition, they used only bivariate analyses and so could not account for potential confounding influences that might bias estimates. The recent resurgence of visitation research has built on this earlier work but has, for the most part, broken new ground. These more recent studies have also been more rigorous. They employ multivariate analyses to control for potential confounders and they have utilized better data by mostly

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relying on large, comprehensive, and oftentimes state-wide administrative data sets to examine how visitation effects play out for large samples and inmate cohorts (e.g. Baumer et al. 2009; La Vigne et al. 2005; Bales and Mears 2008; Barrick et al. 2014; Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017). A small subset of recent studies has incorporated additional methodological rigour by employing matching and dose-response designs, which can, in theory, better account for selection biases than traditional regression techniques (e.g. Mears et al. 2012; Duwe and Clark 2013; Duwe and Johnson 2016; see, generally, Guo and Fraser 2010). The overall body of visitation and recidivism research remains limited in size and scope and so the results of these prior studies can be summarized briefly. As indicated in Table 3.1, findings are somewhat mixed, but most identify a statistically significant, visitation-reducing effect. However, closer inspection of these studies, especially those that are more rigorous (e.g. Duwe and Johnson 2016; Mears et al. 2012), reveals that estimated impacts of visitation on recidivism may be substantively modest (see Mitchell et al. 2016 for a recent review). For example, the study by Mears and colleagues (2012) is one of only two visitation studies to utilize a propensity score matching design. They found that receiving a single visit moved the probability of recidivism from 45 to 43%. After eight visits, the likelihood reduces to 37%. As the authors suggest, however, such reductions in recidivism may be appreciable when aggregated to the entire prison population. There are also some potential and important nuances. For example, studies suggest that the amount, timing, and regularity (or irregularity) of visitation, along with the type of visitor, may condition visitation effects (e.g. Mears et al. 2012; Duwe and Clark 2013; Duwe and Johnson 2016; Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017). There are, too, important, looming questions about whether any estimated visitation effect is indeed causal (see further discussion below). But researchers have only started to explore these and other complexities.

A New Conceptual Framework—Five Critical Questions for Future Visitation and Recidivism Theory and Research In short, inmate visitation has broad theoretical and policy relevance. As a prison experience, it presents opportunities to test theoretical ideas about the nature and impacts of social support during a term of incarceration and

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afterwards. It has, at the same time, potentially important implications for the development of new or better prison and correctional policies aimed at improving prison social order and the successful integration of ex-prisoners back into society. However, substantial theory and research gaps remain. Thus, in this section, I provide a conceptual framework in the form of five critical questions to be considered in future theorization and empirical studies centred on visitation and its effects on recidivism. The goal of this framework is to provide a useful “roadmap” to guide studies that seek to shed further light on the various contours of visitation (e.g. how it happens and what it looks like) and its effects (on recidivism, in particular). This work also updates and vastly expands upon an earlier paper by Cochran and Mears (2013). The theoretical and research needs identified in that earlier paper still stand, but here I expand on those ideas and outline several new avenues that researchers and practitioners should consider as this line of scholarship continues to move forward.

First—Does Visitation Have a Causal Effect? There are strong theoretical reasons to anticipate that visitation would reduce the likelihood of recidivism—that is, that visitation should have a causal, recidivism-reducing impact. However, and as mentioned above, recent studies have not necessarily offered resounding support for these theoretical arguments. Instead, they offer only modest support. Mixed and modest effects paired with the relatively small number of existing studies raise important questions about whether visitation indeed has a causal impact on recidivism or whether estimations from prior studies have measured a spurious association. In addition, there are important analytical limitations in this literature. Large, state-wide administrative inmate data sets paired with multivariate regression analyses provide substantial estimation improvements compared to earlier work that utilized small samples and bivariate designs. Most studies have not, however, utilized potentially more rigorous techniques. Only two studies have, for example, implemented matching designs. Matching designs provide a potential “step up” from regression techniques in analytic rigour (see, e.g. Guo and Fraser 2010) and may serve to better ensure that analyses are estimating visitation effects net of sources of selection bias. With that said, matching designs are not a panacea for estimating causal effects of visitation because, like conventional regression, they can only

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utilize measured covariates. Meaning, they cannot rule out the influences of unmeasured or unmeasurable confounders. There are theoretical reasons to anticipate, however, that a number of critical sources of confounding are not typically available to researchers and so have not been accounted for in prior analyses. Consider, for example, inmates’ pre-existing or pre-prison social networks. In theory, inmates who enter prison with more or stronger social ties will have both an increased likelihood of being visited during incarceration and a reduced likelihood of recidivating. Most prison administrative data sets do not routinely include measures of the strength or size of inmates’ pre-prison social ties (see, however, Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017), but by not accounting for variation in them, prior estimates may be biased. Socio-economic status is another potential confounder and most prior studies do not control for it, which raises additional questions about prior estimated effects. Inmates who are economically disadvantaged are, theoretically, those who are more likely to have family members and friends (i.e. potential visitors) who are similarly disadvantaged (Christian et al. 2006). Thus, poorer inmates may be those who receive fewer visits and are at the same time more likely to recidivate. In short, the current state of research on visitation and recidivism— including the limited number of studies and unaddressed potential sources of confounding in statistical models—raises important questions about whether prior estimated effects are “real”. That is, it is unclear whether prior studies have estimated a true causal effect or a spurious association. What is needed then is theory and research that can more closely consider what potential confounders exist—i.e. identify primary sources of estimation bias—and then employ analytical strategies to address them. As a starting point for improving causal estimates, future studies should consider the two following recommendations. First, future studies should examine better or more appropriate data. That is, future studies should look to obtain and utilize data that can better tap into and account for theoretical sources of selection bias (e.g. preprison social ties, socio-economic status) that have not been accounted for in previous analyses. Ideally, theory can provide guidance. As such, obtaining measures of inmates’ pre-prison social ties or networks, along with socio-economic status of inmates and their social ties, is a good place to start. Comparing results from conventional regression and matching analyses before and after including these and other previously unmeasured confounders would provide valuable insight into the extent to which prior estimated visitation effects on recidivism are biased, or not.

3  Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions …     49

Second, future studies should consider alternative and potentially more appropriate analytical strategies. Specifically, researchers should consider methods like instrumental variable (IV) analysis, which can theoretically provide less biased estimates, or better estimates of causal effects, when theory suggests unmeasured confounders exist (Morgan and Winship 2015). A detailed examination of IV analysis goes beyond the scope of this essay and numerous detailed methodological accounts exist that explain the method (e.g. Angrist 2006). In short, IV analysis can be used to leverage unique scenarios of natural randomization of a treatment and, in turn, provide an opportunity to reduce selection bias and provide more accurate estimates. An actual example from the visitation literature is illustrative. In one of only two existing studies using IV analysis to estimate visitation effects (to my knowledge; see, also, Cochran et al. 2018), Tahamont (2013) utilized inmates’ distance from prison facility to home as an instrument to test the effects of visitation on in-prison inmate misbehaviour. The author theorized that inmates’ distance from home is assigned via a largely random process, or varies randomly among inmates, but has substantial impacts on the ability of inmates to be visited. To the extent that the initial distance from home is random for some population of state inmates, and to the extent that distance indeed influences visitation likelihoods, we can theoretically estimate a more accurate visitation effect. The method is limited, though, because the effect estimate stems from and so only applies to those inmates whose visitation was influenced by distance; that is, whose treatment assignment (who was visited) was in essence determined at least partly by a randomized process (prison facility distance from home). Some inmates might be visited, or not, regardless of distance and so any estimated impact of visitation stemming from an IV analysis would not be generalizable to those inmates because their visitation is not affected by this randomized process. Thus, this method can, theoretically, more accurately estimate a visitation effect on recidivism for at least a subset of the inmate population. Studies that build on Tahamont’s work are needed. Results from successfully designed IV or other analyses that provide improvements to estimation can then help to gauge the accuracy of prior estimated visitation effects. If, say, results from IV analyses confirm findings in earlier studies of visitation effects on recidivism, this would in turn bolster confidence in previously estimated effects (Cochran et al. 2018). Researchers should also consider other types of “natural experiments” (e.g. Kirk 2009) or opportunities for better estimation of visitation effects on recidivism. For example, prison and corrections systems undergo frequent policy changes. These changes may, in some instances, create research opportunities. Prisons might dramatically

50     J. C. Cochran

expand or restrict visiting hours or, say, create a bus system to improve visitor access to prisons, or transfer inmates to different prison facilities in a largely random way thus randomly increasing some inmates’ access to visitation (e.g. Tahamont and Bushway 2015). These and other policy changes may create opportunities to develop “better” estimates.

Second—What Are the Intervening or Causal Mechanisms? Research is sorely needed that not only works to determine whether visitation has a “real” effect, but also that works to determine what leads to it (Moran 2013). In other words, what are the precise, intervening mechanisms that link visitation to recidivism? Prior theory provides ample guidance. As described above, scholars have outlined a diverse set of pathways linking visitation to recidivism (e.g. Hairston 1988; Mears et al. 2012; Mitchell et al. 2016; Wallace et al. 2016; Wolff and Draine 2004). Figure 3.1 maps out many of the hypothesized pathways, or causal mechanisms, connecting visitation to recidivism. The figure includes four main dimensions: pre-visitation (discussed below), visitation, in-prison outcomes, and post-re-entry outcomes linked to visitation. The figure illustrates a range of ways visitation might lead to effects on recidivism. For example, visitation might affect various in-prison outcomes, or experiences, that then affect prisoner re-entry and recidivism. Visitation might also affect re-entry more directly.

Fig. 3.1  Causal model of visitation and recidivism

3  Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions …     51

The far-right box underneath “Re-entry Outcomes” highlights, however, that even when visitation affects re-entry, it might operate through any range of pathways to impact recidivism. If, for example, visitation improves bonds to family members or otherwise improves access to social resources, it may affect post-release employment or access to stable housing and these outcomes might affect behaviour and crime. These and other factors are theoretically more proximate—i.e. visitation theoretically affects such factors as employment, housing, and health more directly—and may then lead to beneficial indirect effects on recidivism. Brunton-Smith and McCarthy (2017) provide, to my knowledge, the only quantitative analysis that worked to connect visitation to recidivism while at the same time assessed an intervening mechanism. They employed a pathways analysis to test, first, whether visiting indeed can improve family attachment or connectedness and then if strengthening family bonds improves re-entry. Findings supported this idea. That is, they found evidence to suggest that, although not all visits improve family connections, visitation may work to reduce recidivism to the extent that they do improve such connections. Apart from Brunton-Smith and McCarthy (2017), prior studies have overlooked the exploration of pathways to recidivism. Thus, we know little about the true nature of visitation effects, such as whether visitation operates to reduce recidivism via any range of avenues such as reduced strains, reduced misconduct, family reunification, improved employment outcomes, and more. This oversight is, in some ways, akin to a programme evaluation that evaluates only the distal outcomes and skips the more proximate ones (see, generally, Mears 2010). Consider, for example, an evaluation of an in-prison vocational training programme that examines only recidivism and finds no effect. Was the programme itself a failure? In this scenario, one would have little basis for knowing. A more appropriate study would evaluate whether inmate participation in or completion of a vocational programme affects post-release employment outcomes, which was likely the more proximate, theorized outcome of interest. This type of evaluation would provide a stronger foundation on which to evaluate whether the programme operates effectively—that is, in accordance with its theorized effects. Similarly, without first understanding the proximate effects of visitation on in-prison and post-release outcomes, we have little basis for understanding whether visitation indeed “works” or operates as hypothesized. Research is needed, then, that takes a more holistic approach, like the one illustrated in Fig. 3.1 and employed by Brunton-Smith and McCarthy (2017), to understanding visitation’s theoretically more direct or proximate

52     J. C. Cochran

effects and how those lead, or do not, to later outcomes. Indeed, the dimensions in Fig. 3.1 represent a host of unanswered research questions and studies that seek to answer any one of them stand to make important contributions. For example, empirical estimates of the extent to which any visitation effects on recidivism are mediated through visitation’s effects on improving inmates’ access to housing, health, or employment would directly test commonly referenced arguments about visitation and social capital. Similar studies could be conducted that examine other aspects of prisoner re-entry that may explain the visitation-recidivism relationship, or that work to disentangle how in-prison outcomes might do so.

Third—When, or Under What Conditions, Does Visitation Have an Effect? Studies are also needed that can work to better disentangle the factors that condition visitation effects. That is, how do particular characteristics of inmates’ experiences influence whether or how visitation affects recidivism? In an earlier paper, Cochran and Mears (2013) called for research that moves beyond dichotomous (e.g. yes/no) measures of whether inmates were visited and explores more carefully the various contours of inmate visitation and whether variation in experiences among inmates who are visited lead to differential effects. Since then, others have made similar arguments (e.g. Hutton 2016; Moran 2013; Tasca et al. 2015) and empirical studies have emerged that examine variation in visitation experiences more closely (Cochran 2014; Hickert et al. 2018; Tasca et al. 2016; Turanovic and Tasca 2017). For example, recent studies have emerged that examine conditioning factors, such as whether visitation effects vary by the type of visitor or the number of visits (e.g. Duwe and Clark 2013; Duwe and Johnson 2016). Studies described above have made important contributions, but more is needed to continue to develop an understanding of visitation effects. Returning to Fig. 3.1, under the heading “Visitation”, there is a list of theoretically relevant dimensions of visitation variability. Variation in the type of visit may matter. Are there, for example, different effects of contact versus non-contact visits? Family, conjugal, and overnight visits are less common, but they constitute more intensive and intimate visitation modes and may lead to subsequently stronger impacts. More generally, the count or rate of visits may matter, such that inmates who receive more visits over the course of their prison term may better maintain or strengthen their social ties.

3  Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions …     53

Theory and research indicate, too, that the pattern, consistency, and timing of visits may matter (Bales and Mears 2008; Cochran 2014; Hickert et al. 2018). It may be that visitation is only effective when inmates are visited consistently over time. A single visit or two over a multi-year prison term may have no appreciable impact on re-entry outcomes. Separately, visitation timing might matter. A single visit just before release from prison may, for example, have important practical implications for re-entry planning (Bales and Mears 2008). Similarly, we need to know much more about differences in the effects of family versus friend visits, and whether visitation from more intimate family members can have stronger beneficial effects. Not least, more studies are needed that can provide insights into what happens during a visit, and what impact variation in the actual experience of a visit might have on both inmates and those that visit them (Hutton 2016; Moran 2013; Moran et al. 2017; Tasca et al. 2016). Prior studies underscore that visiting a facility can be both painful and therapeutic for both visitors and the visited (e.g. Comfort 2008; Hutton 2016). Although it may be that any visiting is generically beneficial for re-entry, it is probably more likely that experiences during visits condition their effects. Apart from the visit itself, characteristics of inmates may also condition visitation effects. Specifically, research suggests that inmates who are younger (Maitland and Sluder 1998; Visher et al. 2004; Uggen and Wakefield 2005; Harvey 2012) and who are imprisoned for the first time (Clemmer 1940; Sykes 1958; Gibbs 1982) may experience more acutely the pains of social isolation. Visitation may then help younger and first-time inmates cope with heightened isolation and the attendant pains of imprisonment unique to their experience, and thus exert stronger effects. Females, too, may be more strongly affected by visitation. Like young inmates and first-timers, scholarship suggests that female inmates experience greater isolation, higher rates of mental health problems, and report greater emotional distress as a result of separation from their children and families (Cobbina et al. 2012; Datesman and Cales 1983; Owens 1998; Clone and DeHart 2014; Giordano et al. 2002; James and Glaze 2006). These challenges likely stem in part from the fact that female inmates are substantially more likely than males to have been primary caretakers of minor children prior to incarceration (Glaze and Maruschak 2008). Females thus may benefit more greatly from visiting, especially visits with their children. Future studies should explore how any effects of visitation on recidivism may vary across these and other theoretically relevant inmate characteristics.

54     J. C. Cochran

Fourth—What Are the Predictors of and Barriers to Visitation? Another important but overlooked aspect of visitation is the fact that many inmates are never visited. Indeed, existing empirical studies of visitation indicate that anywhere from roughly 28 to 75% of inmates will receive zero visits over the course of their prison stay (e.g. Cochran 2014; Duwe and Clark 2013; Hickert et al. 2018). These empirical studies, however, tell us little about why some inmates are not visited. What are the key predictors of visitation? And what are the barriers or challenges? A limited body of research provides some valuable insight. At least three existing quantitative studies (Casey-Acevedo and Bakken 2002; Clark and Duwe 2017; Cochran et al. 2017) have examined the effects of individual characteristics on visitation and a handful of quantitative and qualitative analyses provide important knowledge and context related to the challenges visitors face, including how distance and socio-economic status can make it particularly difficult to visit a loved one in prison (e.g. Christian 2005; Comfort 2008; Cochran et al. 2016; Hutton 2016; Tasca 2016; Tewksbury and DeMichele 2005). Figure 3.1, under the heading “Pre-Visitation”, lists some of the key characteristics underscored in these prior studies. More generally, though, research is needed that can shed light on what makes visitation more or less likely. Inattention to predictors of and barriers to visitation is a problem in and of itself, given that inmates and their visitors consistently report a desire to take part in visitation and that social isolation is a primary strain that inmates experience during incarceration (Adams 1992; Christian 2005; Dixey and Woodall 2012; Mancini et al. 2016). Thus, understanding predictors and barriers to visitation is relevant for understanding potential policies that might help improve visitation access. It is important, too, for consideration of visitation effects on recidivism for three reasons. First, if indeed visitation has a causal, beneficial effect on recidivism, barriers that inmates face to receiving family and friend visits operate to restrict access to what may effectively be a form of beneficial treatment. This is problematic for individuals who may face practical barriers (e.g. distance) and also for corrections systems, communities, and society members who miss out on a potential opportunity to impose more widely a form of theoretically efficient and effective rehabilitative treatment that may improve public safety (see, however, discussion in Hutton 2016).

3  Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions …     55

Second, theory and a small number of existing studies suggest that many of the practical barriers to visitation will disproportionately affect poor and minority inmates and their potential visitors (e.g. Christian et al. 2006; Cochran et al. 2016). Distance, socio-economic status, and the diverse set of other challenges that stem from them are more likely to make visitation difficult for inmates from economically disadvantaged families and communities. Thus, understanding common barriers to visitation provides a critical opportunity to understand better how inequalities stem from or are exacerbated by a particular aspect of the prison experience. To put it differently, it seems likely that socio-economic status has salient impacts on the ability of inmates to contact family and friends during incarceration. Poorer inmates and families may simply be less likely to experience visiting. If visitation indeed can improve family bonds and even reduce recidivism, poorer inmates miss out on this opportunity only because they are poor. This is an important disparity to explore in its own right, but also for understanding the extent to which incarceration experiences are especially disadvantageous for already disadvantaged populations. Third, the fact that a large proportion of inmates are never visited or are unlikely to be visited means that we know little about how visitation affects those groups—that is, those who are systematically barred from receiving visits. For example, if the poorest inmates never receive visits—perhaps because their visitors cannot afford to travel or stay overnight or take time off from work or because they too have a criminal record and so are not allowed to visit (Christian et al. 2006)—then we know little from prior studies about how visitation affects recidivism for this particular group. And it may be precisely those inmates, such as those who are poor, minority, or otherwise disadvantaged and who in turn are less likely to receive visits, and who may stand to benefit most from visitation. Such inmates may, for example, be those for which visitation may be most useful for overcoming the practical and economic challenges of prisoner re-entry. Existing research can tell us little about whether this is true. Identifying first which inmates are least likely to be visited will then help inform studies that seek to identify whether and how visitation effects may vary. Generally, then, theory and research are needed that provide systematic examinations of the characteristics of inmates, their social ties, and prison facilities that increase or decrease the likelihood of visitation. Here, we need to know answers to a range of sub-questions. How does visitation vary across inmate groups? Are there unique inmate groups, such as elderly inmates, serious sex offenders, or inmates who have a history of frequent incarceration, that are never visited? Are economically disadvantaged or minority

56     J. C. Cochran

inmates less likely to be visited? And, if so, why and what are the implications for disparities and inequalities in other outcomes during prisoner re-entry? Who, by contrast, is most likely to be visited? Not least, are there some groups for which visitation may be particularly beneficial, but also rare, such as inmates who are especially disadvantaged or who may face considerably tougher circumstances reconnecting to family and friends after release?

Fifth—Are There Plausible Alternatives to Visitation? If visitation elicits beneficial impacts on re-entry and, specifically, recidivism, it not only raises questions as to why and how such effects emerge, but also about whether other similar experiences might result in similar effects. Take, for example, the primary theoretical argument proposed in prior scholarship—that visitation will help inmates strengthen social bonds and access social support that, in turn, improves re-entry. Can other methods of contact between inmates and their outside social ties yield similar short- and long-term benefits? Going forward, research is needed that explores plausible alternatives to in-person visitation (Martin 2016; Tartaro and Levy 2017). Potential alternative methods of contact to consider include, but are not limited to, phone calls, letter writing, and also video visitation. It may be that the nature of in-person visitation, which can allow family members to see, touch, and interact together, yields unique effects (Arditti 2003; Tasca et al. 2016). However, no formalized comparative theory or research exists that considers differential experiences and effects of different forms of contacts. In short, empirical studies are needed that can determine whether letter writing, phone calls, video calls, and other alternative methods of contact can achieve similar or different outcomes via similar or different theoretical mechanisms compared to in-person visitation. Video calls, or “video visitation”, may be especially interesting to researchers and practitioners because it provides an opportunity for face-to-face communication, while at the same time allowing inmates and visitors to overcome many of the potentially salient practical barriers (e.g. distance, travel, financial costs) inherent to visiting. Prison facilities may also find it appealing because it can avoid any of the potential risks posed by in-prison visits, such as introduction of contraband. With that said, these and other alternatives may prove to be unequal substitutes to in-person visits, particularly for intimate family and child visitation. If so, it would further underscore the need to continue to pursue many of the lines of research suggested above, including those aimed

3  Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism, and Continuing Questions …     57

at understanding how and why visitation effects emerge and strategies to potentially improve inmate access to the beneficial aspects of visitation.

Conclusion Consideration of the effects of visitation resonates with many scholars and practitioners in large part because of visitation’s potential implications for preserving or strengthening familial and social ties. At the same time, visitation theory and research serve as a reminder of the host of collateral consequences that can stem from an individual’s incarceration. Volumes of research highlight the ways in which incarceration and the social isolation that stems from it adversely impact individuals, families, and communities and can have reverberating impacts over the life course (e.g. Chesney-Lind and Mauer 2003; Pettit and Western 2004; Western 2006). Indeed, there is certainly an aspect of research on visitation that can be disheartening. After all, such studies first and foremost bring attention to the high rates of recidivism, low rates of visitation, and overall modest impacts visitation might have on reducing future crime and otherwise counteracting the harms stemming from a prison sentence. This storyline parallels that of the broader literature on the overall effects of mass incarceration. Empirical studies of incarceration effects suggest null or adverse impacts of incarceration on individuals’ likelihoods of recidivism, modest impacts on public safety, and substantial costs, both fiscal and social (e.g. Cullen et al. 2011; Nagin et al. 2009; Spelman 2008). There is, though, room for optimism. Scholarship that seeks to understand how familial and social connections can be maintained or strengthened during, or despite, incarceration, along with research on how social connections and networks affect life in prison and afterwards, is critical for pushing forward our understanding of the heterogeneity inherent to prison experiences and the effects of this heterogeneity on relevant social and behavioural outcomes. Such research can identify theoretically sound recommendations for improving corrections systems so that they can operate more fairly, humanely, and effectively. More than that, such research is important for underscoring the putative benefits of punishment practices that can both protect public safety but also minimize collateral harms for individuals and families (e.g. Braithwaite 1989; Clear and Frost 2014; Cullen and Gendreau 2000). Continued pursuit of these lines of inquiry will be critical for continued improvements to the theory and science of prisons and punishment and the advancement of evidence-based policies.

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Casey-Acevedo, Karen, and Tim Bakken. 2002. “Visiting Women in Prison: Who Visits and Who Cares?” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 34: 67–83. Casey-Acevedo, Karen, Tim Bakken, and Adria Karle. 2004. “Children Visiting Mothers in Prison: The Effects on Mothers’ Behaviour and Disciplinary Adjustment.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 37: 418–430. Chesney-Lind, Meda, and Marc Mauer, eds. 2003. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: The New Press. Christian, Johnna. 2005. “Riding the Bus: Barriers to Prison Visitation and Family Management Strategies.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21: 31–48. Christian, Johnna, Jeff Mellow, and Shenique Thomas. 2006. “Social and Economic Implications of Family Connections to Prisoners.” Journal of Criminal Justice 34: 443–452. Clark, Valerie A., and Grant Duwe. 2017. “Distance Matters: Examining the Factors that Impact Prisoner Visitation in Minnesota.” Criminal Justice and Behavior 44: 184–204. Clear, Todd R., and Natasha A. Frost. 2014. The Punishment Imperative. New York: New York University Press. Clemmer, Donald. 1940. The Prison Community. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Clone, Stephanie, and Dana DeHart. 2014. “Social Support Networks of Incarcerated Women: Types of Support, Sources of Support, and Implications for Reentry.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 53: 503–521. Cobbina, Jennifer E., Beth M. Huebner, and Mark T. Berg. 2012. “Men, Women, and Postrelease Offending: An Examination of the Nature of the Link Between Relational Ties and Recidivism.” Crime and Delinquency 58: 331–361. Cochran, Joshua C. 2012. “The Ties that Bind or the Ties that Break: Examining the Relationship Between Visitation and Prisoner Misconduct.” Journal of Criminal Justice 40: 433–440. Cochran, Joshua C. 2014. “Breaches in the Wall: Imprisonment, Social Support, and Recidivism.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 51: 200–229. Cochran, Joshua C., J. C. Barnes, Daniel P. Mears, and William D. Bales. 2018. “Revisiting the Effects of Visitation on Recidivism.” Justice Quarterly. Forthcoming. Cochran, Joshua C., and Daniel P. Mears. 2013. “Social Isolation and Inmate Behavior: A Conceptual Framework for Theorizing Prison Visitation and Guiding and Assessing Research.” Journal of Criminal Justice 41: 252–261. Cochran, Joshua C., Daniel P. Mears, and William D. Bales. 2017. “Who Gets Visited in Prison? Individual- and Community-Level Disparities in Inmate Visitation Experiences.” Crime and Delinquency 63: 545–568. Cochran, Joshua C., Daniel P. Mears, William D. Bales, and Eric A. Stewart. 2014. “Does Inmate Behavior Affect Post-Release Offending? Investigating the Misconduct-Recidivism Relationships Among Youth and Adults.” Justice Quarterly 31: 1044–1073.

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Glaze, Lauren E., and Laura M. Maruschak. 2008. Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Guo, Shenyang, and Mark W. Fraser. 2010. Propensity Score Analysis: Statistical Methods and Applications. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hairston, Creasie F. 1988. “Family Ties During Imprisonment: Do They Influence Future Criminal Activity?” Federal Probation 52: 48–52. Hairston, Creasie F. 1991. “Family Ties During Imprisonment: Important to Whom and for What?” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 18: 87–104. Harer, Miles. 1995. Recidivism Among Federal Prisoners Released in 1987. Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Prisons. Harvey, Joel. 2012. Young Men in Prison. New York: Routledge. Hickert, Audrey, Sarah Tahamont, and Shawn Bushway. 2018. “A Tale of Two Margins: Exploring the Probabilistic Processes that Generate Prison Visits in the First Two Years of Incarceration.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 34: 691–716. Holt, Norman, and Donald Miller. 1972. Explorations in Inmate-Family Relationships. Sacramento: CA: California Department of Corrections. Hutton, Marie. 2016. “Visiting Time: A Tale of Two Prisons.” Probation Journal 63: 347–361. James, Doris J., and Lauren E. Glaze. 2006. Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. Jiang, Shanhe, and Thomas L. Winfree. 2006. “Social Support, Gender, and Inmate Adjustment to Prison Life: Insights from a National Sample.” The Prison Journal 86: 32–55. Kirk, David S. 2009. “A Natural Experiment on Residential Change and Recidivism: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.” American Sociological Review 74: 484–505. La Vigne, Nancy G., Christy Visher, and Jennifer Castro. 2004. Chicago Prisoners’ Experiences Returning Home. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. La Vigne, Nancy G., Rebecca L. Naser, Lisa E. Brooks, and Jennifer L. Castro. 2005. “Examining the Effect of Incarceration and In-Prison Family Contact on Prisoners’ Family Relationships.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21: 314–335. LeClair, Daniel P. 1978. “Home Furlough Program Effects on Rates of Recidivism.” Criminal Justice and Behavior 5: 249–259. Listwan, Shelley J., Dena Hanley, and Mark Colvin. 2012. The Prison Experience and Reentry: Examining the Impact of Victimization on Coming Home. Washington, DC: Report Submitted to the National Institute of Justice. Doc. No.: 238083. Liu, Siyu, Justin T. Pickett, and Thomas Baker. 2016. “Inside the Black Box: Prison Visitation, the Costs of Offending, and Inmate Social Capital.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 27: 766–790.

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Maitland, Angela S., and Richard D. Sluder. 1998. “Victimization and Youthful Prison Inmates: An Empirical Analysis.” The Prison Journal 78: 55–73. Mancini, Christina, Thomas Baker, Karla Dhungana Sainju, Kristin Golden, Laura E. Bedard, and Marc Gertz. 2016. “Examining External Support Received in Prison and Concerns About Reentry Among Incarcerated Women.” Feminist Criminology 11: 163–190. Martin, Eric. 2016. “Changing Nature of Correctional Visitation: Can Video Visitation Provide the Same Benefits as In-Person Visits?” Corrections Today September/October: 22–24. Maruna, Shadd. 2001. Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild their Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Maruna, Shadd, and Ross Immarigeon. 2004. After Crime and Punishment: Pathways to Offender Reintegration. Devon, UK: William Publishing. Mears, Daniel P. 2010. American Criminal Justice Policy: An Evaluation Approach to Increasing Accountability and Effectiveness. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mears, Daniel P., and Joshua C. Cochran. 2015. Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mears, Daniel P., Joshua C. Cochran, Sonja E. Siennick, and William D. Bales. 2012. “Prison Visitation and Recidivism.” Justice Quarterly 29: 888–918. Mitchell, Meghan M., Kallee Spooner, Di Jia, and Yan Zhang. 2016. “The Effect of Prison Visitation on Reentry Success: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Criminal Justice 47: 74–83. Moran, Dominique. 2013. “Carceral Geography and the Spatialities of Prison Visiting: Visitation, Recidivism, and Hyperincarceration.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31: 174–190. Moran, Dominique, Marie A. Hutton, Louise Dixon, and Tom Disney. 2017. “‘Daddy Is a Difficult Word for Me to Hear’: Carceral Geographies of Parenting and the Prison Visiting Room as a Contested Space of Situated Fathering.” Children’s Geographies 15: 107–121. Morgan, Stephen L., and Christopher Winship. 2015. Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagin, Daniel S., Francis T. Cullen, and Cheryl L. Jonson. 2009. “Imprisonment and Reoffending.” Crime and Justice 38: 115–200. Naser, Rebecca L., and Nancy G. La Vigne. 2006. “Family Support in the Prisoner Reentry Process: Expectations and Realities.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 43: 93–106. Owens, Barbara. 1998. “In the Mix”: Struggle and Survival in a Women’s Prison. Albany: State University of New York Press. Petersilia, Joan. 2003. When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry. New York: Oxford University Press.

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4 Developments and Next Steps in Theorizing the Secondary Prisonization of Families Megan Comfort

Introduction Over the last three decades, the USA has experienced a colossal growth in its carceral population, zooming from incarceration rates so moderate in the early 1970s that it was conceivable to anticipate the ‘end of the prison’ (Blumstein et al. 1977) to rates so high at present that the USA is the world leader in locking its residents behind bars (Institute for Criminal Policy Research 2017). This steep rise has led to a growing interest in the repercussions of incarceration on inmates’ kin and friends, who, around the time the carceral population hit the two-million mark in 2000, started to receive attention as people who themselves were profoundly affected by the punishment meted out to their relative or loved one (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002; Pattillo et al. 2004; Braman 2004; Travis 2005). Historically, discussions of crime and punishment have focused on an individual lawbreaker and the institutions charged with monitoring and sanctioning him (or, in more recent discussions, her). However, over the last decade this scope has widened, with scholars increasingly turning their attention to the impact of incarceration on inmates’ family, friends, and neighbourhoods. In addition to the challenges of tracing out and exploring the full scope of incarceration’s reach into family life, scholars have needed to develop M. Comfort (*)  RTI International, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_4

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theoretical frameworks to analyse the impact of an unprecedentedly punitive era on intimate relationships, parent–child bonds, kinship networks, familial communication and coping strategies, and more. This chapter provides an overview of one such framework, that of “secondary prisonization”, introduced in my book Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Comfort 2008). I begin with a discussion of the original development of secondary prisonization, then delve into recent applications of the concept and discuss the limitations of the framework, as well as unexplored contexts in which the analytical lens of secondary prisonization could potentially yield a more extensive understanding of the connections between criminal justice involvement, social inequality, and family health and well-being. I conclude with reflections on developments and changes for families of prisoners since Doing Time Together and contemplate what may lie ahead as governments grapple with the fallout of having relied for decades on correctional institutions as a cornerstone of social policy.

Secondary Prisonization In Donald Clemmer’s The Prison Community, he presented a conceptual innovation developed from his in-depth observations of the assimilation processes people undergo during incarceration: [A]s we use the term Americanization to describe a greater or lesser degree of the immigrant’s integration into the American scheme of life, we may use the term prisonization to indicate the taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary. ((1940) 1958, 299)

As the term indicates, prisonization underscores that having contact with a correctional facility will in and of itself affect people’s behaviours and outlooks, highlighting the role of the penitentiary as not only a people-processing but a people-changing institution (Hasenfeld 1972). In elaborating the determinants of greater and lesser degrees of prisonization, Clemmer drew attention to the importance of a prisoner’s length of sentence, ability to maintain positive relationships with non-incarcerated people, degree of absorption into a “prison primary group”, and level of resistance to the penitentiary culture’s dogmas and codes. In doing so, he highlighted the importance of structural factors in shaping individual responses: although the characteristics of prisonization are observed at the

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individual level, they are produced by a constellation of socioeconomic, legal, and societal forces that strongly influence whether people wind up in prison in the first place, how long they stay there, what resources are available to them during their incarceration, and how psychologically fortified they are to withstand the impact of a brutal and punitive environment. The theoretical framework of secondary prisonization extends and adapts Clemmer’s concept by shifting the lens to people who are drawn into contact with the penitentiary through the imprisonment of a loved one. Introduced in an ethnographic study of women visiting their incarcerated male partners at northern California’s San Quentin State Prison (Comfort 2003, 2008), secondary prisonization provides analytical insight into how and why people who are legally free can undergo profound transformations of their conduct, speech, physical appearances, daily activities, sexual behaviours, and hopes through their relationships with those held behind bars. A major thrust of secondary prisonization is to theorize the impact of a loved one’s incarceration by emphasizing the role of the correctional facility in shaping the communications, interactions, and expectations that occur between the denizens of institutions and those who reside outside the walls. Secondary prisonization therefore firmly situates individual and interpersonal experiences within a structural framework, which, like Clemmer’s prisonization, expands the analytical lens beyond the motivations, responses, and behaviours of single actors and underscores the importance of socioeconomic, juridical, policy, and environmental influences. From this vantage point, secondary prisonization also allows for the interplay between agents and structures, opening channels to understand the nuances of how people try to make a system work for them and how love, intimacy, and family can be crafted within the spaces of regulation, restriction, and punitive surveillance. By doing so, the concept can engage people’s feelings of agency and ambivalence alongside powerlessness and despondence: within the framework of secondary prisonization, those with incarcerated loved ones are “not victims; they are multidimensional people with complicated views about imprisonment” (Small 2015, 354). Although developed in the context of a study based at a California state prison, secondary prisonization has been documented elsewhere. Hutton (2016) notes the concept’s applicability in her study of prisons in England and Wales, remarking on its particular saliency in the context of “full-body” (or strip) searches as these subject visitors to one of the most intensely demeaning and disempowering practices used in penal institutions. Likewise, secondary prisonization resonates strongly in Granja’s (2016) research with families of prisoners in Portugal, who experience

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intense inspection and control while also managing to exercise creativity in the search for connection, closeness, and stability. And in France, both Ricordeau (2008) and Touraut (2012) describe the ways in which incarceration reverberates beyond the walls of the penitentiary, marking the lives of relatives and friends who strive to maintain contact with those who are locked inside. The following discusses an array of publications that have analytically engaged secondary prisonization, drawing out the strengths and limitations of the concept.

Applications and Developments of Secondary Prisonization Since its introduction, secondary prisonization has been used to explore the impact of a loved one’s incarceration on family members in other contexts. One recent application is Aiello and McCorkel’s (2017) ethnographic study of a mother–child visitation programme in a jail in the north-eastern USA. The authors note that most qualitative studies of children with incarcerated mothers “situate children outside of the penal facility, focusing on the absence of the mother, stress on caregivers, and the emotional and social consequences of altered arrangements”, and that secondary prisonization highlights the need to also investigate children’s interactions with correctional facilities. Drawing on participant observation data of the visitation programme over an 18-month period supplemented by in-depth interviews with mothers and staff in the jail, Aiello and McCorkel explore “the predominant forms of secondary prisonization that all children experience during visits: discipline of the body and regulation of emotion”, focusing on the implications for children “in terms of how they understand themselves, their emotions, and their relationship with their mothers” (p. 355). In analysing such troubling scenarios as children refusing to use the bathroom during their visits because they fear their mothers—who are not permitted to accompany them to the restroom—will be taken away in their absence, to five-year-olds who proudly report that they have learned not to cry when saying goodbye at the end of a visit, Aiello and McCorkel astutely build the case that secondary prisonization operates in unique ways for children and therefore requires further conceptual elaboration in this context. They highlight that during jail visiting, “much of what was demanded of children differs markedly from developmentally appropriate and healthy

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responses to the incarceration of a loved one” and that while “adults are much better equipped to compartmentalize carceral demands”, the majority of children have “not yet developed a nuanced understanding of metaphor, individual rights, bureaucratic logic, and the rule of law” (p. 366) to help them situate the peculiarities of jail visitation within a broader frame of their own relationships to their bodies, emotions, and mothers. Aiello and McCorkel thereby make a crucial connection between the process of secondary prisonization and its impact on child development, the further exploration of which is sure to yield significant insights into the costs and consequences of parental incarceration, family separation, and exposure of children to punishing environments. A strength of Aiello and McCorkel’s analysis is to tightly link the association between children’s experiences at the jail and the psychological adaptations children make with regard to both visitation and their relationships with their mothers. As in Clemmer’s depictions of prisonization ([1940] 1958), secondary prisonization encompasses not only the interactions between outsiders and the correctional facility, but also how those interactions shape people’s emotions, behaviours, and perspectives. A frequent error made in the application of secondary prisonization is to stop short at merely providing descriptions of how family members and loved ones of incarcerated people are subjected to regulation and surveillance. Although this is an important component of the concept, secondary prisonization’s usefulness in theorizing the impact of prisons and jails on individuals and families is rooted in the changes that contact with penal institutions produces in people as they acclimate to coercive and punitive environments, accommodate unnatural restrictions on their self-expression and relationships, and work to circumvent the totality of institutional control. Observing that people are treated as “quasi-inmates” (Comfort 2008, 27) due to their attachments to prisoners is just the first step in building an understanding of how incarceration profoundly transforms intimate and social life. An example of the opportunity to further engage secondary prisonization can be found in Tewksbury and DeMichele’s study of a prison visitation programme in Kentucky (2005). Through self-administered surveys completed by 396 people visiting men in a medium-security facility, the authors gathered a wealth of information on visitor demographics, frequency and context of visiting, relationships with the prisoners, and perceptions of the visiting experience. In presenting a table of people’s reported emotions as they drove to the prison for their visit, Tewksbury and DeMichele suggested that the dominance of “excitement” over other responses such as “sadness” or “worried” makes it “clear that at this prison few visitors felt any secondary

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prisonization” (Tewksbury and DeMichele 2005, 303). If secondary prisonization referred only to experiences of being treated like inmates at the hands of correctional officials, which potentially could be signalled by anticipatory dread, then this statement could be accurate. Yet the fact that people express feeling excited when driving to a prison where someone they love is being held captive is a striking example of secondary prisonization in the sense of the emotion work (Hochschild 1979) required to produce this upbeat outlook. Just as Aiello and McCorkel point out that children learning not to cry when leaving their jailed mothers is an indicator of secondary prisonization (in that the strictures imposed on children by the jail produce an emotional response that runs counter to the situation at hand), adults learning to accentuate positive feelings in the face of sombre circumstances are as well. Indeed, Tewksbury and DeMichele present data that potentially could further support secondary prisonization among some of the visitors they surveyed. Because secondary prisonization arises through a process, individuals will exhibit signs of it to greater and lesser degrees depending on the extent to which they have been in contact with correctional facilities (Comfort 2008, 126–184). Returning again to Aiello and McCorkel (2017), children who were newer to the visiting process (less secondarily prisonized) stood out as they ran across security lines to embrace their mothers or wept loudly when they had to say goodbye, in contrast to more experienced (and more secondarily prisonized) children who had internalized the jail’s rules about where they could go and how they could act. In their analysis of visitors’ perceptions of the prison environment, Tewksbury and DeMichele “found that visitors 40 years old and younger were significantly more likely to view the visiting area as unclean and uncomfortable, and to view entering the prison as more difficult than visitors more than 40 years old” (Tewksbury and DeMichele 2005, 305). One explanation for these findings may be that visitors more than 40 years old have longer histories of prison visiting than their younger counterparts, and therefore, they are more accustomed to these environments and less likely to struggle to navigate them. Likewise, the authors reported that “the more educated the visitor, the less comfortable he or she rated the visiting area and, interestingly, the more difficulty he or she found with prison staff” (Tewksbury and DeMichele 2005, 305). Given that education is protective against incarceration (Western and Pettit 2010), it is possible that people with higher levels of education have spent less time in correctional facilities (including as visitors) and react more negatively to both the environment and the staff. Obviously, these are only conjectures about Tewksbury and DeMichele’s study and would need to be investigated through analysis of the data. However, these hypotheses provide

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examples of how secondary prisonization could be more strongly engaged as a theoretical construct and highlight the lost potential of simply equating it to the treatment of visitors as inmates. In drawing attention to people’s adaptations to visiting incarcerated loved ones—from learning not to cry to generating feelings of excitement—it is important to emphasize again secondary prisonization’s focus on the socio-structural underpinnings of the management of emotions, actions, and interactions. The salience of the structural environment is concretized by Moran (2013), who theorizes prison visiting suites in Russia as liminal spaces where visitors undergo secondary prisonization and prisoners undertake the “performance of home”. Through a focus on carceral geography, Moran links occupancy of specific places to the possibility that “bonds are formed and individuals behave in a way which belies the structural constraints under which they usually operate” (2013, 345). Indeed, by elucidating that the reasons why people respond differently over time to the stresses and strains of navigating correctional institutions is tied to their encounters in those places, secondary prisonization argues against pathologizing people with incarcerated friends and family and in favour of recognizing their resilience and humanity. Being reprimanded by a correctional officer for clinging to her mother will shape a child’s behaviour on a subsequent visit. Wanting to enjoy the one hour he is permitted to spend with his cousin after driving three hours to the prison will encourage someone to overlook the dinginess of the visiting room. Having visited incarcerated family members from a young age will habituate a 50-year-old woman to brusqueness from correctional staff. Those who have loved ones behind bars acquire skills, strategies, and habits that make maintaining relationships possible. Secondary prisonization is the process through which they do so. Finally, in their article on formerly incarcerated fathers of currently incarcerated sons, Halsey and Deegan (2012) issue a reminder that secondary prisonization might not be the only process at play, because ‘prisoner’ and ‘visitor’ are not mutually exclusive categories over the life course. For men in their study who had previously lived in correctional facilities, returning to them “in the complex psycho-social position of parent, visitor, and ex-prisoner” (p. 358) was a traumatic experience, with the secondary prisonization of one’s identity of parent/visitor being compounded by the vestiges of primary prisonization. Relatedly, Halsey and Deegan posit the concept of “secondary (transferred) recidivism”, a feeling expressed by fathers that they had failed in their efforts to move beyond the criminal justice system due to their sons’ imprisonment. As secondary prisonization emphasizes people’s relationships with the prison as a social institution, it is critical to capture

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the full range of these relationships across time. Understanding this range also highlights the possibilities of intersectionality within secondary prisonization, and the need to consider the multiple positions occupied by individuals when analysing the pressures affecting them.

Horizons for Future Research As scholars move forward in theorizing the impact of incarceration on families and communities, a range of analytical tools will be necessary. Reviewing the concept of secondary prisonization and the ways that it has been applied to date illuminates unexplored contexts in which this analytical lens could potentially yield a more extensive understanding of the connections between criminal justice involvement, social inequality, and family health and well-being. Such a review also points to areas where new theoretical work must be done. Perhaps the most promising, and the most pressing, application of secondary prisonization is in relation to children’s experiences of familial incarceration. As Aiello and McCorkel (2017) make painfully clear, visiting a mother in jail can exert powerful pressures on children to regulate their emotions and behaviours in ways that run counter to what is typically considered healthy child development and attachment formation. There are many unanswered questions surrounding this phenomenon, not the least of which is how these pressures can be mitigated and how children’s development can be supported within the context of parental incarceration. Charting out the full scope of the unique aspects of secondary prisonization as experienced by children could be fruitful for informing policy makers and criminal justice professionals about the intergenerational costs of incarceration. This needs to be explored in the contexts of both paternal and maternal incarceration. In addition, virtually nothing is known about the impact of an older sibling’s involvement with the criminal justice system on minors. Aiello and McCorkel’s work was conducted in a jail setting, which also raises the potential usefulness of charting secondary prisonization in the context of different types of detention facilities. Given the centrality of the type and degree of contact with a correctional institution in the process of shaping one’s emotional responses and interpersonal relationships, differences might be observed among groups of people who spend entire weekends travelling to and sitting in prisons for visitation as compared to those who have three 30-minute visits at the local jail each week. Families with loved ones in federal prisons, immigration detention facilities, juvenile

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institutions, or firefighting camps may also have different amounts of exposure to correctional surveillance and control and be burdened with different types of “courtesy stigma” (Goffman 1963, see also Condry 2007), all of which could affect whether and how they alter their schedules, conversations, self-expression, interactions, and other aspects of their daily lives. To date, secondary prisonization has been explored solely through the use of qualitative methods. Another potentially worthwhile avenue would be to test the concept quantitatively. For example, it would be instructive to investigate the hypotheses raised in the above discussion of Tewksbury and DeMichele’s (2005) study about the potential correlation between having a more extensive history of jail or prison visiting and reports of feeling excited before a visit, being age 40 or older (associated with finding entering the prison less difficult), and having a lower level of education (associated with having less difficulty with prison staff). Quantitative research focusing on such linkages could help map out at what point the “dosage” of visiting correctional facilities shows signs of altering people’s emotions and behaviours (that is of secondarily prisonizing them) and inform programmatic and policy decisions about how to reduce the harmful effects of incarceration on family members. Quantitative studies also could determine whether high levels of secondary prisonization are correlated with specific psychosocial or health conditions and help to establish a foundation for meeting those needs (Cooke 2014). Although there are areas in which the application of secondary prisonization is underdeveloped, there are others where new conceptual work is needed. As has been emphasized here, secondary prisonization focuses on people’s interactions with correctional facilities as social institutions, and therefore, it is not the appropriate theoretical framework in instances where family members do not come into contact with the penitentiary. Similarly, the conundrum raised by Halsey and Deegan (2012), namely when individuals experience both primary and secondary prisonization, potentially warrants breaking new theoretical ground or at the least requires a reworking of secondary prisonization beyond its current conception. Further explorations of the configuration in which individuals have occupied multiple statuses vis-à-vis correctional facilities are particularly warranted given the high prevalence of intergenerational imprisonment and the importance of understanding how to support the continued desistance of formerly incarcerated people in their role of supporting their children through incarceration and re-entry. Finally, although secondary prisonization appears to resonate in research in a handful of European countries (Hutton 2016; Moran 2013; Granja 2016; Ricordeau 2008; Touraut 2012), it is vital that other cultural

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lenses be embraced, particularly along the lines of how families are structured and conceptualized and how punishment and confinement are enacted.

A Decade Later, Still Doing Time Together In addition to revisiting the theoretical contributions of secondary prisonization, the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Doing Time Together provides an opportunity to reflect on the current circumstances faced by people with incarcerated loved ones in the USA, and what has—and has not—changed over the last decade. An elementary starting point is the numbers: although there have been incremental decreases in the US correctional population in recent years, at year-end 2015 there were still over 2.1 million people in the nation’s jails and prisons as compared to 1.9 million in 2000, when I conducted the fieldwork for Doing Time Together (Kaeble and Glaze 2016). In contrast with countries that collect systematic data on citizens, including the experience of family member incarceration (see, e.g., in the case of Denmark, Anderson 2016), it has not yet been possible to tally the number of US residents who have a loved one behind bars. However, in a ground-breaking article, Hedwig Lee and colleagues (2015) used data from the General Social Survey to calculate that 44% of African American women and 12% of white women have a family member in prison. The shocking figure that at least one in four women—and, importantly, nearly one in two African American women—experiences this phenomenon starkly exposes the centrality of the penitentiary in US life. Imagining the figure that would arise if jail (not only prison) were included in these calculations, or if they were stratified by income level, boggles the mind. Moving from the macro-level of overall numbers to the micro-level of lived experiences, the technological advances seen in recent years have played out in myriad forms of how prisoners and their families stay in touch. Although incarcerated people are not allowed to possess a regular cell phone or freely access the Internet, it is increasingly common for correctional institutions to contract with companies such as JPay or Global Tel Link (GTL) to provide email, video visitation, and even personal tablets with educational programmes and music for people in jails and prisons. These communications are subjected to similar monitoring as more traditional forms of exchange and require family members to subscribe to and pay for additional services. For example, each message delivered through JPay’s email system requires a “stamp” that can be purchased online or at a kiosk in a

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correctional facility and may take up to 48 hours or longer to be delivered (JPay accessed 23 October 2017). However, there are distinct benefits to using new technologies as additional means for staying in touch with an incarcerated loved one, notably functionality that permits the attachment of photos or even VideoGrams to email messages, not to mention the convenience of sending a message from one’s phone or computer rather than needing to put pen to paper and stamp to envelope. That said, old-fashioned letter writing was extremely common among my research participants and their imprisoned partners in Doing Time Together, with 98% of them corresponding by letter at some point and many of them investing great efforts in their choice of stationery, ink colour, words, and other details. It would be interesting to revisit written communication between prisoners and their loved ones at this juncture, as a new world of ‘emojis’, fonts, and photo filters opens in penitentiary correspondence. While in some contexts technology is expanding opportunities for remaining connected and increasing the amount of contact between incarcerated people and their families, in other circumstances it is being used to diminish and restrict people’s access to each other. A 2015 report for the Prison Policy Initiative (Rabuy and Wagner 2015) documents the increased reliance on video visitation in jails and the concomitant closing down of in-person visitation due to clauses in provider contracts that stipulate that all visitation be conducted via their technology. Correctional staff in favour of video visitation often argue that it is better for institutional safety (because there is no risk of contraband being given to incarcerated people) and that it is more cost effective (because fewer personnel are required to screen, search, and monitor those participating in visits). The Prison Policy Initiative report highlights that video visitation is not common at prisons, where its benefits could be significant in terms of increased contact if people were able to participate from home due to the often-long distances separating prisoners and their families. Rather, the drive to install video technology and eliminate in-person visiting is concentrated in jails—and it is typical to require people to conduct a video visit via a kiosk located in the jail, which confers no benefit of convenience to the visitor and indeed augments hardship as people know that they are in the same building as a loved one and yet cannot be in each other’s presence. Harkening back to the enormous importance that women in Doing Time Together attached to in-person visitation—from the preparation of their appearance to the reassurance of an incarcerated loved one’s hug—it is difficult to imagine how painful the transfer of connection to a video screen must be. In the book, I devoted an entire chapter to the trials and travails women underwent while waiting in line for

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visits and being processed into the institution, and if current iterations of video visiting still require them to succumb to such ceremonies of degrada­ tion (Garfinkel 1968), the frustration and sense of being treated as “quasi-­ inmates” (Comfort 2008, 27) are likely that much more profound. Taking a step back, it is also important to reflect on policy and programmatic changes in the USA that have occurred in recent years. By and large, family members of incarcerated people continue to be an overlooked group, receiving scarce attention and even scanter resources. This is not to say there has been no movement on this front. Indeed, in 2006 the US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families funded programmes in 13 sites across 12 states with the aim of supporting families of incarcerated and re-entering fathers (McKay et al. 2019), demonstrating a clear recognition that partners and children are affected when a father is sent to prison. Likewise, over the last decade a growing number of men’s and women’s prisons have undertaken “family friendly” visitation initiatives (Hoffmann et al. 2010), giving credence to the idea that the correctional environment poses challenges and potential harms to children. In San Francisco, advocacy organizations in partnership with criminal justice system actors developed a Bill of Rights for children of incarcerated parents, which includes the right “to be well cared for in my parent’s absence” and “to speak with, see, and touch my parent” (San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents 2005). All in all, these efforts are sporadic and piecemeal and do not reflect a systematic, national-response to the robust literature that has emerged in the last ten years firmly establishing a multitude of harms experienced by families when a loved one is incarcerated (see, e.g., Wakefield and Wildeman 2013; Turney 2014a, b; Lee et al. 2014; Wildeman et al. 2012; Geller et al. 2012; Wakefield et al. 2016). Indeed, if I were to conduct a revisit of Doing Time Together, it is imaginable that apart from the advances in technology that have transformed life as we know it across nearly all domains, life would be either largely the same for women visiting their partners at San Quentin State Prison or that much harder due to the massive economic recession of 2008 and the atmosphere of fear and retribution engendered by the administration of the 45th president of the USA. As with so many other issues at this juncture, the research is strong and could provide guideposts to a path forward, but the social and political commitment to improving the lot of the most vulnerable is uncertain at best. For now, the USA remains an incarceration nation, profoundly marked by its pursuit of punishment.

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References Aiello, Brittnie L., and Jill A. McCorkel. 2017. “‘It Will Crush You Like a Bug’: Maternal Incarceration, Secondary Prisonization, and Children’s Visitation.” Punishment & Society 20(3): 351–374. Anderson, Lars. 2016. “How Children’s Educational Outcomes and Criminality Vary by Duration and Frequency of Paternal Incarceration.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 149–170. Blumstein, Alfred, Jacqueline Cohen, and Daniel Nagin. 1977. “The Dynamics of a Homeostatic Punishment Process.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 67(3): 317–334. Braman, Donald. 2004. Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clemmer, Donald. (1940) 1958. The Prison Community, 2nd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Comfort, Megan. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Comfort, Megan L. 2003. “In the Tube at San Quentin: The ‘Secondary Prisonization’ of Women Visiting Inmates.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32(1): 77–107. Condry, Rachel. 2007. Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders. Cullompton, Devon: Willan. Cooke, Cheryl L. 2014. “Nearly Invisible: The Psychosocial and Health Needs of Women with Male Partners in Prison.” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 35(12): 979–982. Garfinkel, Harold. 1968. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” In Prison within Society: A Reader in Penology, edited by Lawrence Hazelrigg, 68–77. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Geller, A., C.E. Cooper, I. Garfinkel, O. Schwartz-Soicher, and R.B. Mincy. 2012. “Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and Child Development.” Demography 49(1): 49–76. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster. Granja, Rafaela. 2016. “Beyond Prison Walls: The Experiences of Prisoners’ Relatives and Meanings Associated with Imprisonment.” Probation Journal 63(3): 273–292. Hagan, John, and Ronit Dinovitzer. 1999. “The Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment for Children, Communities, and Prisoners.” In Prisons, edited by Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia, 121–162. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halsey, Mark, and Simone Deegan. 2012. “Father and Son: Two Generations Through Prison.” Punishment & Society 14(3): 338–367.

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Hasenfeld, Yeheskel. 1972. “People Processing Organizations: An Exchange Approach.” American Sociological Review 37: 256–263. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85(3): 551–575. Hoffmann, Heath C., Amy L. Byrd, and Alex M. Kightlinger. 2010. “Prison Programs and Services for Incarcerated Parents and Their Underage Children: Results from a National Survey of Correctional Facilities.” The Prison Journal 90(4): 397–416. Hutton, Marie. 2016. “Visiting Time: A Tale of Two Prisons.” Probation Journal 63(3): 347–361. Institute for Criminal Policy Research. 2017. “World Prison Brief.” http://www. prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief/. Accessed 23 June. JPay. https://jpay.com/PEmessages.aspx. Accessed 23 October 2017. Kaeble, Danielle, and Lauren E. Glaze. 2016. “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2015.” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus15.pdf. Lee, Hedwig, Tyler McCormick, Margaret T. Hicken, and Christopher Wildeman. 2015. “Racial Inequalities in Connectedness to Imprisoned Individuals in the United States.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 12(2): 269–282. Lee, Hedwig, Christopher Wildeman, Emily A. Wang, Niki Matusko, and James S. Jackson. 2014. “A Heavy Burden: The Cardiovascular Health Consequences of Having a Family Member Incarcerated.” American Journal of Public Health 104(3): 421–427. Mauer, Marc, and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds. 2002. Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment. New York: New Press. McKay, Tasseli, Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir. 2019. Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. Moran, Dominique. 2013. “Between Outside and Inside? Prison Visiting Rooms as Liminal Carceral Spaces.” GeoJournal 78(2): 339–351. Pattillo, Mary, David Weiman, and Bruce Western, eds. 2004. Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Rabuy, Bernadette, and Peter Wagner. 2015. Screening Out Family Time: The ForProfit Video Visitation Industry in Prisons and Jails. Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative. Ricordeau, Gwénola. 2008. Les détenus et leurs proches. Solidarités et sentiments à l’ombre des murs. Paris: éd. Autrement. San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents. 2005. “From Rights to Realities”. http://www.sfcipp.org/rights.html. Accessed March 20. Small, Mario L. 2015. “De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography.” City & Community 14(4): 352–358. Tewksbury, Richard, and Matthew DeMichele. 2005. “Going to Prison: A Prison Visitation Program.” The Prison Journal 85(3): 292–310.

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Touraut, Caroline. 2012. La famille à l’épreuve de la prison. Paris: PUF. Travis, Jeremy. 2005. But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. Turney, K. 2014a. “Stress Proliferation Across Generations? Examining the Relationship Between Parental Incarceration and Childhood Health.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 55(3): 302–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146514544173. Turney, Kristin. 2014b. “The Consequences of Paternal Incarceration for Maternal Neglect and Harsh Parenting.” Social Forces 92(4): 1607–1636. https://doi. org/10.1093/sf/sot160. Wakefield, Sara, Hedwig Lee, and Christopher Wildeman. 2016. “Tough on Crime, Tough on Families? Criminal Justice and Family Life in America.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 8–21. Wakefield, Sara, and Christopher Wildeman. 2013. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Western, Bruce, and Becky Pettit. 2010. “Incarceration and Social Inequality.” Daedalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 139(3): 8–19. Wildeman, Christopher, Jason Schnittker, and Kristin Turney. 2012. “Despair by Association? The Mental Health of Mothers with Children by Recently Incarcerated Fathers.” American Sociological Review 77(2): 216–243.

5 Who Are Prisoners’ Family Members? Towards an Holistic and Intersectional Framework Johnna Christian

Terms like “hidden” and “forgotten” victims, and “people in the shadow of the prison” have all been applied to the family members of incarcerated individuals (Codd 2013; Hairston 1988). Such descriptions emerged from the neglect and marginalization of their lives in traditional research and policy making related to correctional systems; the focus was on the incarcerated person and his (rarely her) life inside of prison (Arditti 2012; Comfort 2007). With high rates of imprisonment in the USA, however, consequently high numbers of people in prisoners’ broader networks are impacted by the experience of incarceration (Braman 2004; Western and Wildeman 2009), and research has thus evolved to include the consequences of incarceration for family members. Important questions remain, however, about their lives and experiences, with implications for the advancement of research and policy (Arditti 2012; Christian and Kennedy 2011; McKay et al. 2016; Rodriguez 2016). Who, specifically, are prisoners’ family members beyond spouses, significant others, and children, and why are extended kin and friendship networks vitally important for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people? How do these questions map differently for various demographic groups of incarcerated people, such as men and women, the elderly, and those serving sentences of different lengths? How do family members with multiple incarcerated individuals in their lives meet the demands of their situation? Where J. Christian (*)  Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_5

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do prisoners’ family members fit within the broader structure of social stratification, and how does this impact their ability to provide resources and support to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals? This chapter explores these questions, focusing on the USA; first considering the data sources that typically inform research, then proposing ways to expand and refine concepts of who constitutes prisoners’ family members. The framework of intersectionality, which accounts for multiple statuses and positions individuals may hold simultaneously (Crenshaw 1989; Potter 2015), is a guiding anchor for my analysis of two case studies. The chapter concludes with the implications for future research and policy.

Limitations in Understanding Prisoners’ Family Members The lack of detailed systematically collected data about prisoners’ family members and family relationships in the USA limits our understanding of who these family members are. Data about who constitutes prisoners’ family members draw almost exclusively from self-reported surveys and interviews with the incarcerated and family members (Comfort 2007). Studies using such methods have greatly expanded our knowledge base, but are typically small scale, drawn from non-representative samples, or are focused on a single jurisdiction (Comfort 2007; Geller et al. 2016). Emerging research uses social network methods in which prisoners and formerly incarcerated people report on the individuals in their networks both inside and outside of prison, capturing relationship ties and a broader range of family relationships (Kreager et al. 2016). One lingering question is about which bureaucratic entities are responsible for maintaining information about prisoners’ family members. Correctional agencies have limited information that may be collected in a haphazard and unsystematic fashion; rarely is there a centralized database, either on paper or electronically, that allows for data sharing between agencies and/or with researchers. In addition, there may be jurisdictional variation in data quality and depth of information. The pre-sentence investigation (PSI), for example, is typically conducted by a probation officer, as an advisory document for the judge at the time of sentencing. These documents include family background information, including details about an offender’s living situation and ties to family members at the time of the alleged offence. There are, however, several limitations to the availability and utility

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of the PSI for identifying the range of family members in an incarcerated person’s life. First, the document captures information at a specific period of time, presumably at some point between arrest and sentencing. In addition, courts may be particularly reluctant to allow researchers access to this type of data. And, the information is only as accurate as the self-report and the investigation by the probation officer, including the level of rapport established during a brief and ostensibly stressful interaction. Correctional institutions in the USA might ask questions about family members at the point of intake and assessment, but there may be incentives for the newly incarcerated person to under or over report, such as to prevent the collection of child support payments (which are not automatically suspended due to incarceration), or to over represent the degree of social support in his or her life. Moreover, it is unlikely that intake forms account for the complexity of family scenarios, as elaborated later in this chapter. Another possible source of information is visitation data, but this has clear limitations. In order to receive a visit from an individual on the outside, the incarcerated person must first submit information about the prospective visitor to authorities, who will conduct a background screening to ensure the person’s entry into the facility does not present a security risk. The forms submitted by a prospective visitor indicate the relationship to the prisoner, thereby providing an opportunity to record information about the relationships of potential visitors. In addition, one could gather data from logs of actual visitation. There are, however, evident selection biases in these data sources, as incarcerated people may calculate the likelihood of receiving visits from particular individuals before submitting the initial forms, and only those who actually visit will appear on visitation logs. Finally, institutions vary in the level of detail in visitation logs, sometimes with limited data about visits from minor children. Recognizing the importance of improving data about incarcerated people, initiatives aim to merge data about overlapping populations from administrative data sets (Culhane et al. 2001). The child welfare system, for example, presumably knows when the parent of a child in its care is incarcerated, but agencies typically work independently and do not share information. Even criminal justice-focused agencies in the same jurisdiction, such as prison and parole systems, might have different data points and incompatible systems for compiling data in ways that are valuable for researchers and policy makers. Geller et al. (2016) for example, conducted a novel study of parental incarceration by merging data from a nationally representative, longitudinal self-report survey and an administrative data set. Their research did

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in fact reveal differences in estimates of the number of children with incarcerated parents depending on the data source. Finally, when thinking about research to enhance understanding of who constitutes prisoners’ family members, researchers must be cognizant and critical of potential hazards to extensive data sharing, in that systems have legal obligations of confidentiality, and we should be wary of systems that are used to enhance surveillance and control of already vulnerable populations (Codd 2013; Fulcher 2013). Beyond these concerns about data accessibility and quality, moreover, fundamental questions emerge about our very notions of family.

Expanded Conceptions of Family Members of the Incarcerated Despite recognizing the need to study family as broadly defined, the common conceptualization, and primary focus of both research and policy about family members of the incarcerated, is that they are spouses, significant others, and children (see Comfort 2016; Gueta 2018; Halsey and Deegan 2015 as exceptions). Emphasis on these family members is understandable to an extent, but it also rests on a number of assumptions. Firstly, a family of formation through marriage, partnering, and/or shared children might be presumed to be the most affected by an individual’s incarceration. Were they living in the same household? Was the incarcerated person making financial contributions to the family’s well-being prior to incarceration? And was he/ she bonded with a partner and/or children? What about arrangements such as biological children who do not live with the parent prior to incarceration, and parenting of non-biological children (Foster and Hagan 2009; Gueta 2018; Wakefield and Wildeman 2013)? Researchers have thus begun to recognize the need for more expansive and nuanced analyses of family members’ lives, delineating who specifically constitutes family members, and considering contextual factors (Mowen and Visher 2016; Rodriguez 2016). In a study of prison visitation, for example, Turanovic and Tasca (2017) found that who visits an incarcerated person influences the quality of the visitation experience, with visits from mothers perceived as most negative, and visits from friends least so. One possible explanation for the finding was that parents have a different history with the person than do friends and likely have a different level of investment in the future.

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Parents and siblings of incarcerated people remain understudied, yet they provide substantial levels of support and can be deeply impacted by incarceration (Christian 2005; Comfort 2016; Gueta 2018). Mothers, in particular, may be influenced by the expectations of care and sacrifice for their children, yet doing so is inordinately difficult. Prisons, for example, make it challenging for people on the outside to know what is happening to a loved one on the inside, but mothers may feel responsible for monitoring well-being through visitation, and even contacting prison officials when this option is available (Christian 2005; Halsey and Deegan 2015). In addition to ensuring their incarcerated child’s well-being, mothers may grapple with assumptions that their own inadequate parenting is somehow to blame for a child’s criminal activity (Condry 2007). Romantic partners face assumptions of guilt by association, but parents are presumed the root cause of their incarcerated child’s problems (Comfort 2008). The same mother of an incarcerated person may also serve as the primary caretaker for the children of the incarcerated person, adding another complex and demanding dimension to their lives. Siblings may take on support roles for incarcerated people, especially if parents are no longer living or are otherwise unable to do so (Christian et al. 2006; Comfort 2016; Martinez and Christian 2009). Moreover, family-oriented research has long grappled with questions about incarcerated individuals who have no family connections, making faith communities, friends, or non-profit organizations serve familial roles. There is also a need for greater attention to variation in family situations for different incarcerated people, such as men and women (Casey-Acevedo et al. 2004; Einat et al. 2015). Interestingly, research about the culture in women’s prisons found “pseudofamilies” in which women adopted familial roles such as mother, daughter, and sister, as a way to claim and profess relational ties in coping with the pains of imprisonment (Owen 1998). Such ties provided belonging, care, and love, as well as obligations of allegiance and protection. Work about incarcerated women raises the oft-neglected point that for the incarcerated, fellow inmates might be family as much as, or even more than, their blood relatives, friends, or social networks on the outside of the prison (Liem 2016). Romantic attachments figure prominently in incarcerated men’s family connections, both in terms of their relationships to adult intimate partners and their children (Comfort 2008; Fishman 1990). For example, when men are incarcerated, a child’s biological mother becomes their caretaker in the majority of cases. For incarcerated women, however, a child’s father is much less likely to become the child’s primary caretaker (Glaze and Marushak 2008). Child caretaking is an important matter, as caretakers are

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“gatekeepers” of the incarcerated parent and child relationship who can facilitate or hamper connections by bringing a child to visit at prisons, assisting with letter writing or accepting phone calls from the institution (Swanson et al. 2013; Tasca 2016). When romantic attachments remain between the incarcerated parent and the gatekeeper, contact may be smoother and more frequent, though these individuals still face barriers to doing so (Christian 2005; Tasca 2016). Moreover, there are several unique situations that require closer investigation. Research and policy often neglect problematic family situations, such as child abuse, domestic violence, and other forms of victimization of family members (Oliver and Hariston 2008). Such neglect means that the lives of the most vulnerable family members are the least understood. Research does not always distinguish family members’ ties and roles at different stages of involvement with the criminal justice system. During the incarceration period, families face the dual challenges of maintaining their lives on the outside and maintaining contact with the incarcerated person (Martinez and Christian 2009; Naser and Visher 2006). As noted above, life on the outside is reconfigured differently for different types of family relationships. If the incarcerated person had contributed financially to the family, they must re-adjust to meet material needs without that income. This happens at the same time that the incarcerated person themselves becomes an added expense, or as some family members say, a “job”. The myriad expenses connected to a family members’ incarceration are well documented, but it is worth nothing again that they include the cost of transportation to prisons to visit, sometimes overnight stays near the prison, the cost of phone calls (either through a collect call or debit card system) and sending the incarcerated person money for his or her commissary account (Cochran et al. 2017; Hutton 2016). The rise of video visitation means that family members may have to pay a fee for these types of visits. The family members who take on these obligations may be those who are emotionally closest to the incarcerated person, or may be those who have the resources to do so. Research would benefit from greater clarity around the factors that determine which family members are connected and provide these resources during the incarceration period (Tasca et al. 2016). Demands on family members and family relationships are different after a person has been released from prison. For example, the “maintenance” costs of sustaining contact no longer exist, but a person released from prison is trying to find a way to survive in the community, and family may be a key aspect of this survival (Naser and Visher 2006; Western et al. 2015). How do people decide which family members to rely on, and what makes some

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family able to provide support, and others unwilling to do so? Re-entry may also be a period when obligations to family members emerge, because a person who is released from prison is presumed able to contribute to family life and even reciprocate some of the support provided during incarceration (Martinez and Christian 2009).

Intersectional Frameworks and Family Members Family members’ lives are shaped by the intersections of multiple social statuses, including age, race, gender, work, and economic status, and family stability, in addition to their connections to the carceral environment (Arditti 2012; Fader and Traylor 2015). Mapping out the complexity of these intersections is challenging, but is critical for a full understanding of who constitutes prisoners’ family members. Potter notes a troubling lack of intersectional approaches in criminological research, explaining that intersectionality is “the concept or conceptualization that each person has an assortment of coalesced socially constructed identities that are ordered into an inequitable social stratum” (2015, 3). Intersectionality draws from black feminist theory and critical race theory (Collins 2002; Crenshaw 1989; Potter 2015; Richie 2001) and acknowledges that people can be connected to the justice system in multiple ways throughout their lives, as victims and offenders, and through their attachments to both. Involvement with the criminal justice system can produce trauma and stigmatization that amplifies marginalized statuses. Richie (2001), for example, studied formerly incarcerated women’s re-entry, finding that for black women in particular, gendered expectations of femininity and care for others converged with structural dislocation and racism in the labour market to erect seemingly insurmountable challenges. Richie (2012) also described how black women’s lives have been shaped by a “prison nation” in which male violence, individual and community level structural dislocation, and burdens of community caretaking perpetuate marginalization and disadvantage. Intersectional approaches are particularly relevant for understanding the lives of the family members of people embedded in the criminal justice system, as multiple levels of experience converge to shape their lives. In the USA, for example, half of the black women have a family member who has been incarcerated (Lee et al. 2015); their structural dislocation as racial ethnic minorities is rooted in historical racism and the use of the justice system to perpetuate inequality (Alexander 2012). Further, at the individual level, their lives are greatly impacted by the day-to-day demands of incarceration.

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The structural concentration of incarceration is relevant for family members as any given family member of an incarcerated person may have multiple incarcerated individuals in their lives, which creates unique demands and burdens and requires them to make decisions about how to devote scarce resources to the various incarcerated people in their lives (Lee et al. 2015; Rose and Clear 1998). Having numerous incarcerated people in one’s life means multiple needs and demands for one’s resources (Christian et al. 2006; Halsey and Deegan 2015). During the incarceration period, fathers and sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins may be in prison together, requiring family to make special arrangements for visitation. Restrictions against fraternization between inmates make it difficult for people to interact under these circumstances. Moreover, when multiple families in the same neighbourhood face the demands of incarceration, concentration effects can jeopardize community social capital (Rose and Clear 1998). Another complicating factor is that a family member may have his or her own history of criminal justice contact, requiring them to overcome the barriers they themselves face while also providing what support they can to others (Halsey and Deegan 2015). In addition, there may be legal restrictions to their contact with family members who are involved with the justice system. A person on parole might be restricted from interacting with other people with felony convictions, but also might find that a family member with such a conviction provides empathy and understanding that people without convictions cannot provide.

Case Studies To further illustrate the value of intersectional frameworks for understanding the lives of family members of the incarcerated, I present two case studies drawn from research projects conducted over a fifteen-year period. The studies involved in-depth interviews with family members and incarcerated men, examining topics such as family connections before and during incarceration, and expected connections after. In addition, participants described how family configurations changed during periods of incarceration, the networks of family members connected to or disconnected from the incarcerated person, and life circumstances such as social support, finances, children’s care, and intimate partnerships. The cases illuminate the multi-layered complexity and varieties of family configurations, and the ways that structural dislocation, and gendered expectations for the maintenance of family ties shaped both family members’ and incarcerated people’s lives.

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Rosa: Victimization and Intergenerational Incarceration Rosa was a Latina woman with three close family members—her husband and two sons—who were incarcerated. She had a 27-year relationship with her husband Gilbert, which was tumultuous primarily because of his addiction, as well as verbal and physical abuse. Rosa’s life was shaped by multi-­ generational addiction, violence, arrests, and her male relatives’ cycles of incarceration and return. As a child, she lived in foster care, which she described as a traumatic experience that bonded her with her husband who had had the same experience as a child. Rosa’s bond with her husband, however, brought fear, suffering, and uncertainty. Here, she describes Gilbert’s repeated cycle of substance abuse, crime, and subsequent instability in their relationship and her life: The last bid [prison term] he came home, we thought he was gonna be alright. He started getting sick. Come to find out he was doing the dope [heroin]. He was going down. He was out on the streets for 8 months. He went to jail after robbing a lady in a supermarket. That’s all I know. He was in and out of my house all the time. This was our fifth time trying to get back together.

Rosa also said of Gilbert, “He was a womanizer, a women beater, a drunk, a druggee. We never really got along cause I was scared of him. Right now, we get along better cause we have three grandchildren. My son is 22. He [Gilbert] has been in prison for 18 years of his [their son’s] life”. Rosa explained that she stayed involved with her husband for the sake of her two sons, who were incarcerated in the same prison as their father. Her sons pressured her to continue visiting their father, because they did not want him to be left on the cell block when they were taken by prison officials to visit with Rosa. She made special arrangements with the administrator of the prison for the family to visit together (regulations typically prohibit inmates from interacting with each other during visits), but said, of her husband, I have “anger and resentment towards him”, and “my kids wouldn’t be where they are now [in prison] if it wasn’t for him”. Rosa held her husband responsible for their son’s criminal behaviour and felt trapped in her relationship because of her sons’ expectations of her as a mother, and her sense of responsibility to support her family. Considering Rosa’s life within an intersectional framework illuminates several important aspects of her situation. First, the sheer pervasiveness of incarceration in her family, both in respect to time and depth, with two sons and a husband incarcerated off and on over the course of decades. Rosa

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spoke of the prison as a driving force in her life, attributing her sons’ incarceration to their father’s addiction, crime, and incarceration. Moreover, she sustained her relationship with her husband in part because incarceration was a bonding element for her family. Rosa’s sons imposed expectations of family caretaking and extreme self-sacrifice by insisting that she continue to support their father and maintain family ties, despite Gilbert’s abuse of Rosa, and the instability he brought to the family. As a Latina woman, Rosa’s roles as wife, mother, and grandmother (she noted that grandchildren helped, to some extent, to improve her relationship with her husband) were deeply connected to her prison life.

Dante: Intimate Partnerships and Fathering from Prison Dante was a 29-year-old African American man who had served one and a half years of his six-year prison sentence. His family situation illustrates the need for expanded conceptions of who constitutes family, as well as the complex arrangements that incarcerated people and their family members must negotiate. Dante had two biological children, Matthew and Elise, and three children Dino, Bobby, and Missy for whom he served as a father figure. His biological son Matthew’s mother was Judy, and his biological daughter Elise’s mother, Kathy, was also biological mother to the three children Dino, Bobby, and Missy. In addition to being close to Matthew and Elise, Dante was particularly connected to seven-year-old Missy, stating “since Missy is little she don’t know no one else [as her father]”. Dante experienced a number of complications in attempting to father his children from prison, including managing conflicts between the gatekeepers of his access to his children (Moran et al. 2017; Tasca 2016). He said of his mother Susan, Her and my daughter’s mother don’t see eye to eye. That put a wedge between our relationship….See my mother don’t play games. My daughter’s mother plays games. Family gatherings, I wouldn’t know anything about. My mother would go get my son [Matthew] and wouldn’t attempt to go get my daughter [Elise]. Where is my daughter? Not even making an attempt. My daughter don’t have anything to do with that. My mother be scared to have her cause she don’t know how her mother would act.

Not only was Dante disappointed that his mother’s conflicts with the mother of his child limited the closeness of her relationship with her

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granddaughter, but Dante was also distressed by his limited knowledge about the specifics of what was happening, as well as his limited ability to do anything about it from prison. He further described conflicts between each of the mothers of his children, Kathy and Judy. Me and my son mother we were never in a relationship. She got pregnant, and had a son. I was like you need some money. When I starting dealing with my daughter’s mother she (son’s mother) really starting playing games. I told her that the only thing stopping me from being with him is you.

In addition to these difficulties concerning his partnerships, Dante had tried to maintain his father-like role for Missy. He explained, I talk to her and her sister, I don’t treat her no different than I treat my daughter. Even in the county (jail), I would see my son, my daughter, and Missy. I started something, so I gotta finish it (fathering Missy). Even on Christmas I would buy the sons (Dino and Bobby) something, but I would really look out for my son, my daughter, and Missy.

Fathering was a central facet of Dante’s identity, and staying connected to his children was one way that he enacted this role, but he was limited by the conflicts between the children’s mothers, and problems between the mother of one child and his own mother. An intersectional framework is informative in analysing Dante’s life because he was bound by his status as an incarcerated man striving to meet expectations for fathering (Jardine 2017; Moran et al. 2017), at the same time that the female family members and children in his extended familial networks faced the consequences of his incarceration. Even though this account was from Dante’s perspective, it was evident that these family members faced pressures and challenges to sustain family life with him. His mother facilitated contact with one biological child because of her stable relationship with that child’s mother. Dante, however, was unhappy she was unwilling to make similar connections to the mother of his other biological child. Moreover, Dante had taken on a devoted parenting role for a child who was not biologically his. His current and former intimate partners, Kathy and Judy, were both raising their children, and enacting family life, within the context of Dante’s incarceration to the best of their abilities, though still at times disappointing to their incarcerated family member.

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Conclusion How, then, should policy and research be informed by more expansive and inclusive definitions of who constitutes prisoners’ family, as well as recognition of the intersectional aspects of their lived experience? Firstly, policy should take into account the profound socioeconomic dislocation of prisoners’ family members, a move which would ideally lead to policies that minimize additional economic burdens on these family members. Some economic burdens may be more easily addressed than others. It may be untenable to develop policies to subsidize the loss of an income due to a family members’ incarceration, for example, but the cost of maintaining contact with incarcerated people could be mitigated (Christian et al. 2006; Codd 2013). In the USA, there have been developments around the cost of phone calls from prison to family members, limiting the surcharges imposed by telephone company providers, but such efforts are tenuous, and dependent on political sensibilities. In-person visiting, particularly at state prisons, has tremendous costs for families who may have to travel long distances for visits (Christian 2005). Housing prisoners in facilities as close to their home communities as possible would minimize the cost of travelling to visits and possibly allow family members to visit more frequently (Cochran et al. 2017). Video visitation is a development with both promise and perils for the cost burdens to family members (Fulcher 2013). In theory, video visitation eliminates the need for family members to travel to prisons for in-person visits; however, some correctional facilities require family to travel to a trailer or facility on prison grounds, to be virtually connected. Such arrangements may provide cost savings for the facility, eliminating the need for supervision of in-person visits, but do not eliminate travel costs for families, and often carry a fee for the video connection. Moreover, video visits do not account for the range of family connections as described above; how do children, for example, relate to parents by video, and might elderly family members be less comfortable with such technology? In addition, although some facilities use video visitation as a supplement to in-person visits, thereby expanding the contact options for family members, other jurisdictions have eliminated contact visits and replaced them with video visitation (Rabuy and Wagner 2015). There is a need for more research about the various forms of video visitation, and how such visits are experienced by the incarcerated person and family members (Fulcher 2013; Rabuy and Wagner 2015). Other financial burdens for family come from sending money to the incarcerated person via a commissary account, which allows him or her to purchase items such as toiletries, snacks, and writing materials to make

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imprisonment more comfortable. Providing adequate supplies of basic items and food could reduce the need for additional purchases, which are largely subsidized by family. In addition, policy aimed at family members of the incarcerated should be developed in consultation with family and account for the fluidity of their lives inside and outside of the institution. “Prison worries” (Braman 2004) infiltrate their daily lives through the demands of maintaining contact, concern for the incarcerated family member, and interactions with the legal system and prison bureaucracy. Options for contact are limited to exchanging letters, phone calls, in-person visits, and increasingly in many jurisdictions, video visitation. Each of these modes of contact imposes burdens on family members that could be alleviated through policy proscriptions that account for the reality of who family members are. For example, prisons have begun to acknowledge children’s needs when visiting in the prison, albeit in a limited fashion. Spaces for children to interact with parents and child-friendly environments with toys and chairs should be adopted as a standard part of a prison environment. But what of other family members who visit and would benefit from a more holistic approach to visitation? Elderly parents or those with physical disabilities or illnesses such as diabetes would benefit from facilities with less time standing and waiting, restrictions against medication, etc. Visitation settings could also account for the reality of family members’ lives on the outside, acknowledging that every visit has its own needs and some may be light and fun while others are more heavy with the potential for conflict and trauma. Generic visiting sessions do not allow family members to live life as it is on the outside, whereby people adapt their interaction and conversations to the needs of the moment (Turanovic and Tasca 2017). Families might prefer to focus on recreational interactions, spiritual practice, or intensive discussion of sensitive issues dependent upon developments in their lives since the last visitation period. Frequency of visits is also important in this regard, as those who visit often may have more opportunity to test and develop their visit preferences. Family members in crisis situations or with difficult news to convey might benefit from professional assistance during the visit, but such assistance should not be imposed upon families who might value the relative privacy of interactions during visits. Finally, the gender, racial, and ethnic make of the population of prisoners’ family members point to the need for cultural competence among correctional officials, which would make their interactions with families more respectful, helpful, and humane. Admittedly, one of the primary barriers to such policy innovation may be false assumptions that family members of

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the incarcerated are not deserving of constructive policies that provide support. Guilt by association with those who have committed crimes, stigma, and attributions of blame are commonly directed at these family members (Comfort 2008; Condry 2007). One challenge, then, is to change the conversation about who family members are on a deeper level. In addition to the important policy concerns, rethinking who constitutes prisoners’ family members presents ramifications for future research and methodological approaches to capturing the full range of family members lives. Innovative data collection must recognize that family members are not defined by traditional parameters of nuclear families, and that relationships may shift frequently based on need, available resources, and emotional attachments. Allowing incarcerated people and their family members to openly define what family means to them and who constitutes the members of their families is an initial step. Then, mapping relationships over time would be illuminating. In addition, the disconnected with limited family supports should be more fully integrated into research. Finally, approaching policy and research about the family members of the incarcerated from an intersectional framework opens the range of questions asked about their lives, as well as the need to capture overlapping experiences.

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Rabuy, Bernadette, Peter Wagner. 2015. “Screening Out Family Time: The For-Profit Video Visitation Industry in Prisons and Jails.” Prison Policy Initiative. https://static.prisonpolicy.org/visitation/ScreeningOutFamilyTime_ January2015.pdf. Richie, Beth E. 2001. “Challenges Incarcerated Women Face as They Return to Their Communities: Findings from Life History Interviews.” Crime & Delinquency 47(3): 368–389. Richie, Beth. 2012. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation. New York: New York University Press. Rodriguez, Nancy. 2016. “Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice: The Role of Science in Addressing the Effects of Incarceration on Family Life.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 231–240. Rose, Dina R., and Todd R. Clear. 1998. “Incarceration, Social Capital, and Crime: Implications for Social Disorganization Theory.” Criminology 36(3): 441–480. Swanson, Cheryl, Chang-Bae Lee, Frank A. Sansone, and Kimberly M. Tatum. 2013. “Incarcerated Fathers and Their Children: Perceptions of Barriers to Their Relationships.” The Prison Journal 93(4): 453–474. Tasca, Melinda. 2016. “The Gatekeepers of Contact: Child–Caregiver Dyads and Parental Prison Visitation.” Criminal Justice and Behavior 43(6): 739–758. Tasca, Melinda, Philip Mulvey, and Nancy Rodriguez. 2016. “Families Coming Together in Prison: An Examination of Visitation Encounters.” Punishment & Society 18(4): 459–478. Turanovic, Jillian J., and Melinda Tasca. 2017. “Inmates’ Experiences with Prison Visitation.” Justice Quarterly 1–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2017.138 5826. Wakefield, Sara, and Christopher Wildeman. 2013. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Western, Bruce, and Christopher Wildeman. 2009. “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621(1): 221–242. Western, Bruce, Anthony A. Braga, Jaclyn Davis, and Catherine Sirois. 2015 “Stress and Hardship After Prison.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5): 1512–1547.

6 A Holistic Approach to Prisoners’ Families—From Arrest to Release Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith

The Criminal Justice Process—From a Family Perspective Some studies have underlined the importance of looking at how families become involved during the various phases of the criminal justice process in order to understand the trajectory of their experiences before, during, and after imprisonment and the impact upon them at each stage (Condry 2007; McDermott and King 1992; Smith 2014; Smith and Gampell 2011). This includes looking at the very different ways in which these stages sometimes function and affect families (depending on the jurisdiction and the family situation): from arrest to investigation, court, and sentencing, through a prison sentence, and on release. As described by Condry: “New responsibilities might emerge at each stage of the criminal justice process. It is important to look at the whole criminal justice process, rather than just focus on the effects of imprisonment on the family; relatives are often very involved with each stage of the investigation and some cases can take years to process from discovery to sentencing” (Condry 2007, 4). R. Condry (*)  Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. S. Smith  The Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, Oslo University, Oslo, Norway © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_6

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For example, the prison regime to which the prisoner is subjected will greatly influence the possibilities for contact between family members. Here, we are in other words dealing with a number of mediators which can be very important and sometimes crucial for families. We will not be able to address all these questions properly within the scope of this chapter but will briefly go through some of the important issues with regard to the arrest, pre-trial detention, the prison regime and possibilities for contact when serving a sentence, and release (for further discussion of the circumstances around receiving the sentence as well as the release phase, see Condry 2007; McDermott and King 1992; Smith 2014).

Arrest It can be a violent experience for a child to see a parent being arrested, and it can leave deep marks, especially if the arrest does not take place in an appropriate manner. The child’s experience is dependent on the way in which the apprehended, the relatives, and the police handle the situation (Smith 2014, 115). When the arrest does not proceed successfully—from a child’s point of view—the period surrounding the arrest and remand imprisonment can “be a time of extreme shock, stress, fear, confusion and instability for children, especially if the arrest is witnessed at home” (Codd 2008, 65. See also Boswell and Wedge 2007, 62). A study from 1995 in which 30 families from Cambridgeshire in England who were affected by imprisonment were interviewed indicated that especially the early stages of the separation process can be experienced as a severe loss for the children, not least, in those situations where the arrest in itself had been a traumatic experience (Boswell and Wedge 2007, 61). Another British study based on interviews with “some forty families” found that the arrest was “a traumatic experience” (McDermott and King 1992, 51, 53). In line with other qualitative research (Christensen 1999), the study revealed that previous experience with the police was a factor determining how well families handled the situation (McDermott and King 1992, 53). A study of women prisoners and their children in the US describes how the arrest could trigger “a panicked effort to get someone to care for the children and let the children know what was happening”. As described by one mother, she practically had to beg the police: “Please let me (…) make a phone call to my mother. My son is around the corner waiting on me to pick him up from school” (Siegel 2011, 111). Arrest of parents has been compared to situations where children

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witness assault of their parents, or when a child is witness to violence in the family (Mazza 2000, 522; Boswell and Wedge 2007, 62). Numerous personal descriptions confirm that the arrest situation can be painful for children. A Danish girl explains: At the time they arrived, my sister and I were alone at home. Suddenly we heard noise downstairs and the door was kicked in. There were officers everywhere. Eight in all and dogs that barked. Our little sister was sleeping and she woke up. So my father was there and they put the handcuffs on him and we started crying. There was an officer who said that we should say goodbye. Dad took us aside and gave us 150 Kroner and said that he had done something stupid. He said that he would be back soon. We sobbed like crazy. That was the worst day of my life. Afterwards, all the furniture was overturned. The drawers pulled out and clothes were all over the place. (Smith 2014, 62)

In McDermott and King’s qualitative study, seven out of ten home arrests involved “two or more of the following features: the arrest was accomplished by several policemen who were either armed or accompanied by Alsatian dogs; the house was ransacked; partners were taken into custody; and threatened with having their children taken into care” (McDermott and King 1992, 54). Descriptions also confirm that it can be a shocking experience for a child, who has not directly experienced the arrest, to suddenly hear about the arrest of their father at a later stage, for example, in school or in the press (Boswell and Wedge 2007, 62). The adults’ (i.e. the parents, police, prison personnel, and others) handling of the situation surrounding the child of course plays an important role in the child’s experience. Children of imprisoned parents are, of course, also affected by the parent or the caregivers who remain with the child or children. Bartlett et al. (2018) examine the experiences of incarcerated primary carer fathers at the point of arrest. In this Australian study, 34 imprisoned primary carer fathers were interviewed. The study found that almost half of all arrests took place in the family home, with children present in ten cases. Half of the arrests were characterized by force, a large number of police officers, or the use of weapons. The authors highlight the potential for arrest to be traumatizing for children and the importance of guidelines for police requiring consideration of the caring responsibilities of primary carers at the point of arrest which prioritize the needs of children (Bartlett et al. 2018). Adult relatives such as the partners, spouses, and parents of prisoners are in turn also affected by arrest and what for some might be a shock at finding

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out about the offence. Adult relatives who are not resident with the offender might not witness the arrest, nor indeed may co-resident relatives where an offender is arrested away from the home. In Condry’s study of the relatives of serious offenders, some participants learnt about the offence from a telephone call or visit from the police to ask if they knew the whereabouts of offender, from social workers, media reports, or even from the victims—one wife of a man convicted of historic sex offences against children was sent a letter by her husband’s victims which she handed over to social services (Condry 2007). Families can be placed in a compromised position, as possible sources of information about the suspect or offender (see also Goffman 2014 for an account of how family members can be put under pressure by the police) which conflicts with their desire to protect their loved one. In Condry’s study, the relatives “commonly described experiencing feelings of shock, disbelief, unreality, and feeling sick” when initially learning about the crime (Condry 2007, 26). Although the family situations, relationships, and knowledge about the offender’s life and crime(s) were different, “discovery was an important turning point in the trajectories of relatives’ lives; a catastrophic interruption which … left devastation in its wake” (Condry 2007, 40). Relatives described feelings of shock at the offence itself and at its anticipated consequences: You’re in a situation where you’ve all had this terrific shock, you’re having to deal with ultimately the sentences that they get, you’re having to deal with actually what they’ve done, which is significant. (George, son convicted of homicide, in Condry 2007, 26)

This shock manifested itself in physical symptoms for some relatives: I can actually remember physically what I felt like that day, half dead. It’s like when you’ve got the worst dose of the flu but double-fold, it’s like you just, your limbs have got no weight but they feel dead heavy, you know, I can feel how I felt but you couldn’t describe how you felt. You weren’t floating, they were heavy but there was nothing in them, you were just nothing, you were just hollow. (Gill, husband convicted of sex offence, in Condry 2007, 26)

Emotionally, the relatives in Condry’s study made comparisons with their feelings of loss and bereavement. As one mother said: “It’s grief, a form of grieving, but you haven’t got the respectability of them being dead” (in Condry 2007, 27). Similarly, a qualitative study of male partners of incarcerated women demonstrated “the shock and devastation that comes with the

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discovery that one’s wife had committed a crime, and then with the following arrest and the initial stages of incarceration” (Einat et al. 2013, 668). The authors found that the “psychosocial effects of finding out about the crime linger well beyond the time of initial shock. Thus, although four (50%) of the participants were interviewed two years or more after they had first learned of their wives’ criminal actions, they still referred to the great difficulty of discovery and its long-lasting negative impact” (Einat et al. 2013, 668). There is very little research on how law enforcement officials themselves look at and understand the situation where a family member, such as a parent, is arrested, for example in front of his or her children. Limited qualitative research however suggests that such situations can be very difficult and leave a mark on police officers as well (Smith 2014, 115). Generally, research on the arrest of family members has been qualitative and has typically explored the experiences of partners and children who had a meaningful relationship with the arrested/imprisoned family member. This research has demonstrated that the arrest and the surrounding circumstances—not least police methods—can greatly affect family members and not least the children.

Pre-trial Research suggests that pre-trial detention (remand custody) can be a particularly difficult period for families facing incarceration (Smith 2014; Boswell and Wedge 2007; Christensen 1999) and again, stress afflicting the parent remaining at home can also affect the children (Murray and Farrington 2006, 726). Qualitative Danish research shows that for partners who find themselves in this situation for the first time, the rules and their lack of immediately useful experience can be overwhelming (Christensen 1999, 50). A small British qualitative study found that “the initial process of arrest and remand” was associated with disruption of the family income, disorientation, loss, and uncertainty (Codd 2008, 52). The mothers of a group of children with fathers in prison who participated in another English study in 1995 responded that it was especially during the remand imprisonment period and immediately after sentencing that they experienced a worsening of their children’s behaviour and demeanour (Boswell and Wedge 2007, 62). A particular issue during pre-trial is the uncertainty and lack of knowledge of what will happen—for how long will remand imprisonment last and will the family member receive a prison sentence?

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There is often a scarcity of information for close kin about detention and remand in custody of their family member. In some cases, they do not even know the reason for the remand in custody and might also have difficulty locating the imprisoned person (McDermott and King 1992, 54; Smith 2014). Furthermore, many families seem to know little about their rights regarding visitation of those in remand custody or attaining financial support from the social services. Needless to say, the situation becomes particularly absurd if close kin have not even been notified about the detention, something which the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) in 2002 critiqued Danish Police for sometimes omitting to do (Smith 2014, 94). Most empirical research on children of imprisoned parents and other family members of prisoners does not differentiate between the remand phase and imprisonment following a sentence. This is clearly the case with the available quantitative studies, which normally only record one category, namely “imprisonment”. This naturally makes it difficult to single out the characteristics of the pre-trial phase and its potential impact. Under all circumstances of imprisonment, the way in which children can spend time with their parent changes fundamentally, and depending on the jurisdiction, the police can sometimes also influence decisions on a number of issues surrounding visits and the regime employed during the pre-trial phase. Here, there seems to be a split between criminal justice systems where pre-trial detainees generally have more rights and privileges compared to sentenced prisoners (such as in England) and systems where remand prisoners tend to have fewer rights than sentenced prisoners (such as in the Scandinavian countries, see Smith 2017; Smith and Jakobsen 2017). A particularly Scandinavian kind of problem during the remand period is the use of pre-trial solitary confinement, which has been an integral part of the system in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark for many years (Smith 2011). It is well known within research that solitary confinement and the resulting minimal access to psychological, meaningful social contact will expose prisoners to a number of negative effects including anxiety, depression, and possibly mental illness (Haney 2003; Smith 2006; Shalev 2009). It is obvious that such harmful effects can play a significant role in the prisoner’s ability to function as a parent. For the children, this means that the contact with the parents can be extremely difficult and that the possibility of getting care from the parents is strongly limited (Christensen 1999, 45). Interestingly, Swedish research has shown that parents in pre-trial solitary confinement have very high levels of psychological health problems, which remain constant over time, while psychological health is gradually improved among

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parents under ordinary pre-trial (remand) conditions—something which the authors attribute to the lack of contact with their children and the inability to be a parent and take care of your children, which is especially evident when subjected to solitary confinement (Holmgren et al. 2007, 17, 21, 23). Furthermore, the police in Denmark can request supervised visits during the remand period, which means that a police officer will be present during the visit in order to ensure that the case is not spoken about, which creates a very special and problematic situation for the children. Unfortunately, the practice of supervised visits is widespread in Denmark and between 45 and 50% of all remand prisoners are subjected restrictions on visits and other forms of contact and thereby to this practice (Smith and Jakobsen 2017). In fact, although the practice of pre-trial solitary confinement has been reduced to a minimum in Denmark in recent years, the remand regime is nevertheless still remarkably austere in the way it prevents contact with the outside world. Pre-trial detainees are normally not allowed to use a phone and can be on remand for more than a year without ever being able to telephone family, receive unsupervised visits, and while being subjected to security control of all written correspondence as well. The latter means that it can take up three weeks for a letter to get processed and arrive, which effectively renders this form of communication useless in a situation of family crisis (Smith and Jakobsen 2017). Unsurprisingly, prisoners and their families in Denmark describe the pre-trial phase as especially stressful and much worse than the conditions and regimes for sentenced prisoners (Smith and Jakobsen 2017). In Sweden, an astounding two-thirds of all remand prisoners are typically kept in solitary confinement (Smith and Jakobsen 2017). In the USA, such a practice is normally associated with sentenced prisoners and the supermax phenomenon (Reiter 2016). In Scandinavia, on the other hand, regimes for sentenced prisoner will often be relatively open with good opportunities for visits and contact. In other words, the specific characteristics, laws, and regulations governing the pre-trial phase and remand imprisonment in a particular jurisdiction can be of significant importance.

Prison Regimes, Visits, and Contact As previously mentioned, the character of prison regimes and the laws and practices surrounding visits and other forms of contact can be of paramount importance for families. For families trying to maintain contact, the prison can become a “domestic satellite” (Comfort 2008, 99) where everything

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from family meals to sex can take place—depending on the jurisdiction and the local regime. The rules, regulations, and cultures produced by these regimes and their legal context can also—together with other factors, such as the distance from home to prison—make it more or less impossible to uphold meaningful contact. In such cases, family contact may simply cease and perhaps never commence again depending on the circumstances. One way of distinguishing between these diverse rules and regulations and their effects upon families is to categorise them as “exclusionary regimes” or “inclusionary regimes” where the former can include, for example, punitive policies such as three-strikes law and abolition of discretionary parole, while the latter can include state family prison policies and welfare support (Foster and Hagan 2015, 137). One recent article argues that while study after study has documented the negative effects of incarceration for family life, we lack “empirical acknowledgement of the variance in the character of criminal justice contact and family life and, as a result, the dramatic variation in incarceration’s impacts for family life” (Wakefield et al. 2016, 13). Similarly, Sara Wakefield argues elsewhere that it is important to “link the conditions of confinement more broadly to family functioning after release” and that studies “focused on the conditions of confinement during the prison boom have tended to focus on the most extreme conditions” such as long-term solitary confinement (Wakefield 2016, 543). Though this may be the case with regard to American research, there are a small number of studies elsewhere that make a point of looking at various forms of prison regimes and conditions and how they affect families in different ways through, for example, different visiting practices (Murray and Farrington 2008, 177; Smith 2014). There has also been some discussion of the work of not only prisons and prison staff, but also police officers, courts, and social workers (Smith 2014). In their discussion of “macro-level state regimes”, Foster and Hagan talk about the importance of, for example, “punitive contexts”, “criminal law enforcement”, and “prisoner reentry processes” in different countries and jurisdictions (Foster and Hagan 2015b, 148). For example, when looking at the question of prison visits, recent research discusses the importance of having such visits and the importance of the possibilities and conditions in that regard (Aiello and McCorkel 2017; Mitchell et al. 2016; Mowen and Visher 2016). One study looked at 676 individuals imprisoned in Texas who were sampled 30 days before release and two to five months after (Mowen and Visher 2016, 509). The study found that the formerly incarcerated “reported significant increases in both familial emotional support and familial interactions when they experienced greater

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contact with family members during their term of incarceration” (ibid., 519). Importantly, individuals who reported “barriers to family contact” also reported a “decrease in family relationships after release” (ibid., 519). The possible “barriers” included, for example, having family members placed in prisons too far away, encountering difficult visitation rules, and experiencing that the prisons/jails in question were unpleasant to visit (ibid., 513). A study of a mother-child visitation programme in an American jail found that children of incarcerated parents experienced significant secondary prisonization. For example, the children experienced “changes in their schedules and routines” and especially visits provoked “anxiety, confusion, concern, and attention” over “the jail’s effort to discipline their bodies and regulate their emotions” (Aiello and McCorkel 2017, 16). A UK study of the impact of maternal imprisonment identified that many children do not have the opportunity to visit their mothers in prison (Minson 2017). In the UK, the average distance women are held from their home is 60 miles (Women in Prison 2013) which can make visiting prohibitively expensive and difficult to organize. In Minson’s study, one eleven-year-old whose mother had been in prison for ten years explained: Q So how often do you get to see your Mum? A Not much. I think we’ve been like once or twice in the last couple of years. We used to go see her quite a bit but she moved further away and then she moved even further away. Q So where is she now? A I don’t exactly know. I only know we can’t go and see her ‘cos we can’t afford it. (Daughter of prisoner, in Condry et al. 2016, 629)

In their study of children visiting prisoners in Ireland, Donson and Parkes (2018) highlight the lack of a child-centred approach which would see the children as children first—viewing the visiting process from the child’s perspective and foregrounding their needs would result in all children being given access to enhanced visits. Yet in their study they found that the dominant perspective remained rooted in the prisoner: “… their responsibility for their children, their rehabilitation. In this context, it is unsurprising that children get ‘lost in the process’; they are not recognized as rights holders requiring an institutional approach which responds to their dignity and needs” (Donson and Parkes 2018, 206). Prison regimes, prison policies, and visiting facilities can therefore in themselves severely complicate or discontinue contact. Put differently, we are talking about very important mediators of the effects of imprisonment on families which are often ignored or unaccounted for in quantitative research.

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Indeed, prisoners often describe how it can be difficult to have visits and to relate to the world outside and the family they feel that they have let down. Some imprisoned parents choose to opt out of visits for that reason, or sometimes because the visiting conditions are bad. A formerly imprisoned father explains: We had a lot of money – that’s often the attraction with criminality. But when I was in prison, they [the family] were on income support. They probably felt it as a letdown. That dad is gone, the money’s gone and all possibilities are gone. That made me withdraw from them because I couldn’t cope with being guilty of that as well. It’s not nice to think back on that. (Smith 2014, 63)

As described in qualitative research, family members are also influenced, sometimes extensively, by the rules and regulations of the prisons they interact with in order to maintain contact. According to Comfort, this means that the intimate relationships between prisoners and their partners are “played out in the grip of the ‘carceral home’” whereby family members as well as inmates experience “prisonization” (Comfort 2008, 125). This, of course, has detrimental effects upon the children of imprisoned parents. As a Danish mother explained in 2007, if her son wanted to bring a reading book from school into the prison, she “had to go to the most senior staff and practically beg for permission. He’s now in third grade – and he still hasn’t been allowed to read one line for his dad” (Smith 2014, 64). This can be worse and is prolonged for families of prisoners serving long sentences. In a UK study of the female partners of long-term male prisoners, one partner of a life sentence prisoner described her difficulties interacting with prison staff. Simple inconveniences compounded this difficulty: But when you’re dealing one-to-one with a system that says - go and wait outside in the rain for an hour, no you can’t stand in this little bit that’s dry. We want you [to] stand there in the rain. And that’s what they do to us. (Partner of prisoner, in Kotova 2016 and Condry et al. 2016, 634)

Hutton (2018) describes the way that families are perceived and treated when visiting a prison as a “legally sanctioned stigma”: the labelling and treatment of prisoners’ families as a separate group combined with their negative stereotyping as inherently untrustworthy (and potentially criminal) bodies manifests in institutional practices that discriminate against them … This discrimination is bought sharply into focus when comparisons are drawn between the treatment of social visitors (prisoners’ families) and

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official visitors, particularly when we consider differences in how both groups are processed and searched as they enter the prison and the location and condition of visits they are entitled to (Hutton 2018, 236). Another interesting way of approaching the issue of how prison regimes affect families is offered by Jardine (2017). Jardine looks at different ways of theorizing what a family is and not least what families do and why it can be important for a family to display such activities: This emphasis on the active processes through which people establish and reinforce their family relationships by doing ‘family things’ (spending time together, sharing food, engaging in family traditions and telling family stories) sheds light on why seemingly everyday objects and activities, such as photographs and phone calls, are accorded such significance by men and women serving a prison sentence. (Jardine 2017, 4)

Indeed, this is why “families affected by imprisonment utilize a range of resources such as visits, mementos and traditions to actively ‘display’ family, often in highly individual ways, and to maintain their relationships despite imprisonment” (ibid.). The history of prison visits has not yet been written, but through different glimpses we can piece together how long the shadows of the isolation practices of the modern penitentiary have stretched and how far into the twentieth century the separation of prisoners and their families was almost absolute in many places. In Denmark, for example, as late as in 1919 a personal description from a prisoner who experienced what was essentially still a commonly applied Pennsylvania model regime reveals how visits and correspondence with the family were severely restricted. Each prisoner was allowed a 15-minute visit every third month, which was awaited with great excitement not only days but also weeks ahead. Correspondence was limited to receiving and sending one letter a month (Smith 2014, 25). We do not know exactly when these rules began to change and developed into the different practices we see today but although the starting point in the shape of the nineteenth-century modern penitentiary was strikingly uniform, there are today important differences in visiting systems from country to country—from conjugal visits in Scandinavia, for example, to the peculiar model found in the UK and elsewhere where visits take place in big common rooms, and prisoners are ordered to sit on a specific chair without being allowed extended physical contact with visitors, even their children. Also, we know from an English study that as late as in the 1960s a wife could not visit her imprisoned husband more than once per month

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(Morris 1965, 291). By contrast, today prisoners in an English category B or C prison can expect the possibility of somewhere between one weekly onehour visits and sometimes up to three weekly visits lasting from one to two and a half hours per visit (Moran et al. 2017, 111). During remand, pretrial detainees can in some places in the UK receive visits almost daily and typically at least three times a week, whereas a Danish remand prisoner will normally only be allowed a weekly visit of half an hour or one hour, and very often under the immediate supervision of a police officer (Smith and Jakobsen 2017). But as previously mentioned the rights and conditions are typically much better for sentenced prisoners in Scandinavia, and in some, open prisons visits can take place both inside and outside with ample opportunity for fresh air, playing with children, and so on. In an open prison in Denmark, you are also allowed to have a mobile phone (without Internet connection) in your cell from which you can call your family (Smith 2014). In prisons in some jurisdictions it is today also possible to stay overnight in special facilities such as visiting apartments. In Norway, parents can in some prisons stay with their children in such apartments overnight, and in Denmark, it is possible for entire families to do this in a number of institutions (Smith 2014). Even in the USA there are prisons which allow family members to spend the night together (Comfort 2008, 101). Conjugal visits also feature in other systems and a study in an Israeli women’s prison, for example, found that conjugal visits decrease emotional frustrations (Einat and Rabinovitz 2013). In the Scandinavian case, evidence points in the direction of the 1970s as a time of change but only in the sense that prisoners right to privacy and sexual relations came to the fore (hence the conjugal visits) while the question of their children and the need for contact in that regard were apparently not an issue. During the last decade, however, visiting conditions and policies have undergone very extensive child-friendly reforms in Scandinavia partly based on a human rights and children’s rights agenda and “children’s officers” responsible for introducing childfriendly procedures and visiting conditions have been introduced across the Scandinavian prison estates (Smith 2014, 2015). As already touched upon, some regimes can make visits more or less impossible, and some personal circumstances and family situations can also complicate visits. Indeed, while most research underlines how extremely important visiting is for many families and children, this is nevertheless not always the case. As previously discussed, the imprisonment of a family member can be a positive experience for some which allows changes and choices to be made—for example for victims of abuse in the family. But, and this arguably goes especially for children, to a great extent the visiting conditions

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can in themselves also complicate visits and what they produce. One study based on interviews with “45 caregiver-child dyads”, for example, found that the extent to which children found visiting the imprisoned parents “problematic and distressing” could “equate with elevated levels of child trauma symptoms” (Arditti and Savla 2013, 553, 557).

Release and Re-entry Numerous studies have found the support of family to be important to the successful resettlement of prisoners on release (e.g. Cobean and Power 1978; Ditchfield 1994; Hairston 1998; Home Office 2005; Naser and La Vigne 2006; Nelson et al. 1999; Maldonado 2006; Niven and Stewart 2005; Rocque et al. 2013; Social Exclusion Unit 2002; Visher and Travis 2003). The support provided by families can be practical, in the form of housing, clothing, food, or money; access and guidance in relation to jobs or education; emotional support, feeling cared for and connected; and in some cases direct care for those managing a physical or mental illness on release. One government review in the UK found that prisoners receiving at least one visit during their sentence were more likely to secure accommodation and employment and therefore less likely to reoffend (Niven and Stewart 2005). More recently, in their analysis of data from a longitudinal survey of male prisoners in England and Wales, Brunton-Smith and McCarthy (2017) found a particular effect from parental visits to prisoners—visits from parents were influential in improving prisoners’ relations with their family and subsequently those prisoners that experienced improved family relations were significantly less likely to reoffend. However, their findings show that strong family relationships on entry to prison do not automatically translate into positive resettlement outcomes upon release: Rather it is the strengthening of these attachments throughout the prison sentence (and beyond), which has a sustained impact on reducing reoffending risks, albeit an effect that is diminished when considered two years after release. This positive effect of improving family relations is also evident when considering abstaining from class A drug use and successfully finding employment on release from prison. (Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2017, 14)

In their study of 39 family pairs of British male prisoners and their (ex-) partners before and after release, Markson et al. (2015) found that family relationships predicted positive outcomes with finding accommodation,

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alcohol and drug use, the extent to which ex-prisoners felt they were coping with resettlement challenges, and the quality of post-release family relations. However, in their study difficulties with employment and finance were not related to previous family relations nor to the other resettlement outcomes. Their findings therefore suggest that family relationships do not provide a general protective influence during resettlement, but rather that there is a strong effect of family relationships on social and emotional aspects. A decade ago, Codd (2007) wrote about the “rediscovery” of the importance of family ties within the field of desistance and government policy. Numerous studies had found that strong family ties helped to prevent reoffending and facilitate reintegration. As Codd notes, this had led to a range of measures designed to make prisons more family-friendly, such as extended visits. Codd critiques the notion of these measures being utilized to support the successful reintegration of prisoners and argues that families should be supported for their own sake, rather than as instruments of penal policy. She argues for caution in making families responsible for a prisoner’s successful resettlement and also highlights the gendered nature of care provided to prisoners by family members who are often female and adding to pre-­ existing caring responsibilities. Jardine echoes the burden placed upon families if they are required to offer support and yet are unsupported themselves (Jardine 2015). The numbers here are substantial—for example, Wagner and Rabuy estimate that there are 840,000 people on parole in the USA and 3.7 million on probation (Wagner and Rabuy 2017), resulting in millions of family members affected by restrictions placed on a prisoner after release. However, it is also important that we do not treat prisoners’ families as a single, homogenous group—as Rodriguez (2016) has argued, it is important to recognize the nuances and complexities of family life when considering the families of prisoners. This includes a consideration of the effects of antisocial behaviour and criminality on family life. As well as being directly affected by a family member’s criminality, families may have had to contend with mental illness, substance misuse, and histories of physical or sexual abuse, all of which could make a significant difference to how they experience incarceration and how they experience release and re-entry. As Rodriguez argues, there is a need to recognize the toll this can take on families which includes the personal, cultural, and structural challenges they might face, which can hinder family members’ ability to seek assistance and also crucially to provide support to the prisoner on release. Although family support may have a range of benefits, it also should be noted that the point of release can be a time when family relationships are

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particularly fragile (Wildeman and Western 2010). Reintegration into family relationships can present a range of challenges, not least the renegotiation of family relationships that have been previously mediated through the prison—learning to live together again. As Martinez and Christian (2009) show in their study of family relationships on release, both the former prisoner and the family must begin to negotiate the challenge of giving and receiving support. Comfort (2018) explores the challenges faced by families when men return to the home from prison and in particular the shifts in gendered relationship dynamics that must be managed. Prison requires prisoners and their partners to enact particular forms of masculinity and femininity which then change when the man returns home: men’s and women’s understandings of what it means to “be a man” shift to encompass behaviours and achievements that are difficult for men with conviction histories to attain, and the profound dissatisfaction both parties feel about the failure to enact this manhood translates into conflict in the relationship … the rising use of confinement may contribute to strife within the family, and thus how the state’s power to punish reverberates daily in the social roles and interactions of some of society’s most vulnerable members. (Comfort 2018, 74)

Experiences of release can also vary greatly according to the type and length of sentence. Comfort (2016) explores the problem of the hardships posed for families of repeated brief jail stays and community supervision of their loved ones, which she argues are “uniquely destabilizing” and distinct from the hardships that arise during imprisonment. Families will also experience particular problems when long-term prisoners are released. There are likely to be additional and ongoing difficulties for those related to lifers, other prisoners released on licence, or to sex offenders who might be subject to further restrictions on release from prison. In Condry’s (2007) study of the relatives of serious offenders in the UK, several interviewees were preoccupied with the restrictions that would follow the offender being placed on the sex offenders’ register and how these would affect their lives. The relatives in this study also reported further difficulties in re-grouping as a family, re-­negotiating family responsibilities, and a significant lack of accessible support. Problems such as ongoing stigmatization and exclusion, accommodation, and employment are all likely to worsen when the offence is a serious one. In the long term, relatives in Condry’s study even worried what they would tell children as they grew up, and some interviewees even mentioned concern over what to tell future grandchildren (Condry 2007).

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Taken together, the above research clearly demonstrates how all stages of the criminal justice process from arrest procedures and pre-trial practices to prison regimes, visiting conditions, release and re-entry can have immense importance for the families involved. Qualitative research suggests that individual occurrences, such as the arrest situation, and individual factors, such as the regime for prison visits, in themselves can have severe consequences and, in case of the latter, perhaps make the difference between whether or not contact is maintained at all. It therefore seems absolutely necessary to take a holistic approach which considers the experiences of families of prisoners and their circumstances across the criminal justice process when addressing the effects of imprisonment upon them.

References Aiello, Brittnie, and Jill McCorkel. 2017. “‘It Will Crush You Like a Bug’: Maternal Incarceration, Secondary Prisonization, and Children’s Visitation.” Punishment & Society 20(3): 351–374. Arditti, J.A., and J. Savla. 2013. “Parental Incarceration and Child Trauma Symptoms in Single Caregiver Homes.” Journal of Child & Family Studies 24(3): 551–561. Bartlett, Tess S., Catherine A. Flynn, and Christopher J. Trotter. 2018. “‘They Didn’t Even Let Me Say Goodbye’: A Study of Imprisoned Primary Carer Fathers at the Point of Arrest in Victoria, Australia.” Child Care in Practice 24(2): 115–130. Boswell, Gwyneth, and Peter Wedge. 2007. Imprisoned Fathers and Their Children. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Brunton-Smith, I., and D.J. McCarthy. 2017. “The Effects of Prisoner Attachment to Family on Re-entry Outcomes: A Longitudinal Assessment.” The British Journal of Criminology 57(2): 463–482. Christensen, Else. 1999. Forældre i Fængsel. Copenhagen: SFI. Cobean, Susan C., and Paul W. Power. 1978. The Role of the Family in the Rehabilitation of the Offender. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 22: 29–39. Codd, Helen. 2007. “Prisoners’ Families and Resettlement: A Critical Analysis.” The Howard Journal 46(3): 255–263. Codd, Helen. 2008. In the Shadow of Prison: Families, Imprisonment and Criminal Justice. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. Comfort, Megan. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. University of Chicago Press. Comfort, Megan. 2016. “‘A Twenty-Hour-a-Day Job’: The Impact of Frequent Low-Level Criminal Justice Involvement on Family Life.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 63–79.

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Comfort, Megan. 2018. “‘I’m the Man and He’s the Woman!’: Gender Dynamics Among Couples During and After Prison.” In Prisons, Punishment and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? edited by R. Condry and P. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Condry, Rachel. 2007. Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders. Cullompton: Willan. Condry, Rachel, Anna Kotova, and Shona Minson. 2016. “Social Injustice and Collateral Damage: The Families and Children of Prisoners.” In The Handbook on Prisons, edited by Yvonne Jewkes, Jamie Bennett, and Ben Crewe, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Ditchfield, John. 1994. “Family Ties and Recidivism.” (Home Office Research Bulletin No. 36). London: Home Office. Donson, Fiona, and Aisling Parkes. 2018. “Rights and Securing in the Shadow of the Irish Prison.” In Prisons, Punishment and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? edited by R. Condry and P. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Einat, Tomer, and Sharon Rabinovitz. 2013. “A Warm Touch in a Cold Cell: Inmates’ Views on Conjugal Visits in a Maximum-Security Women’s Prison in Israel.” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 57(12): 1522–1545. Einat, Tomer, Inbal Harle-Aviram, and Sharon Rabinovitz. 2013. “Barred from Each Other: Why Normative Husbands Remain Married to Incarcerated Wives—An Exploratory Study.” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 59(6): 654–679. Foster, Holly, and John Hagan. 2015. “Punishment Regimes and the Multilevel Effects of Parental Incarceration: Intergenerational, Intersectional, and Interinstitutional Models of Social Inequality and Systemic Exclusion.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 135–158. Goffman, Alice. 2014. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hairston, Creasie Finney. 1998. “Family Ties During Imprisonment: Do They Influence Future Criminal Activity?” Federal Probation 52(1): 48–52. Haney, Craig. 2003. “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement.” Crime and Delinquency 49(1): 124–156. Holmgren, Bengt, Thomas Frisell, and Bo Runeson. 2007. “Psykisk hälsa hos häktade med restriktioner.” Kriminalvården, Projektnummer: 2007: 1. Home Office. 2005. “Resettlement Outcomes on Release from Prison in 2003.” (Home Office Research Findings No. 248). London: HMSO. Hutton, Marie. 2018. “The Legally Sanctioned Stigma of Prisoners’ Families.” In Prisons, Punishment and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? edited by R. Condry and P. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jardine, Cara. 2015. Constructing Family in the Context of Imprisonment: A Study of Prisoners and Their Families in Scotland. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

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Jardine, Cara. 2017. “Constructing and Maintaining Family in The Context of Imprisonment.” The British Journal of Criminology. Kotova, Anna. 2016. ‘He’s Got a Life Sentence, but I Have a Life Sentence to Cope with as Well’: The Experiences of Long-Term Prisoners’ Partners. Unpublished DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford. Maldonado, Solangel. 2006. “Recidivism and Paternal Engagement.” Family Law Quarterly 40: 191–212. Markson, Lucy, Frederik Lösel, Karen Souza, and Caroline Lanksey. 2015. “Male Prisoners’ Family Relationships and Resilience in Resettlement.” Criminology and Criminal Justice 15(4): 423–441. Martinez, Damien J., and Johnna Christian. 2009. “The Familial Relationships of Former Prisoners Examining the Link Between Residence and Informal Support Mechanisms.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38(2): 201–224. Mazza, Carl. 2000. “And Then the World Fell Apart: The Children of Incarcerated Fathers.” Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Services 83(5): 521–529. McDermott, Kathleen, and Roy D. King. 1992. “Prison Rule 102: ‘Stand by Your Man’.” In Prisoners’ Children: What Are the Issues? edited by R. Shaw. London: Routledge. Minson, Shona. 2017. Who Cares? Analysing the Place of Children in Maternal Sentencing Decisions in England and Wales. Unpublished DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford. Mitchell, Meghan M., Kallee Spooner, Di Jia, and Yan Zhang. 2016. “The Effect of Prison Visitation on Reentry Success: A Meta-Anaysis.” Journal of Criminal Justice 47: 74–83. Moran, Dominique, Marie A. Hutton, Louise Dixon, and Tom Disney. 2017. “‘Daddy Is a Difficult Word for Me to Hear’: Carceral Geographies of Parenting and the Prison Visiting Room as a Contested Space of Situated Fathering.” Children’s Geographies 15(1): 107–121. Morris, Pauline. 1965. Prisoners and their Families. New York: Hart publishing company. Mowen, Thomas J., and Christy A. Visher. 2016. “Changing the Ties That Bind: How Incarceration Impacts Family Relationships.” Criminology & Public Policy 15(2): 503–528. Murray, Joseph, and David Farrington. 2006. “Evidence-Based Programs for Children of Prisoners.” Criminology & Public Policy 5(4): 721–736. Murray, Joseph, and David Farrington. 2008. “The Effects of Parental Imprisonment on Children.” Crime and Justice 37(1): 133–206. Naser, Rebecca L., and Nancy G. La Vigne. 2006. “Family Support in the Prisoner Reentry Process: Expectations and Realities.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 43: 93–106. Nelson, Marta, Perry Deess, and Charlotte Allen. 1999. The First Month Out: Postincarceration Experiences in New York City. New York: Vera Institute of Justice.

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Niven, Stephen, and Duncan Stewart. 2005. “Resettlement Outcomes on Release from Prison in 2003.” (Home Office Findings No. 248). London: Home Office. Reiter, Keramet. 2016. 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rocque, Michael, David M. Bierie, Chad Posick, and Doris L MacKenzie. 2013. “Unraveling Change: Social Bonds and Recidivism Among Released Offenders.” Victims and Offenders 8: 209–230. Rodriguez, Nancy. 2016. “Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice: The Role of Science in Addressing the Effects of Incarceration on Family Life.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 231–240. Shalev, Sharon. 2009. Supermax: Controlling Risk Through Solitary Confinement. Cullompton: Willan. Siegel, J.A. 2011. Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Smith, Peter Scharff. 2006. “The Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prison Inmates: A Brief History and Review of the Literature.” Crime and Justice 34(1): 441–528. Smith, Peter Scharff. 2011. “A Critical look at Scandinavian Exceptionalism. Welfare State theories, Penal Populism, and Prison Conditions in Denmark and Scandinavia.” In Nordic Prison Practice and Policy—Exceptional or Not? Exploring Penal Exceptionalism in the Nordic context edited by Thomas Ugelvik and Jane Dullum. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, Peter Scharff. 2014. When the Innocent Are Punished: The Children of Imprisoned Parents. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Smith, Peter Scharff. 2015. “Children of Imprisoned Parents in Scandinavia: Their Problems, Treatment and the Role of Scandinavian Penal Culture.” Law in Context 32: 147–168. Smith, Peter Scharff. 2017. “Punishment Without Conviction? Scandinavian Pre-trial Practices and the Power of the ‘Benevolent’ State.” In Embraced by the Welfare State? Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice edited by Smith and Ugelvik, 129–155. Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Peter Scharff, and Lucy Gampell, eds. 2011. The Children of Imprisoned Parents. Copenhagen: The Danish Institute for Human Rights. Smith, Peter Scharff, and Janne Jakobsen. 2017. Varetægtsfængsling. Danmarks hårdeste straf? Copenhagen: DJØF Publishing. Social Exclusion Unit. 2002. Reducing Re-offending by Ex-prisoners. London: Social Exclusion Unit. Visher, Christy A., and Jeremy Travis. 2003. “Transitions from Prison to Community: Understanding Individual Pathways.” Annual Review of Sociology 29: 89–113. Wagner, Peter, and Bernadette Rabuy. 2017. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie.” Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2017.html. Accessed 15 December 2017.

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Wakefield, S. 2016. “Changing the Ties that Bind.” Criminology & Public Policy 15: 543–549. Wakefield, S., H. Lee, and C. Wildeman. 2016. “Tough on Crime, Tough on Families? Criminal Justice and Family Life in America.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 665(1): 8–21. Wildeman, Christopher, and Bruce Western. 2010. “Incarceration in Fragile Families.” The Future of Children 20: 157–177. Women in Prison. 2013. State of the Estate—Women in Prison’s Report on the Women’s Custodial Estate 2011–2012. London: Women in Prison.

7 Opportunities and Challenges for Work on Behalf of Families Affected by Imprisonment: The Experience of Families Outside Nancy Loucks

Families Outside is the only national Scottish charity that works solely on behalf of children and families affected by imprisonment. Founded in 1991 by a prison governor and originally staffed and funded by the Scottish Prison Service, Families Outside has since developed its own independent identity, funding sources, and staffing. Even with initial support from the Prison Service, work on behalf of families affected by imprisonment is not easy. The breadth of the impact of imprisonment means that engagement with prisons is not enough: efforts must also include other criminal justice agencies such as the police and courts, as well as those outside the justice system such as schools and health professionals. Unlike other interest groups, families of people in prison deliberately do not draw attention to themselves, hesitate to reach out for support, and shy away from speaking out about their cause. These families are no one’s specific responsibility in terms of funding or policy, which presents the challenge of getting potential funders, strategists, and practitioners to recognise the relevance of this issue and to take ownership of it. This chapter describes the work of Families Outside, giving an example of how one organisation tackles these challenges in order to improve outcomes for children and families. N. Loucks (*)  Chief Executive, Families Outside, Edinburgh, Scotland e-mail: [email protected] University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_7

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Background In 1983, a small local organisation in Glasgow called Families Outside started to raise awareness of the impact of imprisonment on the children and families left behind. A single-issue organisation, the concern was whether this focus was enough to sustain its work on its own or whether it should join forces with a larger organisation with a relevant focus. The Board decided to merge Families Outside with a larger criminal justice charity, but even in this context the work was not deemed a priority, and by 1989, the focus on families had largely disappeared. In 1991, however, a prison governor in Edinburgh had been in regular contact with the mother of a prisoner in his care, and the two of them determined that the needs of families were significant enough to try again, this time under the auspices of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS). Governor Alec Spencer established the Scottish Forum on Prisons and Families, funded by the SPS and staffed by a secondee from the SPS, and hosted by Save the Children. Its work started with research into the needs of families when someone went to prison (Peart and Asquith 1992) as well as how prisons could work more effectively to recognise and address these needs (Buist 1997). The role of the Family Contact & Development Officer came out of this research (Peart and Asquith 1992), and in 1998, the Forum set up the Scottish Prisoners’ Families Helpline in order to support families more directly. As the work of the Forum developed, the Board believed greater independence from the Prison Service would be beneficial and that the Forum had a large enough remit to operate on its own. In 2001, the Scottish Forum on Prisons and Families became Families Outside and appointed its first independent Director. In 2007, the Board took the further decision to extend the work of Families Outside into direct service provision. From 2 members of staff in 1991 to 27 members of staff 27 years later, Families Outside remains the only national Scottish charity that works exclusively on behalf of children and families affected by imprisonment. Our purpose is to improve outcomes for families so that they can live healthy, active lives free from the stigma and disadvantage a family member’s imprisonment can bring. While this can include support for families when a community sentence is imposed, we prioritise the experience of imprisonment, as separation through imprisonment has significantly greater consequences. As other chapters in this volume highlight, the impact of imprisonment impacts a

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family’s finances, housing, physical and mental health and well-being, education and employment, childcare, victimisation, family contact, travel and transport, and more. Imprisonment acts like a bereavement but is a ‘disenfranchised grief ’ which remains hidden and therefore unsupported (Doka 1998). The criminal justice system is part of a family’s experience, but only a part of it—most of the issues they face as a consequence of imprisonment are not about prisons, and not even about the justice system. This of course means that ownership of the issue of impact on families is diluted across a range of jurisdictions (health, education, housing, finance, justice), and the specific needs of families of prisoners easily become sidelined. The Scottish Forum on Prisons and Families spent its first decade building a body of information about the impact of imprisonment on the families left behind, both through research and eventually through the Helpline, which swiftly became a critical source of first-hand information about the types of issues families were facing. The role of the organisation following its transition into Families Outside continued this, but it soon became clear that a more holistic approach was required to support families in this situation. Since the Board took the decision in 2007 to enter into direct service provision, the remit for Families Outside now focuses on three main areas: Direct Support to families via the freephone national Helpline as well as regionally based family support for face-to-face, in-depth local support; Training for key professionals, particularly to prison staff but latterly to social work teams, Children’s Panel members, health professionals, schools, youth workers, students, the judiciary, and so on, as well as awareness-raising amongst relevant interest groups; and Development of Policy and Practice to raise awareness of the legal and practical barriers for families when someone goes to prison and to identify and sustain changes to these. These three areas of work are designed to address the Key Objectives for Families Outside, which are as follows: Policy makers, decision makers, and relevant service providers will be well-informed about the issues facing families affected by imprisonment. They will recognise prisoners’ families within their remit and take the needs of these families into account in the decisions they make and the services they provide. Families affected by imprisonment can readily access appropriate information and support at the time they need it. This in turn will improve their outcomes so that they can live healthy, active lives free from stigma and disadvantage.

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Families Outside will provide a sustainable and viable service as long as the demand for its work is evident. These objectives are essential and ongoing. The third point is perhaps of particular interest: our focus has to be on meeting the needs of families affected by imprisonment, not merely on job security for ourselves. If families no longer need our input, then we have achieved our outcomes, and the organisation can cease to exist. In view of the issues this chapter and the others in this volume raise, we do not anticipate a need to shut our doors for the foreseeable future. We do however keep this Objective in mind to help us retain our focus. The three main tenets of our work—direct support, training, and development of policy and practice—complement and inform each other. The next sections unpick what each of these overlapping areas of work entails.

Direct Support I would not have survived without you. You have made me feel that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Through direct support, Families Outside reaches families immediately and in turn receives first-hand information about the issues that are important to them. This work also helps us identify trends, which inform the planning and development of publications for families and professionals. The Helpline is often a family member’s first port of call, with many concerns resolved without further need for support. Families and professionals most commonly find the Helpline via our website and can choose to remain anonymous throughout the interaction—something helpful to families facing stigma, fear, and lack of confidence. People can ring the Helpline, contact us by email or text, or can make use of our web chat service. We have also had people contact us via social media (Facebook or Twitter). The fact that most people who contact us are in their mid-20s or above suggests we may not be reaching young people as readily as we should, and we are exploring means of improving this. Meanwhile, the regional provision of support provides face-to-face contact with those in need of more in-depth support, such as those requiring connection to locally based specialist services. Regional Family Support Coordinators can develop trusting relationships with both families and professionals, with agencies able to make referrals to or receive support from a person known to them. For example, every prison and local authority in

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Scotland has a designated Regional Family Support Coordinator assigned to them. Support is designed to be holistic and assets-based: the more we can work with families rather than for families, using their own strengths to overcome the difficulties they face, the stronger the family becomes. The combination of the Helpline and the Regional Support means that families can reach us early and then progress to more in-depth, local support if they need this: I was suicidal at time of contacting Families Outside, had no self-worth, felt isolated and a ‘freak’ - I could not cope with having given birth to a son whose behaviour and impact of this has affected so many victims and others life…. I was able to speak openly both to helpline and at face to face sessions, was given time and space to share all kinds of emotions/thoughts without being judged and felt that all of the 3 people I have had the pleasure of meeting at Families Outside were genuinely interested, had excellent balance of professionalism but also ‘human’ approach - this was vital for me as it enabled me to just be myself/honest and really share emotions/fears/thoughts etc.

Peer support is another element of direct support, but one we have struggled to sustain. Trust can be difficult for families to establish with each other and, like people in prison, can create ‘hierarchies’ between them based on the nature of the offence (Condry 2007; Loucks and Loureiro 2018). Participation in peer support groups tends to dwindle once someone has left prison, unless group members gather for other reasons as well (e.g. campaigning, theatrical performance etc.). We are currently exploring, and hoping to build upon, models of peer support that work well, namely those that operate under a principle of non-disclosure such as My Time (Dr. Lorna Brookes, Liverpool), Children Heard & Seen (Oxfordshire), and KIN (Vox Liminis and Families Outside, Scotland).

Database The database for our Family Support work captures the voices and experiences of families, which in turn helps us identify key issues as well as trends. For example, the database identified increased numbers of queries and concerns from families about Home Detention Curfew (electronic tagging), from concerns about how it worked to worries about someone being released back to the family when there was undisclosed domestic abuse, to fear about the drug dealers now surrounding the family home when a family’s daughter was restricted to the house on curfew. In recent years, the

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database has reflected a particular increase in requests for support from families of people convicted of a sexual offence. Such aggregate data informs our work and helps us develop and target resources for families: families tell us what they need, and we provide it. It also informs our input to policy and practice. For example, we contribute to the Scottish Prison Service’s Suicide Risk Strategy Group and are able to provide ‘live’ feedback from families concerned about someone in prison who may be suicidal. Equally, we shared families’ experiences regarding the provision of health and social care in prisons—another growing concern for families, with the ageing of the prison population and generally poor health amongst prisoners.

Publications I just wanted to say thank you for this excellent, invaluable resource. It really opened my eyes to the unique challenges which children and young people encounter in this situation, and to what can change if they open up to just one trusted person.

Information from the database guides our development of publications for families and professionals. The increased request for support for families of people convicted of a sexual offence, for example, led us to develop and publish Picking Up the Pieces, which is a handbook for families in this situation. The handbook clearly filled a gap both for families and for the professionals who support them, as it has been circulated internationally and translated into four languages so far. Our awareness that we are not reaching young people through our Helpline has prompted us to develop age-specific materials, circulated via parents and carers as well as through professionals, schools, and online. My Diary, for example, was written with the assistance of a well-known children’s author and illustrated by a local art student. Teachers have fed back that they use this with their classes to prompt discussions about stigma and isolation in general as well as for more specific support for children with a family member in prison. Families feed into all of our publications, either directly through their suggestions and feedback or indirectly through their experiences and the support we provide. Where possible, families produce their own material, supported through our staff but usually in collaboration with other organisations. The Families Left Behind, for example, was written by four women

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(three family members and a woman with experience of the justice system herself ) with the support of Fife Council’s Adult Basic Education and Family Community Support Team; Citizens Theatre in Glasgow worked with families to write and perform ‘A Family Sentence’; and KIN, an arts collaborative of young people with experience of a close family member in prison, supported by Vox Liminis, has developed a range of materials by and for families. Families Outside encourages direct input from families where possible, but this has been a constant struggle for us. Where families are willing to share their own experiences, either in writing or through talks or interviews, the impact is considerably more powerful than when we (or anyone else) speak on their behalf: Hearing from those with lived experience brings an extra potency to events and these are the lessons and messages that stay with you more so beyond the conference (delegate feedback following family input to a conference).

The difficulty is that the stigma of having a family member in prison permeates every aspect of their lives, and families largely prefer to remain anonymous and keep the experience secret. Families can gain confidence in sharing their stories through support from our staff or, more effectively, through peer support and shared experience: We’ve got our own voices; we just sometimes need a bit of help in them being heard.

Such input can be challenging to sustain, however, especially once the family has moved past the period of imprisonment and, understandably, wish to leave this episode of their lives behind.

Family Focus The definition of ‘family’ that we use at Families Outside is deliberately broad, as family structures can vary widely. Indeed, my favourite definition of ‘dysfunctional’ families comes from the novel, The Liars’ Club, by Mary Karr, in which she says, “A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it” (1995: xiv). We do however focus our work specifically on the family members left behind when someone goes to prison, rather than on the person in prison or the family as a whole unit.

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We have a number of reasons for this. First, the focus of the entire criminal justice process is on the person who has committed the offence—sometimes stretching to the victim of the offence, but rarely making reference to the family or including them in the discussion. A wide range of agencies works to support the person in prison and to prevent a return to custody. Most agencies and services work solely with the person who has committed the offence, and families themselves begin to rotate their lives around the person in prison—organising visits, waiting for telephone calls, handing in money—to the extent that their own lives become “a prison without bars” (Christiensen 2001: 85; also Comfort 2008). Second, and related to this, the focus on the person in prison means that the remaining family can easily lose sight of their own needs. As an example, a prison officer told us about a lady who was handing in money for her partner in prison and handed in everything she had, to the extent that she didn’t have enough for the bus fare home for her and her children. The prison officer convinced her to take some of the money back, but she remained worried that she wasn’t handing in enough. Third, the best interest of the person in prison is not necessarily the best interest of the remaining family outside, and vice versa. Families may need advocates for their own needs, separate from that of the person in prison, especially if the relationship is an abusive or coercive one. While positive family ties are generally a good thing and have distinct material benefits for the returning prisoner, we cannot assume that maintaining these connections is always positive, for either party. Our focus primarily on the family members outside prison rather than on the people in prison themselves is the only way we restrict our service. We work hard to keep our funding as flexible as possible, for example funding staff posts via multiple funding streams where possible to prevent posts being lost when a funding stream ends. Any restrictions on ages, issues, or geographical areas for example, we try to supplement with funding that allows us to support others as well. Families affected by imprisonment do not readily fit into neat categories. Consequently, we do not offer a specific ‘package’ of support or programmes, nor do we impose time restrictions on our support. Rather, we offer (or connect them to) the support the family needs, whatever it might be. As long as the need relates to their experience of having someone in prison, we will help if we can, even if it means the person has not yet gone to prison, or has already been released.

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Collaborative Working As a small national organisation, Families Outside cannot expect to support all families affected by imprisonment in Scotland. Even more, we don’t wish to. We believe that it is not helpful to families to depend solely on a specialist organisation, for a number of reasons. First, families affected by imprisonment often struggle to feel part of their local community, both because they isolate themselves and because they may be actively ostracised. Families in this situation are often in poverty or facing other barriers to social connection: if we then offer support solely through a niche organisation, this fails to keep them connected to core universal services such as health and schools. Further, providing a service without reference to (and indeed collaboration with) other organisations means other organisations can abdicate responsibility for families affected by imprisonment—something that perpetuates a lack of awareness and understanding of the experiences of people in this situation, thereby perpetuating their stigmatisation. A lack of collaboration also fails to recognise and embrace the knowledge and expertise other organisations can bring. We prefer to draw upon the expertise of others—for example specialists in mental health, addiction, and housing—rather than attempt to replicate that support ourselves. Through collaboration with others, families receive a much wider and better quality service. For example, through our collaborative work with arts-based criminal justice charity Vox Liminis, families with young children can take part in music-based workshops for children and their dads in prison, and young people aged 15–25 (KIN, mentioned above) can engage in peer-led activities through the shared experience of a family member’s imprisonment. Input from Barnardo’s Scotland, Early Years Scotland, and Getting Better Together Shotts means that families with young children receive support through parenting work in prisons—an area of expertise we therefore have no need to replicate. Sacro (another criminal justice charity) is working to expand its travel service for families visiting prisons, and we can connect them with families in need of such support. The cases our Family Support Team supports are often in collaboration with other organisations. The following case study shows how our work links with wider work on preventing offending, such as through our collaborative work with prisons and schools: ‘Jane’ was left to look after her four children when her partner ‘James’ was sentenced to 3 years in prison. Following the imprisonment, the second youngest child (‘John’, age 7) was showing challenging behaviour in the house and in

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school. James had been the main carer within the household, and Jane struggled to juggle family life without him. Jane had accrued substantial debts and failed to look after her own physical health at the start of James’ sentence, becoming depressed to the point she didn’t want to leave the house and engage with anyone. Following referral from the Family Contact Team at the prison, our Regional Family Support Coordinator (RFSC) worked with Jane and explained the importance of telling the school about their situation. The RFSC arranged a meeting with the deputy head, where it was agreed that the class teacher would be informed and would stay in regular contact with Jane about John’s behaviour. Meanwhile the RFSC agreed to work on a 1–1 basis with John to give him the space to talk about his feelings. The meeting improved communications for everyone, and Jane said “The kids have had a lot of support from the school and special child workers. They’re happy again, I’m happy again”. Jane then engaged in a parenting programme, which she completed and enjoyed, giving Jane confidence and the ability to parent the children more effectively. Jane was encouraged to attend regular appointments with her GP, and her health was now manageable. The RFSC worked closely with Jane to look at family relationships and offered ways to deal with different personalities, which over time alleviated stress for her. A volunteer driver from Sacro was assigned to the family to take them to visits. Jane was referred to a project to look at her finances, and she attended a peer support group run by the RFSC and Adult Basic Education. She enjoyed meeting other people, which gave her confidence and helped her feel she wasn’t alone. There had been little involvement with Social Work, but they had a positive approach with Jane, and she felt that she could turn to them if things were really difficult. With intervention from the RFSC, James was allocated a Throughcare Support Officer (TSO) from the prison. Now released on Home Detention Curfew, James is being supported by the TSO, reducing the pressure on Jane to support him. The RFSC is still supporting the family with these changes to the household, which John is struggling with, and the school is looking at extra support for him.

Replicating all of these services within our own organisation would require a phenomenal (and likely unsustainable) increase in our staff numbers as well as create unnecessary duplication. Working in partnership, formally or informally, with organisations such as Barnardo’s Scotland and the NSPCC, however, has meant we could combine our expertise with their research and policy teams to campaign successfully for meaningful changes in practice (see below). Collaboration with the NHS helps us raise awareness of the impact of imprisonment amongst health professionals, including the

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relevance of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences; originally Felitti et al. 1998) such as imprisonment of a household member. Finally, cooperation (if not collaboration) with key agencies such as prisons means we can influence and support practice where it affects families most. We no longer receive funding or support of any kind from Scottish prisons, but we could not do the work we do without positive relationships with and input from prison staff. Through these relationships, we learn about the barriers for families and how these might be overcome. We learn about policy and practice likely to have an impact on families and identify gaps in support. Positive relationships also mean that prison staff come to us, with a high proportion of referrals for support for families coming from prisons themselves.

Training Exceeded expectations, was very informative and gave a real insight into the emotions children may experience during this time. Will encourage me to approach this issue in a more open way and to look at ways to support children in my class focusing on relationships.

With the relationships and local knowledge built through regional support, the Regional Family Support Coordinators are also responsible for the delivery of training. While this can be a different skill set, the value of first-hand information to key professionals about the impact on families and ways to support these is immense. In this way, participants in the training know whom to contact if they or a family they come into contact with need support. Trainers can also give up-to-the-minute examples of local issues for families and the supports available to them. At Families Outside, we deliver input to all new prison officer recruits at the Scottish Prison Service College as well as training at individual prisons on the impact of imprisonment and child protection. We also train key professionals such as social work teams, health visitors, early years practitioners, the police, the Judiciary, Children’s Panel members, and psychology and social work students. This training tends to be ad hoc—as and when it’s requested, with no specific contract, and more often than not, no funding. We sustain this work through unrestricted core funding—not ideal, but in considering what helps families most, we recognise that providing the training for free and reaching key professionals benefits families more than not reaching these professionals. We do have professionals that recognise the

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value of this work and consequently fund it (most recently NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, for example), but equally we have had key groups withdraw from training when we suggested that they cover our costs for this. This is an ongoing dilemma for third sector organisations, and not one for which we can suggest a solution. While we have some basic ‘packages’ of training—for example our ‘Out of the Shadows’ introduction to the impact of imprisonment on children and families—much of our training is tailored towards specific audiences. Our most popular training, for example, is our Continuing Professional Development workshop for teachers. In this ‘twilight session’ (taking place in the afternoon after school hours), we take teachers into their local prison to experience what a prison visit is like, then we run a workshop with them inside the prison about the impact of imprisonment and their role in supporting children in their schools who are going through this: All teachers in my school would benefit from this so that no child feels excluded or unable to discuss what they are going through. Excellent and inspirational! I am going back to school to change my approach to a family! We have missed these children. Thank you!

Such workshops have restricted numbers, so we complement these with community-based sessions to increase access to the training. Even so, training for school staff about the impact of imprisonment is not yet part of the core curriculum, and ensuring awareness of teachers on this issue remains challenging. With the COPING study (Jones et al. 2013) identifying schools as a key opportunity for support for children of prisoners, we aim to raise awareness of education staff as far and wide as possible so that children get the support they need and that school staff feel informed, confident, and supported in providing it: The leader was fully engaging with the right balance and use of interactive and factual material. We were also provided with really useful materials to take and use in schools. I think this should be a mandatory lecture that all students should attend as it is incredibly insightful and engaging!

We have therefore developed supporting materials for the training, including a free online resource for schools (now shared worldwide), which includes suggested lesson plans and ideas for school assemblies. Our own workshops in schools informed much of this work: through a collaborative series of workshops led by the Scottish Prison Service called the

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LifeTime project, in which prison staff took over one year group of a secondary school and ran their classes like a prison for a day, our input focused on the impact of behaviour on other people—namely the impact on families when someone goes to prison. Most revealing in these workshops was the number of young people who came forward to say they had a family member in prison, when their teachers and classmates had not known this. In one school, at least one young person in every one of the ten workshops we ran that day told us of a family member’s imprisonment. Of most importance, however, was development of the training for education professionals by a former teacher. Families Outside had made a number of attempts over the years to engage with schools and teaching staff, but with limited success. One day a guidance teacher contacted us who was supporting three children in her school who were struggling following their mother’s imprisonment on a life sentence. The work impacted this teacher to the extent that she left her job to conduct a Winston Churchill Fellowship on the topic and then came to work with Families Outside to develop a programme for teachers. The ‘inside’ knowledge of the education system, alongside the credibility of being a teacher who had experienced what she was training about, built an unprecedented momentum. The person who subsequently led this programme at Families Outside was a teacher who took part in one of these in-prison CPD workshops, and we are in the process of developing more advanced training for school staff who want to know more.

Policy and Practice I just wanted to drop you a quick email to congratulate you all on the amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill being passed yesterday. This is wonderful news for everyone who has campaigned over the years to improve the visibility of children affected by parental imprisonment. Your vision and tenacity on this issue has been amazing. A great achievement! (email from an external colleague) I just wanted to let you know that working with the children and families of prisoners is now on the agenda at the Department. A fantastic result! (email from the Department of Corrections in New Zealand following a study visit to Families Outside)

The third strand of our work focuses on change to policy and practice: we can support families in the short term, but a focus on policy and practice aims for wider, sustainable impact, possibly beyond the life of the organisation.

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As they do for training, our Regional Family Support Coordinators feed into local strategic and practice-based groups. The Child & Family Strategy Groups operating in most prisons in Scotland are a key example of this— again requiring a different skill set, but involvement that builds upon the front line and local knowledge the Regional Family Support Coordinators build. Through regional team meetings with the entire Family Support Team (Regional staff, Helpline, and Regional Managers), this local knowledge and practice informs practice nationally and internationally, as we liaise with like-minded organisations elsewhere to share challenges and learning. As a single-focus organisation, we have gained respect as experts in the field of support in relation to families affected by imprisonment. This means, for example, that we now have national responsibility for the oversight and support of all prison visitor centres in Scotland. Prison visitor centres in Scotland are independently run services for people visiting prisons, providing information, support, and refreshment (usually) outside the secure perimeter of a prison before and after a visit. This national remit prevents us from operating a visitor centre ourselves. Rather, we use our specific expertise to ensure visitors receive a certain standard of service wherever they visit, while encouraging service providers to learn from each other and build on the support they offer. Through the work of our National Prison Visitor Centre Coordinator, the National Performance Framework for Prison Visitor Centres in Scotland was launched in June 2017. This Framework includes the requirement for Scottish Government funding that operation of such centres must be by organisations independent from the prison— something that was agreed collaboratively within the National Prison Visitor Centre Steering Group, which includes the Scottish Prison Service and Scottish Government. Another method of influence is through responses to Government consultations. The impact of this can be difficult to measure (cf. Evaluation Support Scotland 2017), but we know that responding to consultations at least flags up issues relevant to families affected by imprisonment that policy makers may not have previously considered. For example, through a consultation on new standards for National Health & Social Care, we were able to raise the point that the Carers Legislation in Scotland does not apply to carers when someone goes to prison: in this case, the prison becomes the carer, and the family has no input to or information about the care their family member receives—something in direct conflict with provision for carers under the Mental Health (Scotland) Act, for example. Where policy work can be done in partnership, the impact is likely to be greater. An amendment to the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016

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regarding collection and sharing of data about children of prisoners succeeded through a collaboration between Barnardo’s Scotland, the NSPCC, and Families Outside, with the support of Mary Fee MSP, who also convenes a Parliamentary Cross-Party Group on Children & Families Affected by Imprisonment. Families Outside’s unique service is paramount in supporting families and children affected by imprisonment. Their support in my role as a Member of the Scottish Parliament has allowed me to raise the issues affecting families and children with the Scottish Government and press for action to better support this extremely vulnerable group. (feedback from Mary Fee, MSP)

Members of the multi-disciplinary Family Outcomes Group (prisons, police, courts, social work, and third sector) for Lothian & Borders Community Justice Authority worked together to create the Framework for Support to Families Affected by the Justice System (2nd edition, Families Outside 2018), now applied nationally. International partnerships are equally of value for our work. Through these, we share good practice and ‘brainstorm’ with experienced and knowledgeable colleagues regarding shared challenges. With Children of Prisoners Europe (COPE), for example, we share materials and campaigns to raise awareness and improve practice, through examples such as the Italian Memorandum of Understanding (Bambinisenzasbarre 2016). As members of International Coalition for Children of Incarcerated Parents (INCCIP), we extend this reach even further, learning from (and contributing to) research internationally and helping to keep the scale of our own challenges in perspective.

Common Challenges Some of the more challenging aspects of our work include how we measure the impact we have made, and how we ensure we have the funding to sustain the work we do on behalf of families. These two points are symbiotic: without the evidence to support the need for and impact of our work, we are unlikely to gather the funds to continue it. As noted above, our database provides the key data we need to reflect the reasons families contact us, the support we provide, and changes in trends regarding predominant needs. A good database is worth the investment: we now have a means of tracking each family member’s journey through our

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service as well as analysing this information by geographical area, relevant prison, demographic characteristics, and keywords or topics. The database also includes information from a Family Support Wheel we have developed, based on the model in the Barnardo’s Practitioners’ Guide (Sutherland and Wright 2017). The Support Wheel shows changes (for better or worse) in the issues families wish to address in their work with us. Regional Family Support Coordinators use the Support Wheel as a basis for early discussions with families, revisiting the Wheel every few weeks, and again at the end of a family member’s engagement with us. We also have online and hard copy feedback forms for families and professionals to use following their work with us. Such tools are very positive in theory, and often in practice. The reality however is that families affected by imprisonment may not follow a steady course of engagement with a service. Someone ringing the Helpline may do so only once, for example, perhaps choosing not to leave their name or any other personal details. Even those working face to face with a Regional Family Support Coordinator may suddenly cease contact, and we may never know the reason for this. Filling in a feedback form may not be top of their list of priorities, and we continually revisit how we gather views from both families and professionals about the support they receive from us. We therefore gather feedback where we can, but rely heavily on case studies to highlight the value of our work and the difference it can make in people’s lives. Evidence is crucial to generate funding for this type of work. Support for children and families affected by imprisonment is not a popular cause, and we are not the type of organisation that can stand on the street with a collecting tin. We can however evidence the importance of support for families in this position as a means of improving outcomes overall—and indeed improving wider outcomes for local and national governments. Highlighting how we help the Government meet its wider aims encourages them to recognise the value of supporting the work we do, especially as this work cuts across a range of National Outcomes and Strategies: our work helps them, and the more we can demonstrate this, the better chance we have of gaining financial support as well as cooperation to develop relevant policies and legislation. In Scotland, we can demonstrate that our work on behalf of families affected by imprisonment relates directly to wider strategies on parenting, education, children and young people, and health as well as justice. We can also claim that our work relates directly to at least 7 of the Scottish Government’s 16 National Outcomes: We work to ensure that young people are successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens (Outcome 4).

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Our pioneering work with schools is now thriving, extending support for teachers, students, and related professionals throughout Scotland. We assist people to live longer, healthier lives (Outcome 6). Our work with families affected by imprisonment increases their access to services with which, most often, they had not previously had contact (e.g. health, financial support, emotional support, and advocacy). We tackle the significant inequalities in Scottish society (Outcome 7) through our support to vulnerable children and families unfortunate enough to have a family member in the criminal justice system. These families often suffer from multiple deprivations such as poverty, unstable housing, and poor physical and mental health, often as a direct result of their family member’s offending. We improve the life chances for children, young people and families at risk (Outcome 8) through the provision of information and support to them at a difficult time. Often no other support is available, yet the short- and longterm impact on these families is severe. We support Scotland’s communities to live lives safe from crime, disorder and danger (Outcome 9). The estimated 20,000 children each year in Scotland who have a parent go to prison are much more likely to end up in prison themselves; the support and information we offer is designed to improve outcomes for these children and families. We work to achieve strong, resilient and supportive communities where people take responsibility for their own actions and how they affect others (Outcome 11). Families affected by imprisonment tend to be targeted and victimised, even though they themselves have not committed an offence. Our work encourages understanding of and support for the children and families in this situation, raises awareness amongst young people of the consequences of offending, and challenges criminal justice professionals to recognise the impact their actions and decisions have on the children and families of offenders. Finally, we assist in the development of policy and practice to ensure that public services are high quality, continually improving, efficient and responsive (Outcome 16) to the needs of families affected by imprisonment. While we do not receive funding from all of these government areas, about half of our funding overall comes from central Government. The remainder comes primarily from ongoing applications to charitable trusts—a supportive but often short-term source of funding. Government funding is equally short term, if not more so, with funding often limited to one year, with no guarantee of continuation. The time and effort required to cover the costs of comprehensive and relevant support to families affected by imprisonment,

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as well as the time required to report back to funders to account for the funds, is disproportionate to the time spent actually delivering the work. This is a universal problem within the charitable sector and not one we anticipate will change in the foreseeable future.

Connectivity and Conclusions This chapter outlines the way Families Outside addresses the challenges families face when someone goes to prison. Critical to our work is how direct support, training, and policy inform and connect with each other. The flow chart below (Fig. 7.1) outlines how tying together all three strands can work in practice: Also critical is positive collaboration with key organisations that come into contact with families. Scotland is a small country with a willing and accessible national Government, but Families Outside still cannot support the breadth of concerns families have without input from others. The work is not easy: our approach demands tremendous versatility and commitment from our staff, and funding is always precarious. The increased awareness of the impact of imprisonment on children and families nationally, and the

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Fig. 7.1  Flowchart of work strands

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zŽƵŶŐƉĞƌƐŽŶĐĂůůƐ ƚŚĞ,ĞůƉůŝŶĞ

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&ŝĨĞŽƵŶĐŝůĐŚŽŽƐĞƚŚŝƐĐĂƐĞ ƐƚƵĚLJƚŽŚŝŐŚůŝŐŚƚƚŽ ĨŽƌƚŚĐŽŵŝŶŐŝŶƐƉĞĐƚŽƌĂƚĞĂƐĂŶ ĞdžĂŵƉůĞŽĨĞdžĐĞůůĞŶƚƉƌĂĐƟĐĞ

DĞĞƟŶŐƚĂŬĞƐƉůĂĐĞǁŝƚŚĚĂĚ ǀŝĚĞŽͲĐŽŶĨĞƌĞŶĐĞĚŝŶĨƌŽŵ ƉƌŝƐŽŶ

DĞĞƟŶŐŝƐƉŽƐŝƟǀĞĨŽƌLJŽƵŶŐƉĞƌƐŽŶ͕ĐĂƌĞƌ͕ƚĞĂĐŚĞƌ͕ ĚĂĚ͕&ĂŵŝůLJ^ƵƉƉŽƌƚŽŽƌĚŝŶĂƚŽƌ͕ĂŶĚƉƌŝƐŽŶƐƚĂī

7  Opportunities and Challenges for Work …     137

feedback we get from families and professionals alike, however, with 100% of both recommending the service to others, suggests we may be doing something right. You really don’t know how much you are changing lives. (feedback from a participant in an in-prison CPD session for teachers)

Notes 1. http://www.psspeople.com/how-pss-can-help/make-my-family-stronger/ with-my-parent-in-prison. 2. http://childrenheardandseen.co.uk/. 3. https://www.familiesoutside.org.uk/content/uploads/2016/08/Picking-upthe-Pieces.pdf. 4. https://www.familiesoutside.org.uk/my-diary-2/. 5. https://www.familiesoutside.org.uk/5586-2/. 6. https://www.familiesoutside.org.uk/content/uploads/2017/03/Guidance-andResources-for-Schools-in-Supporting-Children-Impacted-by-Imprisonmentv.2.pdf. 7. LifeTime was loosely based on a programme established in England called ‘Prison? Me? No way!’, designed to encourage young people to think about the consequences of their behaviour. LifeTime was run on a voluntary basis by prison staff from HMP Edinburgh in collaboration with (then) Lothian & Borders Police, the Scottish Court Service, the British Red Cross, the Fire Service, Families Outside, and others. Funding from Lothian & Borders Community Justice Authority provided materials for the start-up of the programme, but LifeTime no longer runs following the transfer of the prison officer leading the work to another part of Scotland.

References Bambinisenzasbarre ONLUS. 2016. “Memorandum of Understanding Between The Ministry of Justice, The National Ombudsman for Childhood and Adolescence, and Bambinisenzasbarre ONLUS.” http://childrenofprisoners.eu/wp-content/ uploads/2016/01/Memorandum-of-Understanding-English-16.12.2015.pdf. Buist, Maureen. 1997. More Than a Box of Toys: The Experience of Children and Young People Visiting Scottish Prisons. Edinburgh: Scottish Forum on Prisons and Families.

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Christiensen, Else. 2001. “Imprisoned Parents and Their Families: What Can We Do to Minimise Harmful Effects to Children?” Journal of Child Centred Practice 84: 85. Comfort, Megan. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Condry, Rachel. 2007. Families Shamed. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Doka, Kenneth J. 1998. Living With Grief: Who We Are, How We Grieve. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America. Evaluation Support Scotland. 2017. Charting the Waters: A Guide for the Third Sector on How to Evaluate Policy Influencing Work. Edinburgh: Evaluation Support Scotland. Families Outside. 2018. Framework for Support to Families Affected by the Justice System, 2nd ed. Available at https://www.familiesoutside.org.uk/content/ uploads/2016/03/Families-Framework-FINAL-July-2015-v3.pdf. Felitti, Vincent J., Robert F. Anda, Dale Nordenberg, David F. Williamson, Alison M. Spitz, Valerie Edwards, Mary P. Koss, and James S. Marks. 1998. “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14(4): 245–258. Jones, Adele, Bernard Gallagher, Martin Manby, Oliver Robertson, Matthias Schützwohl, Anne H. Berman, Alex Hirschfield, Liz Ayre, Mirjam Urban, and Kathryn Sharratt, 2013. “COPING: Children of Prisoners, Interventions & Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health.” http://www.hud.ac.uk/research/ researchcentres/acc/projects/coping-children-of-prisoners/. Karr, Mary. 1995. The Liars’ Club. New York: Viking Penguin. Loucks, Nancy, and Tânia Loureiro. 2018. “Support for Families of People Convicted of a Sexual Offence.” In Invisible Children: Contemporary Research and Analysis on the Children of Prisoners, edited by Liz Gordon, 190–208. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. National Prison Visitor Centre Steering Group. 2017. “National Performance Framework for Prison Visitor Centres in Scotland.” Available at https://www. familiesoutside.org.uk/content/uploads/2017/06/Nat_Perf_Frame_VCs.pdf. Peart, Kate, and Stuart Asquith. 1992. Scottish Prisoners and Their Families: The Impact of Imprisonment on Family Relationships. Glasgow: Centre for the Study of the Child and Society, University of Glasgow, with Save the Children and the Scottish Prison Service. Sutherland, Lindsay, and Polly Wright. 2017. “Supporting Children and Families Affected by a Family Member’s Offending —A Practitioner’s Guide.” Available at https://www.i-hop.org.uk/ci/fattach/get/870/0/filename/i-HOP+PractitionersGuide_Interactive_Pages.pdf.

Part II Different Perspectives: Widening the Lens

8 Experiences of Male Partners of Women Prisoners Tomer Einat

Introduction One of the most significant “pains of imprisonment” for women prisoners is the separation from their husbands (Severance 2005). This disconcerting and frustrating deprivation often negatively affects women’s ability to function as wives while in prison and after release (Dodge and Pogrebin 2001). When a man is imprisoned, the marriage usually remains intact (Travis et al. 2003), whereas women’s incarceration often results in their abandonment by their partners and termination of their marriage (the term marriage in this study relates to formally wedded couples and common-law couples; Sergin and Flora 2005). The abandonment of women prisoners by their spouses has been ­recognized by researchers and practitioners as a noteworthy component of women-prisoners’ subculture (Dodge and Pogrebin 2001) and a significant factor of their rehabilitation and reentry into society (Visher and Travis 2003). However, relatively few studies have addressed this topic in depth (Mackenzie et al. 1995). Furthermore, close examination reveals that prisoners’ marital relationships were addressed mainly from the prisoners’ point of view (Hairston and Addams 2001) and focused, almost exclusively, on men prisoners (Grinstead et al. 2001). In other words, studies of marital relationships between prisoners and their spouses, neglected women prisoners, and the few studies examining women inmates overlooked 50% of the T. Einat (*)  Department of Criminology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_8

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individuals involved in these relationships and possibly affected by them— the husbands. Thus, in the preliminary research for this manuscript, I could not find a single empirical study that had focused on the rationale behind men’s decision to terminate or maintain their marital relations with imprisoned wives, nor on the impact of such decision on their emotional and behavioral state. The aim of this study is to fill this literature lacuna and explore the motivations and justifications of men to remain married to their incarcerated wives imprisoned in Neve Tirza prison—the sole prison ­facility for women in Israel. By examining these topics, the current study seeks to identify and analyze the significance of marital relationships to women-­ prisoners’ spouses and to describe the dynamics of marital relationships between men and incarcerated spouses, both from men’s perspective, a step that previous research has not taken before.

Incarceration, Marital Stability, and Prisoners’ Reentry Incarceration prevents meaningful interaction and limits physical and emotional connections among spouses (Sergin and Flora 2005), and often changes individuals in ways that make them incompatible with their ­partners (Comfort 2008). Physically separated spouses experience ­deficits of emotional interaction (Bada et al. 2014), which increases the number of disagreements and lowers marital satisfaction (Booth et al. 1984). In addition, these physical and mental processes negatively affect the emotional status of the prisoners inside the prison (Jiang and Winfree 2006) and harm the likelihood of their successful rehabilitation and reentry into society after release (Gunnison and Helfgott 2013). Ironically, and irrespective of the negative impact of incarceration and separation from spouse on marital stability (Massoglia et al. 2011) and of imprisonment and marital dissolution on prisoner reentry (Laub and Sampson 2001), several enforcement systems raise various barriers that prevent partners from remaining in contact while a spouse is behind bars. For example, in the USA, more than 60% of state and 80% of federal prisoners are imprisoned in facilities located more than 100 miles from home (Mumola 2000). Wives (as well as other family members) may lack the time and means to travel these long distances with children on a regular basis (Christian et al. 2006). Consequently, 57% of male state-prison inmates in the USA had never had a personal visit with

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their children since their admission to prison and only a quarter of male inmates with families reported weekly contact by phone or postal mail with loved ones (Mumola 2000). Pelka-Slugocka and Slugocki (1980) qualitatively analyzed w ­ omen-prisoners’ viewpoints regarding the relationship between imprisonment and marital ­stability. The majority of their research participants asserted that imprisonment was the sole reason for the destruction of their marriage, whereas approximately 13% maintained that it was the combination of husbands’ personalities and their incarceration. Additionally, the study revealed that the divorce generated feelings of despair and frustration among the women prisoners and harmed their rehabilitation and successful reentry into society. Hairston’s (1991) review concluded that the stress and strain that mens’ imprisonment imposes on family ties are due, mainly, to denial of s­exual relations and inability to engage in and share day-to-day interactions and experiences. As time passes, the spouse at home visits the prisoner less ­frequently and many marriages fail. Similarly, Kiser (1991) found that most men prisoners perceived their separation from their families—alongside the realization that they themselves had brought undeserved hardship to their families—as the most difficult aspect of doing time. Therefore, encouraging prisoners and families to maintain relationships would benefit most prisoners, their families, and the prisons. Bobbitt and Nelson (2004) portrayed the positive aspects of various family involvement programmes on drug abuse, recidivism rates, family strength, avoidance of illegal activity, possession of jobs, and obtainment of stable housing. The researchers’ main conclusion was that: families can be a powerful material and emotional force for positive change for members making the difficult transition from institutional life back to the community…and can significantly assist probation and parole officers in their quest to successfully reenter ex-criminals and ex-prisoners to the community. (p. 8)

The importance of marriage to recidivism rates and reentry was discussed in several cornerstone criminal theories. Hirschi’s social control theory assumes that individuals are prevented from engaging in delinquency by four social bonds: involvement, attachment, commitment, and belief. When these bonds are weak, and the appropriate motivations rise, individuals are more likely to engage in delinquency. Individuals with high affection and respect (attachment) are less likely to engage in delinquency because they do not want to harm the approval of people they care about.

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In their age-graded theory of informal social control, Laub and Sampson (1993) emphasize the importance of quality and strength of current social ties (such as strong bonds of attachment to a partner) in adapting to life transitions more than the occurrence or timing of discrete life events. Hence, marriage by itself may not increase social control, but close emotional ties and mutual investment increase the social bond between individuals and can decrease criminal behavior. Although this issue has been a source of controversy (e.g., Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990), Farrington and West (1995) also concluded that a stable marriage was nevertheless related to adult social conformity, even in adults who were identified at high-risk as children. Whereas these theories emphasize emotional ties and support, the Cognitive Transformation Theory focuses on the conscious transformation of one’s identity in the process of desistance from crime (Giordano et al. 2002). Hence, through associations with a spouse who sees them as non-criminals, prisoners are exposed to and receive reinforcement for socially approved attitudes and behaviors (Agnew 2005) and are likely to receive support for not only avoiding illegal behavior but also developing normative self-perceptions. In summary, identification of various problems faced by men married to incarcerated spouses with regard to the preservation of marital relationships may significantly promote the understanding of the impact of imprisonment on marital continuation/dissolution and assist in developing effective policies directed at their maintenance. Such policies appear to be highly important due to the existence of a (correlative or casual) link between continuation of stable romantic relations among normative men and incarcerated spouses, reduction of the negative effects of various “pains of imprisonment” (Jiang and Winfree 2006), and prisoners’ successful reentry and desistance from crime after release (Thompson and Loper 2005).

Methodology Research Method In order to explore the motivations and justifications of men to remain married to their criminal imprisoned wives and to analyze the significance of marital relationships to them, I employed a qualitative approach which was both interpretative and constructivist (Charmaz 2014). Such an approach enabled me to incorporate unexpected contents, accommodate data upon emergence, and thereby enhance the quality and authenticity of the findings (Creswell 2013).

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Research Tool The semi-structured interview (Cooper et al. 2018) was found to be the most appropriate research tool for achieving the main objectives of the research. The researcher facilitated each interview in order to ensure ­consistency. Due to the flexible method of questioning, the design of the interview was modified as new findings emerged (Rubin and Rubin 1995). This flexibility contributes to the quality and credibility of the interview (Einat and Chen 2012). Each interview started with a similar open-ended broad question: “Could you please tell us about your romantic relations with your spouse prior to her imprisonment?” Only after the interviewees had answered the question, relating to the quality and importance of the relations, did the researcher initiate a series of questions on the main difficulties of maintaining romantic relationships with an incarcerated spouse and the strategies used to do so: “How would you define your current romantic relationships with your spouse?”; “How do you maintain romantic relationships with your imprisoned spouse?”; “Does your spouse’s conviction and incarceration affect your mutual romantic relations?”; “What are/were the main romantic crises you experience/d with her and how do/did you deal with them?”; “What is your main motivation for maintaining marital relationships with your spouse?”; “Do you experience moments where you want to end your marriage?”; “Do you experience any regrets as regards to your decision to maintain marital relationships with your spouse?”

Participants Out of 180 prisoners incarcerated in the single Israeli Women incarceration facility, 20 maintained stable romantic relationships longer than 3 years, from the time of the study. The participants were 20 male partners—15 were married to prisoners and five kept stable, romantic—although nonmarital—relations with their imprisoned spouses for more than 3 years (years of relationships range—3.5–35; M = 17.06, SD = 10.14, median = 17.5). Hence, all research participants were acknowledged by the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) and by the Israeli ruling as common-law husbands (Israel Prison Service 2012). It should be emphasized that all partners got married or maintained romantic relationships prior to the incarceration of the women. Two men partners declined to participate in the study after being informed by their incarcerated spouses about the purpose of the study and its procedures, resulting in a final sample size of 18 men and a response rate of 90%.

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The participants were 18 husbands—15 were married to the prisoners and three were common-law couples. 14 of the 18 couples (77.77%) had mutual children. Approximately, 89% (n = 16) of the participants had no criminal record and two (11.1%) had been jailed for relatively short ­periods of time (10 months and 12 months), six and eight years prior to the ­initiation of the study. All participants were legally employed and had stable places of residence. The women whose husbands were interviewed had been incarcerated for 21.8 months (M; SD = 9.42 compared with 27 months in the general prison population) and convicted to serve 41.4 months (M; SD = 43.1, compared with 31 of the prison population; Ibid.).

Research Procedure The first stage of the research was conducted at the women’s prison facility: the researcher contacted the 20 prisoners who maintained stable romantic relationships with their spouses, briefly explained the objectives of the study, and asked them to request their partners to participate in the study. In the week that followed, the researcher contacted all 18 spouses who agreed to participate, briefly explained the objectives of the study, and scheduled personal meetings. The confidentiality of the interviewees was ensured, and all participants signed an official informed consent form, provided by Bar Ilan University’s Ethics Committee. The next stage of the research, which lasted approximately four months, included the implementation of the interviews. The interviews were held in the apartments of the interviewees, each session lasting approximately four hours. All interviews were audio recorded with the consent of the interviewees. At the end of each interview, the participants were given the opportunity for feedback. The recorded interviews were subsequently transcribed and analyzed. A draft of the findings was then sent to five research participants to read, and about a week later, a meeting was held to hear their comments about the analysis and the extent to which the findings reflected their subjective world. The data were kept in a safe place for the duration of the research process.

Data Analysis The interviews were analyzed using Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke 2014) which relates to the words and descriptions of the research

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participants as reflections of their feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge and serves as a window into their grasp on the reality in which they function. There were four stages to this type of analysis: 1. Repetitive reading of the contents of the interviews. 2. Identification and classification of the major topics that came up in the interviews. 3. Categorization of major themes and sub-themes. 4. Creation of a theoretical structure—through the various subject categories—and linking it to both the literature and the theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008).

Validity and Credibility Two methods were used to ensure the validity (trustworthiness) and credibility of the findings (Golafshani 2003): (1) Triangulation—data were interpreted and analyzed by five research participants and two external readers at different times and locations (Glazer and Strauss 2009); and (2) the study was written as a “thick description” (Tracy 2010) in order to include information about the context of the topics presented and corresponding citations of the interviewees and to enable an open conceptual discussion (Marshall and Rossman 2010).

Findings Content analysis revealed five major themes about marital relationships between men and their incarcerated wives: (a) perceptions of marital relations with imprisoned wives; (b) perceptions of wives’ criminal conduct; (c) difficulties in marital relationships; (d) preconditions for the continuation of marital relationships; and (e) ways of preserving marital relationships.

Perceptions of Marital Relations with Imprisoned Wives Commitment and Motivation Research has repeatedly shown that commitment and motivation are the basis for a good and stable marriage, one which successfully tackles situations of crisis (Hawkins et al. 2004). Commitment and motivation which reflect

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the mutual responsibility of the couple to the preservation of their marriage (Clements and Swensen 2000) are also identified as the best predictors of the quality of such relationships (Owen et al. 2013). Similarly, the findings of the present study indicate that the imprisonment of their partners led the participants to recognize their obligation to the women and to their marital relations: We overcame all our problems together, and we will overcome all obstacles, including the imprisonment, together. It (the imprisonment) even made our romantic relationships grow stronger, made us show how committed we are to each other. (C’, a 37-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to 1.5 years) During the imprisonment, I felt as if I become a part of her, as if we became one. During this time, our romantic relationships grew stronger and stronger. We went through hell and it made us stronger. (D’, a 34-year-old common-law husband, romantically-related to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 3.1 years)

Nonetheless, and somewhat in contrast to these statements, the findings of the current study also suggest that the imprisonment of women spouses generated major dyadic crises, which, at least temporarily, destabilized the romantic relations. Specifically, all participants noted that the incarceration raised frustration, tension, and lack of trust, which led them to consider and reconsider their motivation to preserve the marital relationship: I love her very much and cannot deny it. But the arrest caused a lot of chaos between us, a lot of stress and arguments. I even remember a moment where I wanted to hit her. (A’, a 53-year-old husband, married to an inmate sentenced to a period of 12 years) I was quite disappointed and I stopped trusting her. The fact that she did not share her behavior with me was more disappointing than the acts themselves. I can’t say that she betrayed me…after all she did it for the sake of both of us so it’s not a matter of unfaithfulness. But she did not tell me right at the beginning and that is a shame. (I’, a 44-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 16 months)

Love Love is one of the most significant elements in the preservation of long-lasting marital relationships and is attributed greatly to successfully dealing with short- or long-term romantic crisis (O’Leary et al. 2011).

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In accordance, the findings of this study reveal that the participants perceive love as a noteworthy character of their marriage and an important factor in their decision to preserve marriage relationships: I decided to stay with her for two reasons: Great love and great commitment. I swear that (after her incarceration) it never crossed my mind to leave her. I’m with her until the end. Our love is priceless. I don’t care for other women; I’m just waiting for her. I always knew from the second I met her that we will be together until death. I will not desert her regardless of the situation. She is the best thing that ever happened to me. (D’, a 34-year old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 26 months) You have got to understand, what we’re talking about here is great love. That’s the whole story. The idea of leaving her never came up. It was never mentioned or discussed. Our romantic cell could never be dismantled just because one of us did something wrong. Separation is totally irrelevant. [After revealing her crime] I never felt as if I don’t love her or want her less. It’s all a matter of pure commitment – built on pure love – and this is something you do not want to abandon. (A, a 53-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 19 months)

Interestingly, in addition to the decisive description of all research participants of their marriage in terms of love and devotion, 13 participants related to these relations and their spouses in adorable and admirable ways. These participants perceive their women partners as being unique and exceptional, each a veritable femme fatale, and describe the relations with them in various flattering and admirable ways: I admire my wife. She is bigger than life itself. I can only thank god that she is mine…that I have her. (S’, a 53-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 60 months) She is everything to me. When I look to the right – I see her. When I look to the left – I see her. I see her and no one else but her. I admire her. She is pure gold. There is no one like her in the world and that’s why our love is so strong. (Y’, a 60-year-old husband married to a first-timer sentenced to a period of 4 years)

While these quotations illustrate the high appreciation and admiration of the women spouses, the next ones portray the specific personal characteristics that make the women so admirable: She is (mentally) a very strong woman. She is remarkable…outstanding. She knows everything – regardless of the fact that she’s in prison. (Z’, a 53-old-year husband married to an inmate sentenced to a period of 3 years)

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She is a good soul. She is warm and empathic (mentally) stronger than any man I know, very reliable. She has so many virtues: Understandable, intelligent, supportive, funny, and very ethical. (D’, a 34-year old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 26 months)

All the participants love and admire their partners and perceive them as an attached and inherent part of their past, present, and future married lives. The statements clearly demonstrate that love is perceived as an essential component for the preservation of good marital relations—in general and in times of crisis—in particular. Moreover, regardless of the women-spouses’ criminal behavior and imprisonment, most partners describe them as ideal and wonderful women, using words of admiration. As such, continuation of the marriage to them may be perceived as an obvious and rational act.

Perceptions of Wives’ Criminal Conduct Numerous studies have argued that most women prisoners are abandoned by their male counterparts, be it because of the forced disengagement and/ or the shame in their “betrayal” of the law, their families, and their “traditional gender roles” (Hannah-Moffat 2010). Evidently, such desertion is solely dependent on men’s discretion, irrespective of the women-inmates’ desires (Dodge and Pogrebin 2001). Somewhat in contrast to these studies, our findings indicate that although all participants acknowledge that their spouses committed various criminal offenses and morally reject it, they do not perceive them and their criminal conduct as shameful and disgraceful. Specifically, the participants describe their spouses’ criminal behaviors in a forgiving manner, explaining it as a “sad tale” (e.g., an outcome of a harsh and complicated life story; Scott and Lyman 1968). By doing so, they invalidate the women-inmates’ moral and criminal responsibilities, detach their criminal conduct from their character, and defend their dignity and importance: She did not make it (the money) for herself. ..She gave it for her family. She has a big family and someone had to take care of them. Looking back, I think she had no choice. (I’, a 47-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 18 months) My wife did not do all these things. She meant to do no bad. I know that she doesn’t act out of evilness…she is a good person…a victim of herself. She didn’t really want to kill me…it is not her fault….her friends are bad…they pushed her to act this way. I can’t believe and I don’t believe that she did

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what she did independently. (A, a 53-year-old husband married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 10 years)

Fourteen interviewees used neutralization techniques (Sykes and Matza 1957) to support their contention of their partners’ morality. The men resort to “denial of injury” and “denial of responsibility.” In their simplest form, the former technique suggests that this was a no-victim crime and the latter proposes that the criminal actions were caused by forces beyond the perpetrators’ control (Enticott 2011): In fact, what did she do? She got involved with the Gray Market, something that could happen to anyone, and they forced her to do what she did. It could happen to me, to you, to anyone. She made a mistake but she is only human. But it’s not a crime and she is not a criminal. (Z, a 55-year-old partner, keeping stable, romantic, non-marital relations with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 48 months) No! My wife is not a criminal. She did not break the law. In my opinion, all she did was make a single mistake. The fact that she is in prison does not make her a criminal. (I’, a 47-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 18 months)

Difficulties in Marital Relationships with Incarcerated Wives Numerous studies have repeatedly argued that three factors underline most crises in marital relationships: Diminished (or extinguished) love, reduced (or lack of ) intimacy, and weakened (or nonexistent) commitment (Lamanna et al. 2014). The findings of this study deviate somewhat and indicate that regardless of lengths of imprisonment and/or marriage, the major difficulty experienced by most participants relates to lack of physical intimacy. All other inconveniencies and difficulties characterizing marital relationships in crisis (Huston et al. 2001) appear to be irrelevant to the interviewees: (You cannot believe) how much I miss her. I miss her hugs, I miss the physical contact with her, I miss going to sleep with her. (T’, a 52-year-old partner, keeping stable, romantic, non-marital relations with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 20 months) I miss her smell. She has amazing smells, nothing I experienced with other women. I miss having sex with her. I miss being hugged by her, feeling her head on my shoulder. (D’, a 34-year-old common-law husband, romantically-related to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 3.1 years)

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An additional difficulty, raised by most interviewees, relates to lack of support by family members, friends, and acquaintances. In some cases, participants report that people totally ignored or terminated relationships after the incarceration. The participants view this kind of behavior as an outcome of shame and/or disappointment: It wasn’t easy with my family (because) they wanted me to divorce her. They didn’t understand how she could do that and didn’t accept her. They were really furious. They decided to break off relations with her. My reaction, by the way, was to completely break off my relations with my family. (Z, a 55-yearold partner, keeping stable, romantic, non-marital relations with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 32 months) None of her friends called to ask how we feel. None of our friends came to visit her in prison. Is this friendship? This is disgusting. It’s very difficult to live with the notion that suddenly, when you are in trouble, everyone disappears. (A’, a 53-year-old husband, married to an inmate sentenced to a period of 12 years)

Preconditions for the Continuation of Marital Relationships Between Normative Men and Incarcerated Wives All research participants have pointed out two central factors that could have had a negative effect on the marriage, perhaps even leading to their termination of this relationship: (a) length of prison sentence, and (b) length of marriage prior to the imprisonment.

Length of Prison Sentence Most participants asserted that because their spouses were sentenced to relatively short terms of imprisonment, they did not consider leaving them. However, they also stated that if the sentence had been longer, they may have considered terminating the marriage and finding a new relationship: I don’t know what would have happened to our romantic relationships if she’d been imprisoned for, let’s say, 20 years. I believe I would have separated from her. It’s like disappearing from someone’s life for a very long time. Time is definitely a significant factor. (B’, a 32-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 15 months)

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On the day of the verdict, when the judge said “four years”, I felt as if my hands were freezing. If it were 10 or 15 years, then I’d probably acted differently. I doubt if I would have stayed with her…with all due respect to love. (Z, a 55-year-old partner, keeping stable, romantic, non-marital relations with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 48 months)

These findings strengthen previous findings (Murray 2005; Walker 1983) revealing a decline in visiting patterns among wives of long-term prisoners compared with wives of short-termers, as well as deterioration of marriages over long periods of incarceration.

Length of Marriage Prior to Incarceration The men’s decision to remain married was determined, to a significant degree, by the duration of the relationship prior to the woman’s imprisonment. The findings of this study show that all participants perceived the total length of the relationship prior to spouses’ incarceration to be positively correlated to their decision to remain married: If we’d been married for a year and then she’d begun committing crimes, I would have separated from her. But now, after so many years of marriage, there is no way I would leave her. The length of our romantic relationships is a critical factor. That’s why I couldn’t see any option of leaving her. (T’, a 34-year-old husband, married with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 22 months) We’ve been together for almost 10 years. We went through many things together. It’s a lot of time and obviously, I won’t leave her. (D’, a 34-year-old husband, married with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 19 months)

Ways of Preserving the Marital Relationships with Incarcerated Wives All participants reported that to deal with their pain of separation and maintain marital relationships, they use two tactics—frequent phone calls and making all the visits that the prison allows. The men received between four to five phone calls a day from their imprisoned wives. Both partners awaited these phone calls and cherished them, as the frequent and continuous delivery and receipt of information create a semblance of the exchange of information that occurs when living under the same roof. Symbolically, the ongoing communication, and

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hearing the partner’s voice, signifies a continuation of everyday [dyadic and non-dyadic] normal life: I love when she calls me. I look forward to her phone calls. That’s how I really know what is going on with her in prison. (A’, a 53-year-old husband, married to an inmate sentenced to a period of 12 years) We talk on the phone all day and every day. We actually do everything through the phone: We talk about her feelings, what happened to her in prison during the day, what happened to me at work, and how we miss each other. (A’, a 41-year-old husband, married to a prisoner sentenced to a period of 64 months)

The second tactic is routinely coming for the biweekly 30-minute visits to which all prisoners are entitled (Israel Prison Service 2012). Some of the visits are open visits, that is to say, the inmate can be in physical touch with the spouse, and some are closed visits, conducted through an armored-glass division. All research participants welcome the visits, perceive them as the best temporary way of realizing their marriage, and look forward to them: I come to visit her every two weeks. I never missed a single visit. I wake up at 0500 in the morning and drive four hours just to see her for 30 minutes. And then I have to drive four hours back. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. (C’, a 37-year-old partner, keeping stable, romantic, non-marital relations with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 37 months) I visit her every two weeks, sometimes with her parents and sometimes alone. We sit together, talk, laugh, and try to make use of our joint time. (Y’, a 60-year-old partner, married with a prisoner sentenced to a period of 24 months)

Discussion This purpose of this study was threefold: to explore the motivations and justification of men to remain married to their criminal imprisoned wives, to analyze the significance of marital relationships to women-prisoners’ partners, and to describe the dynamics of marital relationships between men and incarcerated spouses from the men’s perspective. The findings of the study indicate that the discovery of the wife’s crime, her arrest, the initial stages of the incarceration and the concealment of the crime from family and community members, were experienced by the participants as shocking, devastating, and catastrophic. Specifically,

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all interviewees stated that the imprisonment of their female spouses raised frustrations, tension, and lack of trust that led them to reconsider their motivation to preserve their marriages. Yet, all research participants described their spouse’s incarceration as a challenge that brought the couple even closer, enhancing mutual responsibility and commitment. Particularly, the imprisonment led all interviewees to recognize their obligation to their spouses and to their relationships. Similarly, clinical experience and several empirical studies suggest that some couples facing hospitalization, critical illness, or serious injuries perceive their marital relationship to be improved since the medical episode (Dorval et al. 2005). The trauma often creates a powerful intensified family bond and feeling of mutual empathy and intensifies the desire to protect each other (Eggenberger and Nelms 2007). The participants use several cognitive and emotional devices to help them overcome the double difficulty of explaining and coming to terms with their wives’ criminal acts and thereby maintain their marriage. The first device is the rose-colored prism through which the men were able to see their spouses as they did when the romance was young. Through this prism, the men refracted and embellished their partners’ characteristics, describing them as archetypal ideals. This finding reveals that the criminal act and the incarceration promoted positive bias typically seen in early stages of intense romantic love (Gonzaga et al. 2001), although the couples had been in long and stable relationships. The men perceived their partners as unique and exceptional, prototypes of femme fatale, and described the relations with them in flattering and admiring terms. Romantic love is often driven by strong emotions and wishful thinking—as “painted blind,” to use Shakespeare’s phrase (Fletcher and Kerr 2010). After “walking the walk”—maintaining long-term and enduring commitments—it seems to be powered by strong attachment emotions (Maner et al. 2008). The device used by the participants, the glorification of their spouses, reverts to patterns of the time of first love and courtship, not typical of long-term relationships. The findings of the study reveal that in times of extreme crisis, this “chivalrous” behavior reappears, even after relatively many years of marriage. A second device for maintaining romantic relationships with imprisoned spouses is expressing high commitment and devotion. The need for close romantic relationships appears to be exacerbated by confrontations with the fragility of life (Von Fremd 2006). Imprisonment might be perceived as life threatening, as it imposes multiple mental and physical threats to the self (Haney 2002). Studies drawing on terror management theory (Solomon et al. 1991) indicate that reminders of death increase people’s sense of love and closeness to their romantic partners (Mikulincer et al. 2003),

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commitment, desire for intimacy, and love for a romantic partner (Florian et al. 2002). A third and final mechanism used by participants to maintain their ­marital relationships with their imprisoned spouses is to explain their partners’ criminal acts by motivational accounts (Goldstraw-White 2012). Normative men describe their wives’ crimes in ways that allow them to minimize guilt, maintain a positive self- and partner-image, and deflect potential stigma. Thus, normative men’s narratives regarding spouses’ crimes are similar to offender narratives that may be best understood as social constructions of the criminal event and of their own social and self-identities, instead of fact-based records of what really happened (Bruner 2003). Although condemning their spouses’ illicit behavior, participants use rhetorical and linguistic constructions that made the partners’ indiscretions seem inoffensive, reasonable, routine, and sometimes even acceptable. By referring to various excuses and justifications and by using neutralization techniques, participants attempted to construct identities of spouses as being decent, respectable women regardless of their actions. Interestingly, these accounts often drew on themes that described their spouses’ actions as consistent with gender expectations and thus emphasized their spouses’ femininity. Similar to the justifications used by the men in the current study, women offenders cited in other studies used defense of necessity, denial of responsibility, and appeal to higher loyalties at much higher frequency than male offenders. The women claimed that their actions were borne out of necessity, caused by forces beyond their control or to care for, support, or prevent suffering from family and friends, attesting to the fact that gender constrains the way ­individuals describe their own crimes (Klenowski et al. 2011). Participants view their partners’ criminal acts as most related to their “real character.” Maruna (2001) argued that to enable released prisoners to make the transition to the community and adjust to life outside of prison, they are required to consciously reformulate their identities. He observed that those who desisted from crime tended to describe redemption narratives in which they viewed their “real selves” as non-criminals and their previous criminal behaviors as the results of mistakes, bad choices, and negative influences. They separated and differentiated themselves from their previous mistakes, crafted a moral tale from their experiences, and expressed a desire to use their experiences to help others (Bahr et al. 2010). The Cognitive Transformation Theory focuses on the conscious transformation of one’s identity in the process of desistance from crime (Giordano et al. 2002). Thus, through associations with a spouse who sees them as non-criminals, prisoners are exposed to and receive reinforcement for particular attitudes

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and behaviors (Agnew 2005) and are likely to receive support for not only avoiding illegal behavior but also developing normative self-perceptions. Increasingly, studies are considering the consequences of incarceration for family life, almost always documenting negative consequences. Imprisonment often involves sharply diminished socioeconomic resources, both during and after a sentence (Geller et al. 2011). Incarceration also involves considerable stigma (Braman 2004). Prisoners’ spouses also suffer from emotional and adjustment problems, reduction in spousal involvement with their children, change in family roles, increased household responsibility, and increased burnout and depression (Turney and Wildeman 2012). These difficulties were found in studies based on male prisoners and women spouses. None of these difficulties were mentioned by the current research participants, who referred to physical separation and lack of physical intimacy as the major difficulty in maintaining the romantic relationship with incarcerated female spouses. All other inconveniences and difficulties, characterizing marital relationships in crisis (Huston et al. 2001), or relationships between women spouses of incarcerated men, appear to be irrelevant to the interviewees. The participants of the current study emphasize the importance of physical contact with the prisoners, both explicitly and indirectly, when referring to prerequisites to the continuation of the relationships and to ways of preserving the relationships. Out of the three means of maintaining contact available to the normative men and their imprisoned spouses (e.g., visits, letters, and phone calls), the participants adhere to a routine of frequent phone calls and visits, which provides interaction opportunities, involvement, and information exchange that enable a gradual accommodation to subtle changes in both partners—inside and outside the prison. Finally, the findings of the current study indicate that in some respects, prisoners’ partners experience difficulties and use coping strategies very similar to those cited by spouses facing lengthy separation due to military deployment or life-threatening illness (Sokolski and Hendrick 1999). Identifying communalities between the problems faced by prisoners’ spouses and those faced by normative individuals in other social situations might prove fruitful for understanding the impact of ongoing imprisonment on marital dissolution and also for developing effective policies directed at reintegration. Almost 40% of marriages of imprisoned men dissolve after the incarceration period ended, suggesting that an individual’s release from prison and reintroduction to home life produces additional stressors that are detrimental to a marriage (Massoglia et al. 2011). In this line of reasoning, one should acknowledge that reentry is not an event but a process

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(Maruna and Toch 2005). Many released prisoners experience various—such as difficulty in obtaining employment, acquiring housing, stigmatization, substance abuse and mental health problems, and loss of social standing in their communities (Gunnison and Helfgott 2013) during the process, and may violate parole. Consequently, many researchers and correctional administrators embraced the concept that offender reentry could (and should) be promoted by appropriate support and treatment (Bahr et al. 2010). One factor that could contribute to successful adaptation to normative life and reentry is stable marital and familial relations (Kurlychek and Kempinen 2006). In line with the social control theory, informal monitoring by a spouse and, more significantly, maintenance of a cohesive marriage have a preventive effect on crime and assist individuals in desisting from drug use and other delinquent behaviors (Laub and Sampson 2001). The current study provides a preliminary look at the experiences of men who share long and stable romantic relationships with incarcerated wives. They report using coping strategies and describe major difficulties and preconditions, all of which allow a unique insight into spouses’ perceptions and motivations to preserve these relationships. Such insights may point to future research direction as well as serve to develop effective policies directed at maintaining stable, long-term romantic relationships with women prisoners and, possibly, reducing their chance of recommitting crimes and enhancing successful rehabilitation.

Policy Implications The results of the study reveal that all research participants suffer from similar difficulties in their effort to preserve marital relationships. Although it could be hypothesized that as a group, these men differ significantly from most of their peers who abandoned their spouses after their imprisonment, the nature of the difficulties represents a challenge to correctional, criminal justice, and social-welfare practitioners and administrators. Therefore, to address the problems and the unique needs of this particular group and to improve and develop services within and outside the prison service system, I can suggest several recommendations. The first is to reconsider visitation policy. Normative men and their imprisoned spouses, ineligible for home furloughs, should be warranted more conjugal visits. Simultaneously, imprisoned married women, eligible for home leaves, should be entitled to longer and more frequent furloughs. Such visitation/furlough policy would assist in providing relatively stable and reasonable marital relations. Second,

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this study emphasizes the need to bring marital health to the forefront; a psychoeducational component could be incorporated into the regularly scheduled rehabilitation programs in prison. Couples consisted of normative men and imprisoned women should receive intensive dyadic and familial support. Such assistance and therapy appear to be particularly relevant in cases where the women are incarcerated for long prison terms, when the length of marriage prior to incarceration is relatively short, and in the early stages of imprisonment—when the men are most likely to terminate the marital relations. With enough studies of this nature, policies may eventually be formed that mandate marital therapy training for counselors in prisons and easier access to marital strength initiatives for prisoners and spouses on all prisons and within the community as well.

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9 The Traumatic Bereavement of Children Experiencing the Loss of a Loved One to Death Row Sandra Joy, Elizabeth Beck and Ashley Hurley

Trauma expert Judith Herman (2015, 72) explained, ‘If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.’ While Herman was talking specifically about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and crime victims, we expand her definition of victims to include individuals who have a loved one facing state-sanctioned execution, as the prospect and the act of execution is traumatic for many family members and loved ones, particularly for children. Simply having an incarcerated parent in and of itself, regardless of the particular sentence given to the parent, carries its own set of challenges for children. Numerous risk factors are prevalent among children of incarcerated parents, such as parental substance abuse, mental health issues, and poor education, yet the most impactful risk factors found to operate independently of all others include poverty and household instability (Phillips et al. 2006). Stressful or traumatic events that can have negative, enduring S. Joy (*)  Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. Beck  Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Hurley  Camden Wyoming, DE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_9

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effects on the health and well-being of children have been categorized as ‘adverse childhood experiences’ (ACEs). Such experiences range from physical, emotional, or sexual abuse to parental divorce. Parental incarceration is now also recognized as an ‘adverse childhood experience’ (ACE), yet differentiated from other ACEs by the trauma, shame, and stigma associated with this experience (Hairston 2007). In 2007, Beck and Jones identified five ways that children of the condemned differ from children whose parents are incarcerated, but not sentenced to die. These include: (1) the probability that their parent will die prematurely and in a deliberate way by the mechanisms of the state, (2) the community will largely support the death, (3) throughout the foreseeable future and over the course of appeals there will be times of intense media scrutiny that can go on for decades, (4) restrictive rules associated with visiting someone on death row, including, in almost every state, the loss of contact visits, and (5) the feelings associated with anticipatory and complicated grief. Here, we add a sixth: social exclusion. In the pages ahead, we weave these six themes throughout our discussion. In order to provide context to the impact of the death penalty on children, we first describe the history and critiques of the death penalty. We then explore how the death penalty supports trauma, complicated mourning, and impacts social development among family members (Foster and Hagan 2007). Two of the authors are scholars who have studied the effects of capital punishment on family members. Together, in separate studies, they interviewed and reported on data involving 87 family members, of which 20 were adult or minor children who had a parent on death row or executed. The authors returned to their interview transcripts in order to provide examples. A third author, Ashley Hurley, has a father who was on death row from 2003 to 2016. Throughout the manuscript, Hurley uses her experience to provide insight into the larger issues explored in the manuscript. Hurley’s words are in italics. We begin with Hurley’s background: I was 15, and standing at my high school locker, when a friend told me she heard that my father had been arrested. I was shocked, and even more so when I learned that my father was charged with the murder of my stepmother. I ran to the high school counselor’s office for comfort and to reach my mother. Around this time my mother also learned about my father’s arrest from the media. She frantically called the school. She wanted me taken out of class before the horrible news spread among the students who then might tell me, but it was too late.

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Growing up I was close to my father and was becoming close to my new stepmother. On that morning I became what Susan Sharp (2005) calls a “double loser,” experiencing both the death of my stepmother and the incarceration of my father at the same time. My father then got a death sentence and I was in constant fear of losing him. My stepfather told me that I had to discontinue all contact with my father. My mother disagreed with him but she did not want to defy him. I wanted nothing more than to see my father, but unaccompanied minors were not allowed in the prison. On my 18th birthday, I skipped school and drove to see my father. It was an emotional reunion. In 2016 my father was taken off of death row as my state abolished the death penalty. Then I could exhale, knowing that I would no longer live in a state of constant fear of an execution.

The Death Penalty in the USA In the course of a robbery, William Henry Furman’s gun was discharged and an individual was killed. Mr. Furman was given the death penalty. His case was appealed to the US Supreme Court, and in 1972, a majority of justices ruled that Mr. Furman’s 8th Amendment Right against cruel and unusual punishment had been violated. Mr. Furman was resentenced, and for the next several years the death penalty became null and void across the USA. In their opinions, two of justices thought that the death penalty was no longer consistent with evolving standards of decency, but four disagreed and instead pointed to administrative inconsistencies in the way the death penalty was implemented (Bedau 1997; Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238, 1972). These inconstancies pointed to a capricious and arbitrary enactment of the death penalty in the USA. Rather than permanently ending the death penalty, it was resurrected in 1976 when the Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v Georgia that the death penalty would be constitutional if the jury is furnished with standards to direct and limit the sentencing, discretion (Gregg v. Georgia 428 US 153). The opinion additionally states that the defendant is able to seek an appeal. In an attempt to ensure that the death penalty was administered fairly, courts developed a new scheme for determining who is eligible to receive the death penalty and a new set of practices were developed for death penalty trials. Although death penalty trials in the USA differ somewhat between states as well as the federal government, the Gregg decision said that capital cases courts must examine aggravating and mitigating circumstances in consideration of death and that aggravating factors must be present for the prosecutor’s office to seek death. Aggravating factors are related to the crime, and although they differ from state to state they tend to include cases in which a child, police officer, or correctional guard was the victim, or when

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the murder occurred during the commission of another crime. Mitigation includes anything in the defendant’s life history that discourages the jury against recommending a death sentence, such as a difficult life history, mental illness, or a heroic act. It is important to note that just because mitigating circumstances are presented, they do not always sway juries. (Bedau 1997; DPIC, n.d.; Gregg v. Georgia 428 US 153). The decision also put into effect minimum standards for an appellate process. After the Gregg decision, 35 states rewrote their death penalty statutes in order to comply with the ruling of the court, and in so doing were able to reinstate the death penalty (Steiker 2002). With recent moves toward moratoriums, there are now 24 states that do not use the death penalty (DPIC, n.d.). At the same time, for the 26 states and the federal government that continue to seek the death penalty, the reverberations are wide. In addition to the sorrow and trauma associated with losing a loved one to death row and then execution, the inclusion of mitigating and aggravating circumstances add an additional burden for family members (Beck et al. 2007).

Mitigation Family members play an important role in developing and presenting mitigation evidence. According to the ABA Standards (American Bar Association 2003), in death penalty trials, all defense teams must have a person who is assigned to collect information that is used in the sentencing phase of the trial. To be done well, this job often involves hundreds of hours of interviews with the defendant’s family members in order to construct the defendant’s life history. Defendants’ life histories often entail dysfunctional family systems, including secrets involving sexual abuse and violence. Profound experiences with intergenerational trauma, exploitation, mental illness, and addiction are other pervasive themes. In order to help save their loved one’s life, family members are asked to open up and lay bare their darkest moments to the legal team (Beck et al. 2007; American Bar Association 2003). At the time of trial, family members are often asked to testify about the context in which the defendant lived. During this time, family members are forced to tell their most difficult moments to a room full of strangers. Sometimes family members are forced to publicly betray one another. In those instances, when a death sentence is given, family members ask themselves over and over if there was something that they could have done differently in testimony. Hurley’s family did not permit her to attend her father’s trial, much less testify on his behalf, which carried its own hardship:

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Given that I was only 15 at the time of my father’s trial, I had no chance to speak on my father’s behalf. I have always wondered if that would have made a difference, if his life would have been spared, could I have helped to portray my father in a better light, not as the monster so many others had seen.

Aggravation It can be argued that in order for people to be able to seek, sentence, and administer the death penalty, it is advantageous to dehumanize the defendant. Because of the inclusion of aggravating factors, it may be assumed that the person for whom the death penalty is sought is the worst of the worst (Bedau 1997). This viewpoint is often played up in the media and within the community. Words like ‘monster,’ ‘villain,’ and ‘dirt’ are used to describe the defendant; as a result, many family members learn to fear their communities. Not only are they targeted because their loved one did something wrong, but they are also considered guilty by association. Family members report being physically harassed, having their property defaced with feces, losing jobs, and even being ostracized from religious institutions. Children have been forced to leave school, which holds consequences for the child’s well-being and development (Beck et al. 2007; Joy 2014). When school is the locus for ridicule the negative effects escalate. Beck et al.’s (2007) work include children being forced to leave school by the administration. While this example is the extreme, most children with whom we interacted, talked about their anxiety associated with going to school. Some youth tried to keep their identity a secret, and those who were unable to do so experienced a loss of friends, derision, and threats (Beck et al. 2007). Hurley explains: The death sentence also affects social qualities of life. In my case, my last name is very unique. When I would say my last name, people would say “Are you related to that killer?” Being that my father was sentenced while I was still in high school, I lost a lot of friends at that time. I mean, who wants to be friends with the killer’s daughter?

Appeals In the Furman decision, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote that because death is a unique punishment and because it is a category to itself, it requires safeguards that do not exist in other cases (Furman v. Georgia 408 US 238, 1972). This means layers of appeals. Seldom is a death sentence

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carried out less than seven years after the individual is sent to death row, and in 2011, the average length of time between death sentence and execution reached an all-time high of 16.5 years (DPIC, n.d.). Because the disposition of the case remains in conflict, the news media maintains interest in the case. With each new round of media interest, family members experience heightened scrutiny and stigmatization. The media attention is especially heightened when a warrant is given by the court, which occurs after all of the appeals are exhausted and states the date of the execution (Beck et al. 2007; King 2005; Sharp 2005). The time frame between an execution warrant and an execution is different from state to state, but it is generally between 10 days and two months. Sometimes executions are stayed, a process through which everything is put on hold for greater legal consideration. Sometimes the stays are for a matter of hours and others for years. While Hurley’s father never received a warrant, she recalls the horror she felt when an execution date was set after his sentencing. Hurley had been warned that if a death sentence was assigned an execution date would be set immediately afterward. She was also told that the setting of a date is pro forma and always occurs after sentencing, but that the appeal process put forth in Gregg v. Georgia ensures that the execution would not occur on that date. Even with this knowledge, Hurley found it hard to fully believe that her father would be safe for at least a while: When the original death sentence came down it was scheduled to happen on my birthday. Everyone knew that once they give a death sentence they have to give a date and that it wouldn’t stick because of the appeals, but I worried that if he were to forego his appeals then it would have happened on my birthday.

Critiques of the Death Penalty Critics of the death penalty at times refer to it as a ‘broken system.’ Here, we focus on the way in which its brokenness has particular meaning for family members and include prosecutorial discretion, race, a ‘death qualified jury,’ and innocence. Under the guise of prosecutorial discretion, prosecutors are given great leeway in determining if someone will be charged, for what crime he or she will be charged, what the charge will be, and what sort of plea deal, if any, will be offered (Davis 2007). Most states in the USA elect state attorney generals, and many localities elect their prosecutors (Davis 2007). Prosecutorial discretion also helps to explain why the death penalty is given

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to many individuals who, rather than being the ‘worst of the worst,’ can be poor African-American individuals who tend to lack the resources required to mount an adequate defense (Beck et al. 2007; Davis 2007). The issues related to race and death penalty extend beyond discretion. David Baldus and his colleagues (1990) examined race and the death penalty by comparing close to 40 non-race based variables across 2000 murder cases. The researchers then looked at sentencing outcomes and found clear and persistent differences: If a white person was killed, the defendant is 4.3 times more likely to get the death penalty. The study also found that Black defendants were 1.1 times more likely to get the death penalty than were white defendants (Baldus et al. 1990). Given the history of the USA, the findings from the Baldus study may not be surprising, but the Supreme Court’s reaction to them in McCleskey v. Kemp (McCleskey v. Kemp 481 U.S. 279) is deeply concerning. In 1986, Warren McCleskey appealed his conviction and sentence, saying that because the death penalty is administered in a racially discriminatory manner, his 14th Amendment Right for equal protection had been violated. Findings from the Baldus study were presented to the court. The court did not call into question the researchers’ findings. Rather, the court indicated that because racism is a part of the USA, it is likely to make its way into the death penalty, which does not inherently make it unconstitutional. In a 2013 report generated by the Bureau of Justice, the US Department of Justice found that while African-Americans composed 13.1% of the national population in 2011, they made up 41.8% of people on death row (Bureau of Justice 2013). The more family members interact with the criminal justice system the more they feel like it is rigged against their loved one and the more they grow to distrust it. Of surprise to many family members and US citizens in general is the idea that one must be death qualified in order to serve on a capital jury. To be death qualified a potential juror cannot oppose the death penalty. The perception of procedural biases interacts with family members’ knowledge that from the reinstatement of the death penalty nearly 160 people have been exonerated from death row (DPIC, n.d.). Thus, further eroding the family’s belief that the death penalty can yield a righteous outcome, even when their loved one is guilty. Hurley’s research about the death penalty has strengthened her resolve to advocate against it. Hurley’s father has maintained his innocence and she believes him, both because he is her father and because she has read every document she could about his case, as well as spent a great deal of time with his lawyers:

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A lot of people don’t realize how many people have been exonerated from death row due to their innocence. What is even more sad is the ones who haven’t had that chance and have been put to death in spite of being innocent. You feel helpless. Before my state got rid of the death penalty, it was possible that my dad was going to be murdered for a crime that he didn’t commit. It is a scary situation that makes me feel very, very helpless!

Psychological Distress: Death Is Different The critiques of the death penalty have meaning for family members and help to expose the way in which family members experience conditions necessary for PTSD, as well as depression and other threats to well-being and positive youth development. In this section, we look at the ways in which the death penalty sets the context for traumatic stress, including PTSD, and complications associated with grief and bereavement.

Trauma For a traumatic experience to rise to PTSD, the triggering event must involve several criteria, which includes the fear of or actuality of a loved one’s violent death. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)— which is used to determine mental health diagnosis—in its forth addition states that for PTSD to occur the traumatic event, which can include the near death of a loved one, must evoke fear, helplessness, and horror. While the specific adjectives were removed from the DSM V, we refer to them, as they help to illustrate the violence of the death penalty. Families with a loved one on death row are fearful of losing their loved one to the horrific nature of execution, and they are rendered helpless by a criminal justice system, which is based on the discretion of prosecutors, a racist application, and the knowledge that all jurors support the death penalty (Beck et al. 2003). Beck et al. (2007) found a significant rate of depression (63%) and PTSD symptoms (63%) in their sample of 24 adults who had a loved one sentenced to death. Some family members were debilitated to the degree that they lost jobs and experienced serious health effects. It can be theorized that the children in these families carried additional hardships as they had their own firsthand experience with trauma, as well as their adult caretakers who were changed and at times debilitated by their own trauma (Beck et al. 2007). Hurley laments:

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Even my grandmother, she is still a wonderful, loving grandmother, but you can tell when it all happened that something changed, maybe her optimism, her hope, her faith dwindled as well. It definitely changes people.

Grief and Bereavement The theoretical concepts of nonfinite loss, disenfranchised grief, suffocated loss, and anticipatory mourning found in the literature are particularly helpful to gaining an understanding of the nature and intensity of the bereavement process when a loved one is sentenced to die. Nonfinite loss refers to those situations in which losses are slowly manifested over time, and often do not have an impending ending (Bruce and Schultz 2001). It is the loss that is continuous and exacerbated by such things as milestones, which are not met by the affected individual. The continuous nature of the loss eludes the family member’s ability to go through the stages of grief to a point of recovery. For family members, a new set of losses occur with the arrest, conviction, sentencing, years of appeals and death warrants, and in some cases, execution. Bruce and Schultz (2001) explain that in nonfinite loss the grieving person is lost between two worlds, one that is known and one that is dreaded, which highlights Rando’s discussion of ‘anticipatory mourning’ (Rando 2000). This concept was initially used by Rando to refer to the grieving process that individuals go through when their loved one is expected to die as a result of a terminal illness and is used to explain how the anticipatory nature of their loss exacerbates the actual death of their loved one. Hurley describes the ways in which the looming fear of her father’s execution intruded on her life: It’s hard not to think about it because you are put in a situation where you hear about the stories of people who get off of death row and come home and then you hear about the people who are executed. You wonder, where are we going to fit in, what’s going to happen to us?

Kenneth Doka (1989) developed the theory of disenfranchised grief to refer to instances when the bereaved are denied the ‘right to grieve’ by the larger society. Disenfranchised grief occurs when a loss cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. The concept of disenfranchised grief becomes more profound when it is considered alongside research that has found that grief is most effectively addressed when there is community support for the bereaved, and the relationship between the dead

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and his or her mourners is acknowledged (Romanoff and Terenzio 1998). The stigma of having a family member on death row and guilt by association ensures the disenfranchised nature of most family members grief. In addition to the failure of the community to recognize the relationships that exist between people on death row and their families, in many cases family members’ grief takes place against a backdrop of community support for the death. Hurley explains: When executions happen, they are in the paper, in the media. You don’t get privacy, you don’t get to privately mourn. The news might put a blurb on the internet, on Facebook, saying that a convicted killer is being put to death and in the comments people say, good riddance, or rot in hell. It always used to worry me that if my father was executed, what would happen with the funeral. Will a church even allow me to bring a body in? Will there be people outside the funeral with a sign protesting? Here I am planning my father’s funeral.

Bordere’s work on suffocated grief extends the idea of disenfranchised grief to emphasize the ways in which loved ones are penalized for ‘grief and mourning expressions that are devalued and misinterpreted or misdiagnosed’ (Bordere 2017, 37). These penalties can be issued by various representatives of the criminal justice system, found within the police station, the courts, and the prison system (see, e.g., Beck et al. 2007; Joy 2014). Sometimes it is total strangers who penalize family members for their expressions of grief. Hurley describes the medium for such harsh treatment in various forms of social media: There have been times where the media has posted things on Facebook and it is the comments that come after the article that make you want to stand up for your loved one, but if you stand up, you are jumped on! I have been called names, I was called stupid, and asked how could I love somebody who killed my mother (although it was my stepmother) Every time there is news it’s like opening the wound back up because the comments will start again. You don’t get to grieve and don’t ever get a chance to get away from it.

In addition to these theories of grief, Rando (2012) has identified other factors that complicate bereavement. Rando (2012) uses the term traumatic bereavement to describe the compounding effects of trauma and death. She has identified twelve high-risk elements for traumatic bereavement: (1) sudden death, (2) violence and its consequences, (3) human-caused event, (4) suffering (physical or emotional) of the loved one prior to the death, (5) unnaturalness, (6) preventability, (7) intent of the responsible agent(s), (8) randomness, (9) multiple deaths, (10) one’s own personal encounter with death, (11) untimeliness of the deceased’s youth, and

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(12) loss of one’s child (Rando 2012). As the stories of the family members interviewed for this book unfold within the chapters that follow, a majority of these high-risk elements can be found in their retelling of the traumatic stress that they have endured. Clearly, the trauma they have endured and continue to suffer as they await the execution of their loved one, or deal with its aftermath, serves as a major complication in their grief process. For families with a loved one on death row, state-sanctioned execution is murder. The death is unnatural, preventable, and it is done with forethought. Moreover, most family members know that lethal injection involves physical and emotional suffering (Koniaris et al. 2005), and that this pain will be taken to the extreme if their loved one’s execution is botched. With each of the types of grief described above the emotions of the bereaved are intensified and healing becomes more difficult. The bereaved often experience high levels of distress, disorganization, and prolonged grieving, which helps to account for the very high rate of traumatic grief and stress among family members of people on death row, even before an execution occurs (Doka 1989; Bruce and Schultz 2001; Rando 2000; Bordere 2017).

Social Effects Many family members talk about the experience of having a loved one on death row as an almost one-dimensional experience in which they and their family now orient their life around visits, fears, and what a daughter of a man on death row called the ‘constant threat of the black cloud of execution’ (Jones and Beck 2007, 288). There are no formal mechanisms to support youth with a parent on death row. Rather than engaging in help-seeking behavior, we found that youth disguise their feelings and isolate. One source of potential comfort is the parent on death row. At the same time, the relationship seldom feels comforting within the restrictive visitation environment, where it is difficult to build a strong relationship. In addition, the youth tend to assume caretaking responsibilities both for their parent who is on death row and, due to the trauma within the family, other family members, such as younger siblings (Joy 2014).

Parenting from Death Row The men and women on death row are often isolated for 23 hours of the day, and extreme limitations are imposed on their exercise, visitation, and phone access in comparison with the degree of movement and

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privileges found with other people in prison. Moreover, there are virtually no opportunities for education or any other type of enrichment (Johnson 2016). Against this backdrop, it is difficult to form attached and healthy relationships. Additionally, each trip to the prison involves its own level of stress for family members. Family members are not guaranteed that they will see their loved one and that the full time for their visitation will be granted, as often internal workings of the prison cause disruptions in visitation. In many states, visitation is conducted within a Plexiglas booth with no phone, rather simply tiny holes at the bottom of the window in the metal frame (Joy 2014). Most of the children with whom we talked indicated that they were seldom able to share their true feelings with their loved one. Whether the feelings were related to the death sentence or their own issues in school children felt like they needed to protect their parent from their own pain, and that in the visit, it was their job to bring joy to their parent (Joy 2014; Beck and Jones 2007). Given the chaos that surrounds families with a loved one on death row, it is not uncommon for role reversals to occur. From the very beginning of her father’s incarceration, even as a young teenager, Hurley became parentified: I am constantly making sure that he has money on his books, so he can make sure that he has the things that he needs. He’ll ask me to order a book, or a magazine, or renew his newspaper subscription and he always says that he hates to ask me for things. He says, I’m your dad, I shouldn’t be asking you to do these things for me, I should be the one out there helping you. It is tough on him to ask me for a favor. It has been a role reversal.

Social Exclusion All of the data point to the multiple ways in which these youth experience social exclusion. Shucksmith and Chapman (1998) describe social exclusion as youth’s nonparticipation in relationships and institutions that support well-being and economic mobility. School is certainly a critical institution. We found when students attended school they often did so with anxiety. Nearly all of the youth either dropped out of high school or college (depending on where they were at the time of the arrest) or truncated their schooling by giving up dreams of a higher education. After Hurley graduated from high school, she began to take some college courses at a local community college, yet soon afterward she stopped taking classes:

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Before this happened, I wanted to be a veterinarian. But that did not happen. If this [incarceration] had not happened. Things would be different with my life if it hadn’t happened.

Children also experience exclusion within the home as the adults in their lives tried to keep information from them, in what the research shows are a misguided attempt for protection (Snyder-Joy and Carlo 1998). Decades ago, it was argued that children should not be told about the incarceration of their parent in order to minimize trauma (Becker and Margolin 1967). The reluctance to disclose information about parental incarceration has since been referred to as ‘forced silence’ (Johnston 1995, 73). When adhering to this silence the custodial parent may elect not to inform the child(ren) about the incarcerated parent at all, though more often they provide vague explanations for the parent’s incarceration. More recent research on the topic of children’s coping has found that a sense of uncertainty and lack of information hinders the ability of children to cope (Ayers et al. 1996; Compas 1987) and promotes anxiety and fearfulness in the children (Parke and Clarke-Stewart 2003). Children need reliable information that ‘allows them to begin to make sense of their situation and begin the dual processes of grieving the loss of their parent and coping with their new life circumstances’ (Parke and Clarke-Stewart 2003, 189). Moreover, access to information helps to dispel the misinformation that children will inevitably receive and the fears that the child often conjures. Hurley explains: When it first happened, I was underage so I was kept in the dark about a lot of things. I wasn’t being told about anything, or if I was, it was sugarcoated. But then I would just turn around and find that it would be splashed in the newspapers. It increased my anxiety because I wouldn’t be prepared to have a response for questions that people might ask me about the news story focusing on my dad.

Discussion The collateral consequences of the death penalty are profound and cross generations. Families are torn apart by anxiety, grief, and traumatic stress. These consequences and especially their meaning for children must be included in the debate surrounding the American death penalty. One way to include this information is by raising the specter of the death penalty as a public health concern. Research can be done to further hone in on the physical and

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mental health effects of a capital charge on family members and to place them in a public health framework. Additional research can include exploring the linkages between critical public health problems, such as tobacco and drug and alcohol use, with having a loved one, and particularly a parent, on death row. Key to public health is the idea that something is preventable, and while it is one thing to offer support to children of the condemned what they truly need is for the death penalty to end. The positioning of the death penalty as a public health concern can be used to support policy changes in those states that are seeking moratoriums. As social workers, we must provide opportunities for people who are affected by the death penalty and want to advocate against it to do such, and we must help to raise the voices of those whose lives are harmed or destroyed by it. In this regard, social workers can also use community practice skills to help organizations working to the end the death penalty and to support the voices of family members in these groups. Once the death penalty ends, we can then support these youth in the myriad ways described in other parts of this handbook. As Hurley explains: I got to the point where I wanted to talk about the death penalty because the more I get to talk about it, the more awareness I am able to bring to the injustice of the death penalty.

References American Bar Association. 2003. “ABA Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases.” Hofstra Law Review 31: 913–1090. Ayers, Tim, Irwin Sandler, Stephen West, and Mark Roosa. 1996. “A Dispositional and Situational Assessment of Children’s Coping: Testing Alternative Models of Coping.” Journal of Personality 64(4): 923–958. Baldus, David C., George Woodworth, and Charles A. Pulaski. 1990. Equal Justice and the Death Penalty: A Legal and Empirical Analysis. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England. Beck, Elizabeth, Sarah Britto, and Arlene Andrews. 2007. In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families. New York: Oxford University Press. Beck, Elizabeth, and Sandra Jones. 2007. Children of the Condemned: An Exploration of Loss. Omega Journal of Death and Dying 56: 191–215. Beck, Elizabeth, Brenda Sims Blackwell, Pamela Leonard, and Michael Mears. 2003. “Seeking Sanctuary: Interviews with Family Members of Capital Defendants.” The Cornell Law Review 88: 382–418.

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Becker, Diane, and Faith Margolin. 1967. “How Surviving Parents Handled Their Young Children’s Adaptation to the Crisis of Loss.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 37(4): 753–757. Bedau, Hugo. 1997. The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies. New York: Oxford University Press. Bordere, Tashel. 2017. “Disenfranchisement and Ambiguity in the Face of Loss: The Suffocated Grief of Sexual Assault Survivors.” Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Studies of Applied Family Studies 66(1): 29–45. Bruce, Elizabeth J., and Cynthia L. Schultz. 2001. Nonfinite Loss and Grief: A Psychoeducational Approach. Baltimore: Paul H. Brooks. Bureau of Statistics. 2013. “Bureau of Justice Statistics.” U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. Compas, Bruce E. 1987. “Coping with Stress During Childhood and Adolescence.” Psychological Bulletin 101(3): 393–403. Davis, Angela J. 2007. “Racial Fairness in the Criminal Justice System: The Role of the Prosecutor.” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 39: 202–232. Doka, Kenneth J. 1989. Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrows. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. DPIC. n.d. “Death Penalty Information Center.” https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/. Foster, Holly, and John Hagan. 2007. “Incarceration and Intergenerational Social Exclusion.” Social Problems 54(4): 399–433. Hairston, Creasey Finney. 2007. Focus on the Children with Incarcerated Parents: An Overview of the Research Literature. Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation. Herman, Judith. 2015. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Johnson, Robert. 2016. “Solitary Confinement Until Death by State Sponsored Homicide: An Eighth Amendment Assessment of the Modern Execution Process.” Washington and Lee Law Review 73(3), Article 7, Summer 6-1: 1213–1242. Johnston, Denise. 1995. “Effects of Parental Incarceration.” In Children of Incarcerated Parents, edited by Katherine Gabel and Denise Johnston, 89–100. New York: Lexington Books. Jones, Sandra, and Elizabeth Beck. 2007. “The Role of Disenfranchised Grief and Nonfinite Loss in the Psychological Distress of Family Members of Death Row Inmates.” Omega Journal of Death and Dying 54: 281–299. Joy, Sandra. 2014. Grief, Loss, and Treatment for Death Row Families: Silent No More. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. King, Rachel. 2005. Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Koniaris, Leonidas, Teresa Zimmers, David Lubarsky, and Jonathan Sheldon. 2005. “Inadequate Anesthesia in Lethal Injection for Execution.” Lancet 365: 1412–1414. Parke, Ross D., and K. Alison Clarke-Stewart. 2003. “The Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children: Perspectives, Promises, and Policies.” In Prisoners

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Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Reentry on Children, Families, and Communities, edited by Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press. Phillips, Susan, Alaattin Erkanli, Gordon Keeler, Jane Costello, and Adrian Angold. 2006. “Disentangling the Risks: Parent Criminal Justice Involvement and Children’s Exposure to Family Risks.” Criminology and Public Policy 5(4): 677–702. Rando, Therese A., ed. 2000. Clinical Dimensions of Anticipatory Mourning: Theory and Practice in Working with the Dying, Their Loved Ones, and Their Caregivers. Champaign, IL: Research Press. Rando, Therese. 2012. Coping with the Sudden Death of Your Loved One: Self-Help for Traumatic Bereavement. Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing. Romanoff, Bronna, and Marion Terenzio. 1998. “Rituals and the Grieving Process.” Death Studies 22(8): 697–711. Sharp, Susan F. 2005. Hidden Victims: The Effects of the Death Penalty on Families of the Accused. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shucksmith, Mark, and Pollyanna Chapman. 1998. “Rural Development and Social Exclusion.” Sociologia Ruralis 38(2): 225–242. Snyder-Joy, Zoann K., and Teresa A. Carlo. 1998. “Parenting Through Prison Walls: Incarcerated Mothers and Children’s Visitation Programs.” In Crime Control and Women: Feminist Implications of Criminal Justice Policy, edited by Susan Miller, 130–150. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Steiker, Carol S. 2002. “Things Fall Apart but the Center Holds: The Supreme Court and the Death Penalty.” New York University Law Review 77(6): 1475–1477.

10 Relatives of Registered Sex Offenders: Considering the Costs of Providing Family Support David Patrick Connor

Introduction Although it is widely recognized that many convicted criminal offenders and former prisoners experience considerable setbacks in communities after convictions and incarcerations that make their lives more arduous (Tewksbury and Connor 2012; Travis et al. 2001; Visher et al. 2004), registered sex offenders (RSOs) who live in American society arguably face more challenging impediments (Burchfield and Mingus 2008; Levenson and Cotter 2005; Levenson et al. 2007; Levenson and Hern 2007; Mercado et al. 2008; Robbers 2009; Tewksbury 2004, 2005; Tewksbury and Lees 2006, 2007; Zevitz and Farkas 2000). After being publicly identified as sex offenders, individuals commonly experience feelings of anxiety, depression, embarrassment, isolation, and shame (Burchfield and Mingus 2008; Connor and Tewksbury 2017; Levenson and Cotter 2005; Levenson et al. 2007; Robbers 2009; Tewksbury 2012). Harassment and ostracism from community members may also be encountered by known sex offenders (Levenson and Cotter 2005; Tewksbury 2005; Tewksbury and Lees 2006; Zevitz and Farkas 2000). In addition, the stigma that is associated with labeling as a sex offender, especially in regard to issues of employment, education, and community activity (Tewksbury 2012; Tewksbury and Lees 2006, 2007; Zevitz and Farkas 2000), may become a significant obstacle for such individuals. D. P. Connor (*)  Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_10

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Further, RSOs often must live in socially disorganized communities or rural locations with limited employment, treatment, and transportation opportunities (Tewksbury and Mustaine 2006, 2008). Thus, because RSOs likely face more hardships than other criminal offenders, ensuring their access to social support may be especially salient. Social support is important with respect to minimizing subsequent criminal behavior and enabling successful reintegration. Prior research indicates that lower recidivism rates are common among former inmates who have social support throughout their incarceration (Arditti et al. 2003; Klein et al. 2002). Prison visits from loved ones significantly decrease the risk of backsliding into criminal activity (Bales and Mears 2008; Duwe and Clark 2013). Interpersonal attachments also prove to be influential in assisting ex-offenders with community employment (Berg and Huebner 2011). Further, social relationships often afford ex-offenders with opportunities for financial assistance and housing (La Vigne et al. 2004; Nelson et al. 1999; Visher et al. 2010). The notion that social support is particularly relevant to RSOs is perhaps best manifested through a common feature of sex offender treatment programs, where participating RSOs are obligated to forge social relationships with primary support partners in the community. Support partners are most commonly relatives of RSOs who agree to provide family support to their loved ones. By guaranteeing that RSOs have at least one prosocial contact in the community, probation and parole officials and treatment providers attempt to add an additional layer of influence and surveillance to the everyday lives of RSOs who are living in society. Reduction of subsequent criminal behavior and demonstration of a crime-free lifestyle that should be imitated are the desired results of such associations. Support partners of RSOs are an important population to examine, as they purportedly play an important role with respect to helping a particularly stigmatized group of criminal offenders successfully reintegrate into society as productive, law-abiding persons. In this chapter, I utilize the narratives of support partners who are relatives of RSOs to shed light on the negative consequences that may arise from providing family support to sexual lawbreakers after their criminal convictions and to recommend solutions. Relatively little is known about individuals who have a social link with and provide social support to publicly identified sex offenders. However, available studies suggest that family members of RSOs are likely to experience negative repercussions (Comartin et al. 2010; Farkas and Miller 2007; Levenson and Tewksbury 2009; Tewksbury and Levenson 2009). Farkas and Miller (2007) focused on adult family members of publicly labeled sex offenders, interviewing 72 family members (within 28 families)

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from six different states. Chronic hopelessness, depression, and frustration that stemmed from adjusting to life with RSOs were the most commonly reported feelings. Interestingly, some family members also expressed that relationships with other relatives deteriorated as a direct result of their decisions to remain in contact with RSOs. Similarly, with online survey data from 584 family members across the USA, Levenson and Tewksbury (2009) and Tewksbury and Levenson (2009) found that individuals related to RSOs commonly experienced adverse consequences. Most family members (86%) endured a significant amount of stress, as a result of their association with a RSO, and nearly one-half (49%) often felt afraid for their own safety because of their loved one’s status (Tewksbury and Levenson 2009). One-half of the family members lost friends or a close relationship, and 66% said that shame and embarrassment often prevented them from participating in community activities (Tewksbury and Levenson 2009). Individuals who lived with RSOs were more likely than individuals who did not live with RSOs to encounter threats and harassment by neighborhood residents (Levenson and Tewksbury 2009). Children of RSOs also reported unfavorable outcomes with more than one-half stating that they were treated differently by teachers and other children at school. Related to this, Tewksbury and Humkey (2010) found that, when legally permissible, school officials were likely to prohibit parents who were known sex offenders from attending school events. In a smaller study, Comartin and colleagues (2010) conducted a focus group with four mothers of RSOs. Like the earlier studies concerning family members, the researchers found that being related to RSOs often generated negative ramifications, such as stigmatization, isolation, and changes in personal relationships.

The Present Study Ultimately, based on the reported experiences of family members, actively pursuing and maintaining a social relationship with a publicly identified sex offender does not appear to be a desirable responsibility. In fact, like RSOs who may experience more daunting obstacles to reentry in comparison with other criminal offenders, family members of RSOs may encounter challenges that prove to be more difficult to overcome than relatives of other criminal offenders when deciding to support loved ones. The present study utilizes in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals identified by RSOs as their primary support partners to examine the potential negative

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consequences that these relatives face as a result of providing family support to their loved ones and to determine whether or not the costs of providing such support are unique to relatives of RSOs. At the same time, by focusing on the lives of individuals who maintain a close social linkage to known sex offenders, it may be possible to identify programs and services that help them better assist RSOs with successful community reintegration.

Methodology Data for this chapter originated from semi-structured qualitative interviews that I conducted with 38 family members of RSOs who served as support partners for them across two sex offender treatment programs in the southern USA. Although the number of family members who participated in this research was relatively small, the present investigation represented an exploratory endeavor aimed at a largely overlooked population. Thus, the goal of the project was to interview enough participants to reach saturation (i.e., when no new themes or information arose from additional interviews). After completing the interviews and examining the available data, I was confident that thematic saturation was indeed achieved, especially given the fact that saturation may be reached with as few as 12 interviews (Guest et al. 2006). At the same time, although there are no clear, universally accepted guidelines for how many interviews are sufficient to reach thematic saturation, a review of ethnographic research in the leading criminology and criminal justice journals indicated that the median sample size was 35 for studies based on semi-structured interviews (Copes et al. 2011). Thus, with a total sample size of 38, the number of interviews included in the analyses was believed to be satisfactory. Family members were mostly female (n = 29), almost entirely White (n = 36), and largely married (n = 27) (see Table  10.1). Overall, participants ranged in age from 24 to 85, with a mean age of 54.4 years. A majority of support partners (n = 20) possessed a postsecondary degree. All family members served as support partners for RSOs and forged formal relationships with their loved ones who were adult males undergoing community-based sex offender treatment. More than one-third (n = 14) were parents, more than one-fourth were spouses (n = 11), and more than one-tenth (n = 5) were siblings. A small proportion of support partners were ex-spouses (n = 3) and grandparents (n = 2). One brother-in-law, one child, and one uncle were also in the sample. Although prior studies examined family members of RSOs (Comartin et al. 2010; Farkas and Miller 2007;

10  Relatives of Registered Sex Offenders …     185 Table 10.1  Demographic characteristics of family members of RSOs Variable Sex Female Male Race White Black Asian Marital status Married Divorced Single Widowed Age (mean) Education Less than high school High school Some college Two-year college degree Four-year college degree Graduate degree Relationship Parent Spouse Ex-spouse Sibling Grandparent Other (i.e., brother-in-law, child, and uncle)

Value 76.3% (n = 29) 23.7% (n = 9) 94.8% (n = 36) 2.6% (n = 1) 2.6% (n = 1) 71.1% (n = 27) 13.1% (n = 5) 10.5% (n = 4) 5.3% (n = 2) 54.4 (range 24–85) 5.3% (n = 2) 21.0% (n = 8) 21.1% (n = 8) 18.4% (n = 7) 23.7% (n = 9) 10.5% (n = 4) 36.8% (n = 14) 28.9% (n = 11) 7.9% (n = 3) 13.2% (n = 5) 5.2% (n = 2) 7.9% (n = 3)

Table 10.2  Types of activities undertaken by family members of RSOs Variable

Value (%)

Offer emotional support Participate in sex offender treatment Provide housing accommodations Allow RSO to live with them Socialize with RSO outside of treatment Help RSO financially Assist RSO with searching for employment

100 (n = 38) 100 (n = 38) 84.2 (n = 32) 42.1 (n = 16) 78.9 (n = 30) 65.8 (n = 25) 57.9 (n = 22)

Levenson and Tewksbury 2009; Tewksbury and Levenson 2009), individuals in the present study represented a distinct and untapped population. They were specifically selected by RSOs to serve formal supporting roles in the sex offender treatment process and thus are presumably closer to such offenders than other relatives. In this way, these support partners, albeit family members, are likely equipped with unique experiences and insights. The types of activities undertaken by the sample are highlighted in Table 10.2.

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Data Collection I partnered with two forensic psychologists who each operated a sex offender treatment program at their respective practices in order to enlist participation in the present study. By collaborating with these treatment providers, I was able to gain access to family members who served as support partners of RSOs. The treatment providers, who devoted most of their time to working with convicted sex offenders and their loved ones, actively vouched for me throughout the data collection process, confirming for these populations that I was of nonjudgmental character, not affiliated with the criminal justice system, and interested in understanding their experiences. They also provided support partners, who were identified by RSOs in their sex offender treatment programs, with recruitment flyers, following periodic therapy sessions that included both parties (i.e., RSO and support partner). The recruitment flyer explained the research project and invited support partners to contact the researcher to schedule one-on-one, personal interviews if they wished to participate in the study. Support partners who expressed immediate interest had the option to directly sign up for interviews with the respective executive assistant for each practice. Interviews with a non-random, purposive sample of individuals, who were identified by RSOs as their primary sources of social support, were conducted over a nine-month period from March 2014 to November 2014. The interviews were semi-structured to avoid imposing artificial concepts and categories on support partners, which allowed participants to speak freely using their own terminology. This style of interviewing permitted support partners to discuss their thoughts and beliefs in detail. Thirty-three interviews were conducted face-to-face; 27 of these interviews were carried out inside a private office on the grounds of the first treatment provider’s practice, and six of these interviews took place inside a private office on the grounds of the second treatment provider’s practice. The additional five interviews were completed via telephone. The duration of interviews varied; however, on average, they transpired over a period of 90 minutes. Prior to data collection, all procedures were reviewed by my university institutional review board, in order to ensure that ethical standards were met.

Analysis All interviews were transcribed in full. I made every attempt to transcribe the interviews in a way that reflected natural speaking

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patterns; however, some words and phrases were edited to aid readability. All identifying information was removed during this process, and each family member and referenced RSO was assigned an alias to protect confidentiality. Data were manually coded, following principles of analytic induction in multiple readings (Charmaz 1983, 2006). This approach utilized numerous readings of all transcripts, with each reading focused on a narrow range of issues and conceptual categories. As this was an exploratory investigation, open coding was used, and findings reflected issues that emerged from the data during the coding for the concepts of primary interest.

Findings Analysis of interview data revealed that there were five primary costs that relatives of RSOs experienced as a result of providing family support to their loved ones. These negative ramifications included loss of relationships, deterioration of relationships, isolation, harassment, and stigmatization. Although these costs were not unique for family members of RSOs, these unpleasant outcomes were greatly intensified among such relatives who voluntarily served as support partners. The identified costs were widespread, but the perspectives of family members regarding such negative consequences reflected variations and inconsistencies across participants.

Loss of Relationships All family members described costs that stemmed from their willingness to provide RSOs with post-conviction support. The most prominent theme across participants, however, focused on their loss of relationships. Almost without exception, family members believed that at least some of their relationships with other individuals disappeared after agreeing to help RSOs complete treatment and successfully reenter society. As Rupert, a 49-yearold business owner, explained, “Because I chose to support my son after his offense, some other people in my life decided to leave.” Similarly, reflecting on how several acquaintances no longer returned her phone calls, 50-yearold Candy, whose son was convicted of possessing child pornography, acknowledged that “relationships with other people are drying up fast, as they learn that I’m helping Miguel with his issues.”

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Specifically, friends were the most common individuals said to have completely stopped interacting and otherwise communicating with family members who provided post-conviction support to RSOs. “I’ve lost a couple of friends,” confessed Chelsea, a 43-year-old mother who served as a support partner for her ex-husband, “because they couldn’t understand why I would continue to help a man who committed a sex crime.” However, newer and less intimate friendships were more likely to vanish than older and closer associations. As stated by 70-year-old Edith, whose grandson was convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, “Friends I met recently at Bingo do not talk with me now. They aren’t as close to me as my other girlfriends.” In the words of Wallace, who retired as a computer programmer shortly after his nephew was featured on NBC’s To Catch a Predator, a reality television series devoted to seducing and subsequently apprehending sex offenders through the Internet, “Casual buddies of mine at work really didn’t stick around, whereas my strongest friendships really stayed the same, even when it was well known that I was his uncle.” And yet, it was not unusual for long-standing and close friendships to completely die out, as well. Like many family members who helped RSOs, Maria, a 57-year-old nurse, described losing a lifelong friend: One of my best friends I’ve had since the 4th grade is a prosecutor. I called her about my husband’s offense, and now that friendship is gone. It’s gone! It’s instantly gone! She called me “one of those women” who takes the man over the child. Pretty much she said she could never forgive my husband. Because I keep trying to help and be there for him, she said she would never want to associate with me again.

Another participant, 48-year-old Tabitha, whose spouse was convicted of possessing child pornography, shared a similar perspective: My two best friends since I was 14, they had concerns about my continued involvement with my husband after his sex offense conviction. I tried to tell them I am trying to help him with moving on and looking toward the future, making sure it doesn’t happen again, but it didn’t seem to matter. The fact that I stuck around with him made them mad. We don’t talk anymore.

At the same time, for many participants, relationships with family members also abruptly ended, following their commitments to help RSOs complete treatment and successfully reenter society. Traci, a 52-year-old real estate agent, explained how she lost her daughter:

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After being a support person for my son, my daughter responded negatively. My daughter is now 19. She won’t come and stay with us at our house any longer. She said that she couldn’t stay with us anymore, that it creeped her out to be with me. I haven’t heard from her since.

Interestingly, Traci’s son was convicted of possessing child pornography, and her daughter allegedly was never victimized. In a similar vein, 29-year-old Ruby, a newly married college student, who fully supported her husband after his conviction, was purportedly disowned by her entire immediate family: My adoptive mom, she took care of me from the time I was eight, all the way up to about two years ago. Because I still talk to Bob, she won’t have nothing to do with me. The people I call my brothers and sisters, they’re not allowed to talk to me, because they get in trouble by our adoptive mom and dad. My adoptive dad said he will leave my adoptive mom if she talks to me, because I’m with Bob and supporting him. My father, our relationship is no longer. He can’t believe that I would see Bob as a good person and not see him for the monster supposedly is. He doesn’t understand how I can upgrade Bob and tell him he is a really great guy. No matter what, Bob’s a sex offender and shouldn’t be helped.

Deterioration of Relationships Apart from losing relationships with friends and family members, deterioration of relationships was identified by almost all family members as a cost of helping RSOs. In the eyes of these participants, the quality of associations with other individuals worsened, and they attributed this negative consequence to their close interactions with RSOs. “With my doing this, supporting my grandson,” Doris declared, “my relations with others are declining.” As with the loss of relationships, newer and less intimate associations were the most prevalent type to be impacted, once support partners formally established themselves as confidants of RSOs. In particular, individuals who lived in close proximity to participants were often viewed as acting differently toward them. As 50-year-old Max, a business owner, who served as a support partner for his brother, pointed out, “I see my neighbors, and things are different. Their reception of me is not the same. If they were going to invite me over for a pig roast, I’m not getting those invites anymore.” Likewise, Traci articulated how a flourishing friendship with a female neighbor quickly deteriorated:

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I talked to the one neighbor. She and I kind of hung out a little bit, but now not much at all. She still says, “Hi.” She’s nice, but you know, we don’t get together anymore. Not after I decided to support Nelson with treatment and getting better.

Edmund, a father of a RSO, echoed this experience: I live in a small apartment complex. Don’t talk to many people, other than Derrick, the one that lives upstairs. We were becoming friends. He used to come to my apartment all the time. Then with dealing with my son, he stopped coming to my apartment. He’s kind of what my mom would call a “two-faced person” now. He isn’t the same.

Casual friends and other contacts were also frequently reported to be no longer the same after learning of the close interactions that family members had with RSOs. “I’d go to festivals in the summer,” recalled Nicole, a spouse of a RSO, “and usually you see people and talk with them, but most recently, there were some people there that went the other way.” Although discouraged, the 62-year-old school teacher initially dismissed the cold reactions she received that night, until it happened to her again one week later: I went to a couple of things where I saw some old friends, but there’s clearly now the elephant in the room. If they didn’t avoid me, they were asking about how everyone was, except Marvin. And to me, my sticking by his side, that’s the elephant in the room and why they were acting strange.

By the same token, Lynn, a spouse of a RSO, described the altered behavior of a female coworker, after discovering that she still supported him: This one girl at work, she just wanted to know what happened and all this, and why I’m still around him. I’m thinking, “If you want to know, go look on the Internet.” Well, of course she did. We used to talk a lot, but now sometimes she’ll talk to me, sometimes she won’t. I don’t think she likes me still being with Bill.

Further, among a majority of family members who provided post-conviction support to RSOs, long-standing and close relationships were not exempt from undergoing negative transformations. “Since I’ve been supporting Matthew,” Maria announced, “my own family no longer offered to let me come into their homes.” Like many relatives, Ruby was surprised by her once-loyal friend’s recent actions:

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I couldn’t believe it. My friend, Stephanie, who was so close to me, when people find out who my husband is and that I support him, she starts getting snickers, and she’s gone for a couple of months. She’s ok for a while, but when everybody else starts judging, she’s ready to go. Our relationship is not as strong as it used to be, and she’s in-and-out.

Isolation Isolation was another cost described by a majority of support partners after they decided to help RSOs complete treatment and successfully reenter society. According to Felicia, whose son was convicted of statutory rape, “I wanted to do what I could for Ryan. I think because I have, I’ve been cutting myself off from the rest of everybody.” Felicia’s efforts to intentionally distance herself from others characterized the experiences of numerous participants who agreed to serve as support partners. Amelia’s comments were also congruent with this phenomenon. “I feel like I need to get away from people,” she uttered, “and it’s been that way since I’ve been so close to my ex-husband and involved in his recovery.” Specifically, these relatives of RSOs often limited their activities in the communities in which they lived, with a specific focus on avoiding other people. “We have definitely isolated ourselves,” asserted Nicole, including her husband in the discussion, “and we have rarely gone to social events, so we evade people. Only funerals, if you want to call that being social.” She continued, however, noting that “when alone, I also do not want to be around others.” Like many support partners, Traci did not fully comprehend why she actively stayed away from other individuals: I have become secluded. I mean, we don’t go out, I don’t go out, we can’t face anybody… We don’t want to run into anybody … I’m not sure why, but I feel with everything that happened with my son, it’s made me less outgoing.

In a similar vein, 72-year-old Colleen, who served as a support partner for her son, admitted: I don’t get out like I used to. Some of that is my age, some of it isn’t. It’s Randy, it’s since all this happened with him, and I just find that I’m retreating from everything. I guess that’s just how it is now. I don’t want to be around others.

A minority of family members went to extremes to escape interactions with community members. Ruby discussed her well-thought-out plans for those instances when she and her husband needed to leave home:

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I only go out in public during school hours. Town’s quite dead. We can go and do anything we need to do then, and 15 min before school lets out, people are going to be coming, and it’s a whirlwind of hurt that’s coming. So, we get back before then.

At the same time, in their attempts to isolate themselves, numerous support partners found their homes to be places where they could be sheltered from encounters with other individuals. With the home as refuge, 47-year-old Gloria, a mother of three, organized her social life around events behind closed doors: We make sure we have family nights at home. We’re having fun, but at the same time, we’re staying distant from everybody… We live in a rundown, trashy dump, but it’s home. We know that when we go home, that’s our safe place.

In the same way, Sheryl, a 45-year-old spouse of a RSO, planned the future with her new husband, with every intention of remaining within the confines of their country bungalow: We stay home; it’s safe there. I don’t want harassment, throwing stuff, or mean words, so we’re probably never going to move… Harry’s got time off, so we might have a stay-cation. We have lots of plans that are going to keep us grounded and close to home. You can’t go very far if you have a big garden.

Harassment Following the establishment of their formal relationships with RSOs as their support partners, many family members reported that they experienced harassment. In some instances, such hostile actions directed at participants came from known community members. “I promised Daniel I would help him get through all of this,” 44-year-old Heather expressed, “but other people in the city, who I know, are constantly trying to intimidate me.” As the sister of a RSO, Heather knew life would be tough, but never imagined how being her brother’s support partner could expose her to such cruelty from familiar individuals: I am honestly shocked by the reactions. I know these guys. I’m just standing by my brother. He made a mistake, but is moving on with his life. They don’t understand that. I have people throwing things at my house, and notes left on my door, telling me I must be a sex offender, too.

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A statement from Ruby, who faced persistent torment, best summarized the multitude of ways that relatives of RSOs were harassed by known community members: I’ve had people call me “sicko,” a “chomo lover,” and “no better than him for loving him.” They say I will let Bob do anything that he wanted to do. I am just as equal to him for being with him, I am as sick as he is, and I would probably help him commit sex offenses. A common one is that I’m a “bad mom.” I’m “retarded.” I’ve been threatened for loving him. I was told if I go see a former friend of mine, he’s going to beat me with a baseball bat. Bob’s daughter had a play during summer, and he was gone. I went in there, and I could hear the snickering and all that. They were sitting right in front of me. “Oh, look who it is! I wish she would just go away! Why is she even here?” And I know it’s because I’m helping Bobby.

By the same token, Nicole described the antagonistic actions of former friends who lived nearby: The neighbors won’t even look at me now. My husband and I were working in the yard in this shared flower bed, and I was standing with the trashcan on the driveway. The neighbors came out and told me to “get the hell off” of their property.

Sometimes such harassment came in less direct forms. Traci explained her experience with an aggressive neighbor: The one neighbor has been causing a lot of problems for me. After seeing my son and I out together, the neighbor sat outside my house. My nephews live down the street, and they said, “Why is your neighbor staring at your house like that?” I’ll never know what he was up to, but he just glared at me, so I was worried about what he was planning.

Other family members were not always aware of the source of harassment. In the words of Melvin, who received a threatening voice message on his cell phone hours after being out in public with his father, “They basically said, in frightening language, that they wanted to cause me bodily harm for still talking with my dad.” Similarly, Janice spoke about a mystery man vandalizing her property. Although the 53-year-old never caught anyone in the act, she remarked that “somebody, probably a guy, hit our mailbox and spray painted it.” Janice attributed this destruction to her openness about supporting her husband, a RSO:

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I think somebody doesn’t like that I’m doing this for him. That I’m supporting him, that I’m around him, that I say so. I’m just helping him do better. I shouldn’t have to deal with my stuff being ruined, for associating with somebody who is known as a sex offender.

More common, however, was the view that criminal justice officials incessantly troubled family members of RSOs. It should be noted that all partic­ ipants were supporting RSOs who were under some form of community supervision while attending treatment, which likely increased contact between relatives of RSOs and criminal justice officials. Like numerous family members, Lynn’s words illustrated this phenomenon: Once I started supporting my husband, the cops would drive slowly by our house, at least a few times a day. This lasted several months. When I would be outside, they would be sure to tell me that a registered sex offender lived where I was standing, saying I should be careful. I tell them, “He’s my husband!” They become hostile with me, try to tell me I should be inside the house, and simply drive off. I’m not the one who should be under the microscope.

As was the case for Lynn, participants who lived with RSOs were confronted with the most persistent torment. An example from Tara’s interview further highlighted this reality: Probation and parole came in my house. I had pictures of my family on the walls. My granddaughter, when she was small, she’s 20 now, and the other granddaughter. They said I had to have them taken away, because I wasn’t allowed to have them out. They did that to me, and I thought that was kind of puny. That upset me. I didn’t like it because it’s my home and my pictures. They weren’t bothering anybody. I don’t think pictures of clothed children are going to make an evil person out of my husband.

In a similar vein, Tabitha revealed how one probation and parole officer constantly subjected her to hostile remarks: I’m essentially a single mother, and I’ve been on my own. I haven’t had any help, and my husband can’t really help with all of his restrictions, and that is fine. I’m proud of being able to do everything myself. But the probation guy made a comment about my grass being too long, that I need to cut my grass. Oh my God! I’m thinking, “Why don’t you tell him that my gardener is on vacation with my maid, and if it bothers him that much, he can come over

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and mow my grass?” I was livid. I was livid that he would even make a comment about me. He’s always doing that, saying negative and rude things to me for no apparent reason.

And yet, several family members who did not live with RSOs allegedly received regular threats from criminal justice officials. Erin, who served as a support partner for her husband, was unable to live with him, because she lived 866 feet away from a daycare facility. The 24-year-old owned her own home, and her disability prevented her from staying in the cockroachinfested room that her husband was forced to rent. Although Erin received regular doses of harassment from local law enforcement, the most striking episode unfolded at a state university: My husband and I were in the school library. He can’t have any female friends at school. If they’re a student and they’re female, he can’t have relations with them or be friends or whatever. He was working on homework, and I see these two police officers. The officer was like, “Andrew, can you come with me?” And I’m like, “What’s going on?” The officer was like, “What’s he doing on the computer?” And I was like, “He was doing homework on Microsoft Office. He was doing homework.” He was like, “Ma’am, are you a student here?” I was like, “No, I’m his wife.” So the two officers suddenly became less concerned about my safety, but wanted identification. I showed them my license, and they started saying I needed to get out of the school, since I wasn’t a student.

Stigmatization Beyond the loss of relationships, deterioration of relationships, self-imposed isolation, and harassment, numerous relatives felt that they were stigmatized, as a direct result of their close associations with RSOs. In other words, family members believed that they were described, labeled, and regarded in certain ways by other individuals to show strong disapproval, because they served a supporting role for a group of highly defamed criminals. According to Patty, whose husband was convicted of aggravated sexual battery on a 13-year-old female, “It’s the strangest thing, but because I’m with Steve and encouraging his treatment, the contempt people have for him is transferred to me.” Taylor similarly realized, “Yes, my husband is a marked man, but I’m also branded now for accepting him and opening my home to him.” In the eyes of these family members, this courtesy stigmatization (Goffman 1963)—whereby marks of disgrace were assigned to them by others in society for maintaining intimate relationships with RSOs—was almost always the

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most powerful cost. As emphasized by Michelle, “My being labeled through Henry is the most damning consequence of supporting him.” The strength of this stigma was occasionally credited to its apparent ability to explain all of the aforementioned costs that came with helping RSOs. “Because of my labeling,” Wendy conveyed, “I have all of these problems with relationships and harassment.” Dominic, a 58-year-old insurance salesperson, was a father and support partner of a RSO. “That’s why I’m dealing with all of this shit,” he remarked, “because of the stigma I have now for being there for Paul.” And yet, for many relatives of RSOs, articulating the impact of being stigmatized was nearly impossible. Instead, these support partners focused on describing in some detail their courtesy stigmas. Some family members felt that they were viewed differently after deciding to serve as a support partner. “When I go out in public,” Ruby stated, “I feel like I’m considered unusual, and I get stared at. It’s like I’ve got 3 heads and 5 legs.” In the words of Melanie, who reflected upon her professional and personal relationships, “People don’t see me the same anymore. People see me as a monster.” Max, too, was confident that he had become stigmatized, especially after offering his brother a place to stay in his home: The disgrace that is thrown on you by having a brother on the registry is devastating, it’s depressing, and I don’t see how people get through it. You’re redflagged, you’re walking around with a flag on your head. You really are no longer the same to other people.

Other relatives of RSOs not only believed that their identities were spoiled, but they also began to question their personal characters. “It’s like everyone thinks I’m a dirty person,” Amelia remarked, “so maybe I’m not such a goodie-goodie anymore.” Similarly, Heather complained: It sucks because there is a stigma and a label attached to my brother and also by association to me. It’s like, “Ew, you have a pedophile in your family, and you must also be a pedophile.” I never thought of it like that before, but I guess that’s what happens when you get in deep with a hated person. Could I really have the potential to do something like that?

Discussion This chapter assessed the costs that family members of RSOs encountered while formally supporting their loved ones after conviction. Although relatives of other offenders may face the loss of relationships, deterioration of

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relationships, isolation, harassment, and stigmatization, these negative ramifications were greatly intensified for family members of RSOs who served as support partners. It became apparent from the narratives of support partners that family, friends, strangers, criminal justice officials, and communities often struggled to understand why their loved ones would engage in sexual lawbreaking and therefore why they would choose to support sexual lawbreakers after conviction. Loss and deterioration of relationships were near-universal problems identified by relatives of RSOs, as they attempted to help their loved ones reintegrate into society and become law-abiding persons. This is consistent with the experiences of many family members of RSOs who were not necessarily formally supporting them (Levenson and Tewksbury 2009; Tewksbury and Levenson 2009). However, this chapter revealed new information relevant to these phenomena. Specifically, the most commonly terminated and diminished relationships were those with newer and less intimate individuals. Nonetheless, the strongest associations often were completely destroyed or faded, too, which suggests that harm to relationships may be heightened for family members of RSOs. Isolation was another perceived cost of helping RSOs. This self-imposed seclusion included behaviors that RSOs (Burchfield and Mingus 2008; Levenson and Cotter 2005; Levenson et al. 2007; Robbers 2009; Tewksbury 2005, 2012) and their family members (Farkas and Miller 2007; Tewksbury and Levenson 2009) reported in other studies, such as limiting public activities and structuring time to interact with fewer individuals. At the same time, in their attempts to isolate themselves, numerous support partners found their homes to be places where they could be sheltered from encounters with other individuals and fully let their guards down. This parallels the work of Tewksbury (2013), who found that RSOs listed on university sex offender registries similarly utilized the classroom as refuge, where their feelings of vulnerability were largely minimized and some level of comfort arose. The extremes to which relatives of RSOs were willing to go to avoid others show how their challenges may be similar but are often greater in intensity than family members of other criminal offenders. It is important for community corrections officials and treatment providers to ensure that RSOs and their support partners have these “safety zones” or places where they can feel secure, escape stress, and engage in activities that are meaningful to them. This will help RSOs avoid backsliding into criminal behavior and reduce burnout among their support partners and families. Further, harassment was identified by many family members as a cost of helping RSOs. Although prior studies reported that threats and hostile

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actions were directed toward a substantial minority of family members of RSOs (Levenson and Tewksbury 2009; Tewksbury and Levenson 2009), this study shows that persistent torment was experienced by a majority of support partners. This made sense, as support partners presumably spent more time with RSOs in public than other family members, making them more susceptible to threats and intimidation. Participants who lived with RSOs were confronted with the most persistent torment. This matches the findings of Levenson and Tewksbury (2009), who found that those who lived with RSOs were more likely to experience threats and harassment by neighbors. Perhaps the most striking finding, however, was that criminal justice officials were viewed as the most common source of such harassment. Similarly, in Farkas and Miller’s (2007) study, probation and parole officers were blamed for constantly bothering and invading the privacy of family members. Criminal justice officials, specifically probation and parole officials, should be trained to be sensitive toward clients and individuals who are supporting RSOs, so as to avoid derailing their clients’ well-being and support. When stopping by or searching homes and other locations where places of refuge or safety zones may be established, special care should be taken to avoid tainting the environment. By unnecessarily adding stress and ridicule to areas of life once thought to be exempt from such, criminal justice officials may be reducing RSOs’ social support and subsequently increasing their likelihood of failing to successfully reintegrate. Lastly, many relatives of RSOs believed that they were stigmatized— described, labeled, and regarded in certain ways by other individuals to show strong disapproval—because they served supporting roles for a group of highly defamed criminals. This supports Goffman’s (1963) notion that there is a “tendency for stigma to spread from the stigmatized individual to his close connections” (p. 30). Indeed, because a family member who is serving as a support partner is necessarily “related through the social structure to a stigmatized individual,” the RSO, society at large may “treat both individuals in some respects as one” (Goffman 1963, 30). In the eyes of these support partners, this courtesy stigmatization was almost always the most powerful cost. Although family members of RSOs often reported experiencing social stigma (Farkas and Miller 2007; Levenson and Tewksbury 2009; Tewksbury and Levenson 2009), relatives who served as support partners may have endured stronger and more frequent stigmatization, which would explain their perceptions of such being so influential in their lives. As was the case with harassment, the fact that support partners are presumably closer to RSOs than other family members, because of their regular interactions with RSOs, may illustrate how courtesy stigmas

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are intensified for them. However, it may be more than mere closeness. Sigelman et al. (1991) found that male college students who had voluntary, rather than involuntary, relationships with gay males were more likely to be stigmatized. Kulik et al. (2008) also showed that employees who freely associated with stigmatized coworkers were treated negatively. Thus, because support partners are close to and voluntarily forge relationships with RSOs, courtesy stigmas seem to easily attach to them, whereas such stigmas may not as strongly attach or attach at all to other relatives who have no decision to make regarding their familial linkage. Moreover, relatives of RSOs who experienced stigma often reported that they were viewed differently than in the past, which is congruent with the perceptions of other recipients of courtesy stigmas, including family members of Alzheimer’s patients (MacRae 1999), relatives of individuals with mental illness (Corrigan and Miller 2004), and parents of children with disabilities (Green 2004). The costs of providing family support to RSOs were clearly numerous and widespread. Loss of personal relationships, weakening of associations, isolation, harassment, and stigmatization are not unique to family members of RSOs and may be experienced by relatives of other criminal offenders. However, based on interview data, it seems that family members of RSOs in this study who served as support partners for their loved ones experienced intensified challenges in comparison with many relatives of other criminal offenders as a result of their stronger stigmatization. This stigmatization was likely heightened as family, friends, criminal justice officials, and communities in the lives of support partners often struggled to understand why support partners’ loved ones would engage in sexual lawbreaking and therefore why support partners would devote time, energy, and other resources to support RSOs. The efforts of family members who are serving as support partners for RSOs are very likely to be met with heightened challenges and negative reactions from society, including criminal justice officials, relatives, and friends. This suggests that support partners may need social support of their own if they are to stay the course and continue to help RSOs with completing treatment and avoiding future offenses. Support partners should be offered and encouraged to participate in individual counseling sessions with treatment providers or other therapists. Also, sex offender treatment curriculums should allow support partners to meet and comingle with each other, in much the same way that RSOs meet and interact with each other in group-based sex offender treatment. In these ways, support partners may be afforded support and positive reinforcement that is noticeably absent from others in society who sever ties with, withdraw from relationships with, intimidate and torment, and discount them.

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Guest, Greg, Arwen Bunce, and Laura Johnson. 2006. “How Many Interviews Are Enough? An Experiment with Data Saturation and Variability.” Field Methods 18(1): 59–82. Klein, Shirley R., Geannina S. Bartholomew, and Jeff Hibbert. 2002. “Inmate Family Functioning.” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 46(1): 95–111. Kulik, Carol T., Hugh T.J. Bainbridge, and Christina Cregan. 2008. “Known by the Company We Keep: Stigma-by-Association Effects in the Workplace.” Academy of Management Review 33(1): 231–251. La Vigne, Nancy G., Christy A. Visher, and Jennifer Castro. 2004. Chicago Prisoners’ Experiences Returning Home. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. Levenson, Jill S., and Leo P. Cotter. 2005. “The Effect of Megan’s Law on Sex Offender Reintegration.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21(1): 49–66. Levenson, Jill S., David A. D’Amora, and Andrea L. Hern. 2007. “Megan’s Law and Its Impact on Community Re-entry for Sex Offenders.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 25(4): 587–602. Levenson, Jill S., and Andrea L. Hern. 2007. “Sex Offender Residence Restrictions: Unintended Consequences and Community Re-entry.” Justice Research and Policy 9(2): 59–73. Levenson, Jill S., and Richard Tewksbury. 2009. “Collateral Damage: Family Members of Registered Sex Offenders.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 34(1/2): 54–68. MacRae, Hazel. 1999. “Managing Courtesy Stigma: The Case of Alzheimer’s Disease.” Sociology of Health and Illness 21(1): 54–70. Mercado, Cynthia Calkins, Shea Alvarez, and Jill S. Levenson. 2008. “The Impact of Specialized Sex Offender Legislation on Community Re-entry.” Sexual Abuse 20(2): 188–205. Nelson, Marta, Perry Deess, and Charlotte Allen. 1999. The First Month Out: Post-incarceration Experiences in New York City. New York: Vera Institute of Justice. Robbers, Monica L.P. 2009. “Lifers on the Outside: Sex Offenders and Disintegrative Shaming.” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 53(1): 5–28. Sigelman, Carol K., Jennifer L. Howell, David P. Cornell, John D. Cutright, and Janine C. Dewey. 1991. “Courtesy Stigma: The Social Implications of Associating with a Gay Person.” Journal of Social Psychology, 131(1), 45–56. Tewksbury, Richard. 2004. “Experiences and Attitudes of Registered Female Sex Offenders.” Federal Probation 68(3): 30–33. Tewksbury, Richard. 2005. “Collateral Consequences of Sex Offender Registration.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 21(1): 67–81. Tewksbury, Richard. 2012. “Stigmatization of Sex Offenders.” Deviant Behavior 33(8): 606–623. Tewksbury, Richard. 2013. “Sex Offenders and Campus-Based Sex Offender Registration: Stigma, Vulnerability, Isolation, and the Classroom as Refuge.” Journal of Qualitative Criminology and Criminal Justice 1(2): 221–242.

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11 Partners of Incarcerated Men: Questioning Caring Stereotypes Karen Souza, Caroline Lanskey, Lucy Markson and Friedrich Lösel

Family Support in Desistance from Crime In England, families have been described as “a key source of support for prisoners during their time in custody and on their release” (HM Inspectorate of Prisons 2016, 3). Research has also shown that strong family bonds can be effective in steering offenders off the path of crime (Brunton-Smith and McCarthy 2016; Markson et al. 2015; Naser and La Vigne 2006). These findings can be explained by concepts of social bonding (Hirschi 1969), social capital (Becker 1964), desistance (Sampson and Laub 2003), and resilience (Lösel and Bender 2003). Recognising the potential role that families can play in offender rehabilitation, the former National Offender Management Service (NOMS) identified the “Children and Families Pathway” as one of seven key areas of need that should be addressed to reduce reoffending. More recently, the Ministry of Justice (2017) published Lord Farmer’s independent review on The Importance of Strengthening Prisoners’ Family Ties to Prevent Reoffending and Reduce Intergenerational Crime. In the report, Lord Farmer underscored the need to revisit the significance of families in K. Souza (*) · C. Lanskey · L. Markson · F. Lösel  Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] F. Lösel  Institute of Psychology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hutton and D. Moran (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family, Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12744-2_11

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prison reform efforts to tackle offender rehabilitation and their desistance from crime. He argued that this is important for two reasons. First, parental imprisonment is strongly linked to future offending by children of those in prison. Farrington et al.’s (1996) landmark study was cited in the review, which found that around three-quarters of convicted parents had children who would go on to commit crimes themselves. The second reason for the emphasis on families is that studies of desistance consistently show that reoffending rates are significantly lower for people who maintain contact with their partners and families during their prison sentence compared to those who do not (e.g. May et al. 2008; Richards and McWilliams 1996; see also Woolf Report 1991). Consequently, Lord Farmer concluded that “good family relationships are indispensable” to the government’s plans to revolutionise prisons as “purposeful centres of prisoner reform” (see Ministry of Justice 2016, 3). He added that this would require not just additional funding and resources, but also a cultural change within prisons and among governors and prison staff as well. For those in prison, there are clear benefits to maintaining contact with their families in the community. For instance, families provide a connection to the outside world (Christian et al. 2006). They may also provide material goods such as cash and basic care items (Braman 2004; Fishman 1990). Many prisoners rely on their families (especially partners) for psychological and/or emotional support during and after their prison sentence (Lanskey et al., in press; Phillips and Lindsay 2011; Western et al. 2015). However, the assumption that prisoners’ families are willing and able to fulfil a supportive role through and after the imprisonment arguably places a strong burden of responsibility on them and may put those who are already vulnerable at greater risk. Indeed, a plethora of research suggests that the imprisonment of a loved one imposes a myriad of practical, financial, social, and emotional difficulties for the family (Braman 2004; Christian et al. 2006; Lee et al. 2014; Wildeman et al. 2012). Imprisonment can also disrupt the family structure and the relationships within them (Markson et al. 2015). Many parents are forced to assume the roles and responsibilities of both mother and father to their children during the imprisonment. Demands are also placed on families to maintain their relationship with their loved ones in prison through regular visits, letters, and telephone calls, which can be stressful, burdensome, and costly (Braman 2004; Christian 2005; Comfort 2008). While the instrumental role that families can play in offender rehabilitation, re-entry, resettlement, and desistance is well established, how this

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resource can be leveraged and mobilised is still unclear. One way in which families as a resource have been encouraged is to ensure that families have access to frequent and good quality contact during imprisonment (see HM Inspectorate of Prisons 2016). To this end, various strategies for fostering partner and family ties have been recommended. This includes improvements in prison visitation policies and facilities, provisions of support on parenting and also family and couples’ therapies, and the development of partnerships with voluntary sector organisations that support families and disadvantaged populations. Yet while such initiatives are worthwhile, they may not be entirely effective. For one, current provisions for links with families vary considerably across the prison estate. Moreover, heavy reliance on kin support may be over-optimistic, as family support for prisoners is not universal, often fragmented and fraught with difficulties (Codd 2002, 337). And for families in which the parent or partner was abusive or had substance abuse problems, their removal from the home may be a relief (Comfort 2008; Lanskey et al., in press; Travis et al. 2014) and the families’ non-involvement justified. Despite research evidence of the challenges and difficulties that prisoners’ partners and families face, criminal justice policies often refer to them as a source of support for incarcerated individuals. Plans to increase family involvement with prisoners, therefore, require a more in-depth look into the families’ lives. Importantly, we must consider how imprisonment shifts the roles and responsibilities of family members, and the impact that it has on their social and economic standing. A deeper appreciation is also needed for the families’ related struggles and the coping strategies they employ so that support services can be tailored to target their specific needs. The next section discusses the make-up of prisoners’ families, focusing especially on partners, in terms of the roles that they fulfil and the challenges that they often face during and after the enforced separation.

Prisoners’ Families Because Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) does not routinely collect information on inmates’ relationship statuses, it is unclear precisely how many spouses and partners are affected. It is estimated that each year, around 200,000 children in England and Wales experience parental imprisonment (Williams et al. 2012), which means that a sizeable number of these partners are also parents. We also know that there are currently around 80,158 adults in prison in England and Wales, and the majority

206     K. Souza et al.

(i.e. 95%) are men between the ages of 21 and 49 (Ministry of Justice 2017). It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that most partners of prisoners are women around the same age. This is reflected in the research literature in which references to prisoners’ partners almost invariably speak of women (Codd 2002, 334; Fishman 1990), and oftentimes, these women are the mothers of the prisoners’ children (Markson et al. 2015). Few studies have focused on men who are affected by female partner imprisonment (for exceptions see Einat et al. 2015; Rivard 2011) or on same-sex partners of prisoners. Although this chapter also focuses on imprisoned fathers and their female partners, it should be acknowledged that male partners of female (and male) prisoners are an understudied group.

The Concept of “Family” The traditional conceptualisation of “family” in Western cultures comprises a man and a woman who are married and live together, along with their children, in the same household (Wuest 2001). Nowadays, however, this concept of a “nuclear family” tends to be less normative. For instance, national statistics show that the number of marriages in England and Wales has declined significantly since the 1970s (Office for National Statistics 2017). This may be due, in part, to an increase in the number of people cohabiting or waiting until they are older to marry. These unmarried partners also encompass same-sex couples who could not legally marry until relatively recently (see Office for National Statistics 2017). At the same time, there has also been a sharp increase in divorces, such that the country’s divorce rate has nearly doubled in four decades from 22 to 42% (Office for National Statistics 2013). This means that the number of single parents as well as blended (or step) families has likely risen as well. These examples of the various iterations of “family” highlight the complexities of family structures and dynamics seen today. In the absence of official data on prisoners’ families, based on research so far, one can speculate that the above figures may be comparable to, or perhaps even intensified within, the prison population. For instance, research suggests that men who have a history of incarceration are less likely to marry or cohabit (Braman 2002). Furthermore, statistics show that approximately 45% of prisoners lose contact with their families while in prison, and 22% of prisoners who are married become separated or divorced (House of Commons, Home Affairs Committee 2005, 225). Indeed, long periods of separation, limited contact, and various stress factors related to a partner’s

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imprisonment can place great strain on a couple’s relationship, which can subsequently result in loss of intimacy and closeness between partners, and erode relationships over time (Arditti et al. 2003; Hairston 2001; Lanskey et al., in press; Mazza 2002; Wolcott and Hughes 1999).

Theorising Women’s Caring and Social Roles Women are often characterised as “natural” caregivers (Barnett 2004; Gilligan 1982; Graham 1983). This “ethics of care” (Gilligan 1982) is seen especially in patriarchal societies in which there is an ideological expectation of women to provide care and support to vulnerable groups such as children (Garey et al. 2002), the elderly (Medjuck et al. 1992; Ron 2009), and the sick (MacRae 1995), who are typically family members. For the most part, this work tends to be informal, unpaid, unacknowledged, and unsupported (Barnett 2004; Garey et al. 2002), yet it is arguably no less demanding, difficult, or challenging than formal paid employment. Nevertheless, the roles of “mother”, “homemaker”, and “caregiver” are often seen as less worthy than that of the “working woman” (Wuest 2001). This mindset perpetuates gender inequality which can have negative effects: it can strip women of their independence, neglect their personal wants and needs, restrict their aspirations, and ultimately devalue women’s roles in society. Regarding prisoners, Codd (2000) posits that gendered expectations of female partners to maintain the household while their men are in prison increase women’s feelings of obligation to their partners. This, in turn, can create a sense of dependency in the women. Thus, as Wuest argues, “theoretical understandings of caring and caregiving fail to account for the complex reality of women’s experiences” (2001, 169).

Feminist Perspectives Criminal justice research and policies tend to be framed within men’s experiences (Solomon et al. 2004), likely because men are vastly overrepresented in the prison population. However, given the profound impact of imprisonment on families, feminist scholars have long critiqued and worked to address this “malestream” focus (Cain 1986; Gelsthorpe and Morris 1988; Smart 1976) and offer a useful perspective to reframe the discussion on female partners. The primary goal of feminist scholarship is to address social inequality (Allen and Jaramillo-Sierra 2015, 94). Therefore, the core target populations for feminist theories in general are women who are disadvantaged, under-represented, or under-served.

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Employing a feminist approach to studying prisoners’ families has several advantages. First, feminist perspectives draw attention to the dialectics of inequality and support the development of strategies to challenge such disempowering conditions (Acker et al. 1983; Allen 2000; Lather 1991). As previously mentioned, expectations of women to be caregivers to vulnerable individuals can perpetuate gender disparity. Second, because feminism focuses on issues that challenge mainstream ideals, it is useful for studying prisoners and their families who are often perceived as having deviated from the norms of dominant groups in society (Peters et al. 2008, 375). In this vein, a feminist perspective is also useful for studying “non-traditional” families such as unmarried and cohabiting couples, as well as families comprised of typically marginalised groups, such as same-sex partners. Third, feminism considers the function and effects of inequality at not only the micro (individual)-level, but also the macro (systems)-level as well. Thus, it recognises gender disparity not as an isolated problem, but a collective problem that is attributable to broader social policies. There are essentially four fundamental principles underlying feminist family concepts (Allen and Jaramillo-Sierra 2015, 94). The first principle centres on the power differential between men and women. This is observed, for example, in “traditional” households in which men are the breadwinners and women the homemakers/caregivers. Second is the recognition that gender inequality is often unfair and may be harmful to individuals, families, and society. The third principle proposes that because gender inequality is socially and culturally constructed, it is amenable to change. Lastly, feminist-oriented family theorists endorse social changes that promote fair and respectful arrangements between men and women in families. In order to advocate for such change, it is, therefore, necessary to gain insight into the lives of women, in terms of their situations, circumstances, needs, and experiences, and how this impacts their role within their families. While we acknowledge that a feminist perspective only covers a limited part of the problems faced by female partners of prisoners, it is worthwhile to apply such a view to a female minority group that has not yet been addressed by the “mainstream” feminist literature. While research on prisoners’ partners is not new, there are gaps in the literature. First, studies have predominantly focused on prisoners’ wives (e.g. Carlson and Cervera 1991; Fishman 1990; Morris 1965), yet as discussed earlier, many prisoners are in unmarried relationships, and these may be qualitatively different to the marital relationships and experiences of prisoners’ partners in the late twentieth century. In addition, ex-partners are hardly mentioned in the literature but are a vital part of families in which children

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experience parental imprisonment. Second, whereas most studies have been cross-sectional, few have provided a longitudinal view of partners’ lives from before to during and after the imprisonment. This approach is useful for identifying and relating past and present experiences to outcomes. Third, research tends to highlight the negative impact of imprisonment on partners (e.g. Carlson and Cervera 1991; Hairston 1991). However, evidence indicates that imprisonment can also improve the quality of family relationships, for example, by removing the stresses and strains that burdened them (Wolff and Draine 2004). Therefore, a counterbalanced focus on positive aspects of imprisonment, although counter-intuitive, can also be informative.

The Research Study The research on which this chapter is based is the Families and Imprisonment Research (FAIR) study. This is an ongoing prospective longitudinal study of male prisoners in England and their female partners and children during and after the man’s imprisonment. The analysis presented here has three aims, which are to: (1) examine the relationship between heterosexual parents who are separated by the man’s imprisonment; (2) identify the women’s economic, health, and social circumstances; and (3) explore the women’s experiences of the men’s imprisonment and resettlement. Of particular interest is the shift in roles and associated responsibilities for the women, the related challenges and hardships they faced, any positive experiences they had, and the support networks that they drew on. Comparisons of before, during, and after prison are made to examine changes in the partners’ situations and experiences over time.

Research Sample and Method The prisoners were recruited from eight prisons in England and their partners and children were subsequently invited to take part. Data were gathered from 54 imprisoned fathers, 49 mothers who were the men’s current or ex-partners, and 69 biological and stepchildren. Given the focus of this chapter on (ex-)partners’ experiences, only the parents’ data were analysed and presented herein. The fathers’ sentences ranged from 10 months to fiveand-a-half years. Their average sentence length was 2.16 years (SD = 1.13) and they had already served an average of 13.23 months (SD = 10.88). On average, the men had 14.34 prior convictions (SD = 22.14), ranging from

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0 to 136. For 44.4% of the men, this was their first prison sentence. Onethird of these men were serving sentences for drug offences, while 20.8% were in prison for violent offences and 12.5% for burglary (compared to recurrent inmates who were currently serving sentences for violence (33.3%), burglary (26.7%), and robbery (13.3%)). Semi-structured interviews were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data on the families’ relationships, social and economic circumstances, health and well-being, and experiences during and after the father’s prison sentence. The data were collected in two stages between February 2010 and June 2011. The first interviews with the men and their (ex-)partners and children were conducted within approximately four months before the men’s release. The second interviews were conducted within approximately six months after his release (five women were lost at Time 2 due to attrition). The following discussion is based on the accounts of 49 women who took part in both interviews. To protect the research participants’ anonymity, single initials are used in place of their names in the narratives. The women were between 19 and 45 years old (M = 28.63, SD = 7.63). The majority were White or White British (85.7%), and the remainder described themselves as Black or Black British (8.2%), Gypsy or Traveller (4.1%), and mixed race (2.0%). Twenty-five per cent of the women had a previous conviction, mostly for relatively minor offences (e.g. drunk and disorderly and driving offences), and one had served 18 months in prison. The couples had an average of two children together (ranging from 0 to 5), and the children’s mean age was 5.58 years (SD = 4.02) at the time of the first interviews.

Research Findings Descriptive statistics were computed to describe the women’s economic, health, and social situations and circumstances before, during, and after their (ex-)partner’s imprisonment. A thematic analysis of the qualitative data was also performed to identify recurring themes within the textual data which were used to supplement the quantitative findings.

Relationships and Shifting Roles and Responsibilities Before Prison The majority (79.6%) of parents in our sample were in a romantic relationship before the father’s imprisonment, and eight of these couples were married. The rest were in a relationship but not married (three couples

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were engaged). The length of the partners’ relationships ranged from seven months to 20.5 years, with the average couple having been together for around six-and-a-half years (SD = 4.82). Just under two-thirds of the couples were living together prior to his imprisonment. These findings are in line with the above-mentioned statistics on current trends of family compositions. When asked to describe their relationship before the father went to prison, the women’s experiences were mixed. There were some who viewed their relationship positively, and their responses ranged from “absolutely perfect” to “just alright”. The women attributed the positive connection mainly to good communication (e.g. “We don’t bottle up problems, we sort them out”) and his involvement as a parent (e.g. “He’s a great dad and partner. He helps with the kids and housework”). In contrast, women who viewed their relationship negatively stated that his dishonesty, alcohol or drug use, infidelity and criminality were major sources of conflict between them. A 41-year-old mother of two described, “I love him to bits. He’s the best person you can meet. But his drugs, it’s a big issue. He’s done certain things”. Another 20-year-old mother of one stated, “Some days it’s fine. All depends on him, his mood. It’s his fifth time in jail since we’ve been together”. For several families, the arrival of a new baby created additional strain on the couple’s relationship (e.g. “After [R] was born, he didn’t help much. I was tired. We argued”). Some relationships were also marked by violence, and this came from both sides (e.g. “We were both violent at the start”. “He has got a nasty temper, but he said he’s going to change so I’m hoping he will”). The smaller proportion (20.4%) of parents who were ex-partners stayed in contact because the man was the father of the children. Their relationships had lasted between two-and-a-half months and 15 years (the average was around six-and-a-half years, SD = 3.58). Prior to the imprisonment, arguments stemming from substance use and domestic violence were a common theme for these families. The most prevalent concern that the women divulged about her relationship with her ex-partner was infidelity. One ex-partner stated, “He was always jealous. Every time someone came to the door, he accused me of seeing someone else”. In some cases, verbal and physical abuses were involved (e.g. “He took advantage, thought he could walk over me. He was arrested three times because of violence towards me”).

During Prison For many of the couples who were in a romantic relationship, the enforced separation of the parents shifted the women’s roles and responsibilities. Sixty

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per cent of mothers reported being the primary carer of the couple’s children before his imprisonment, while 32.4% stated that the father shared equal responsibility of the children, and 8.1% reported that the fathers had been the primary carer. This indicates an abrupt shift in parental roles for 40% of the mothers who took over the responsibility of primary caregiver upon the father’s imprisonment. This corresponds with other research which has found that for the majority of fathers in prison, the children’s mother became the primary caregiver of their children (Austin et al. 2002). The mothers’ new role as lone parents presented various challenges with the children. One mother reported “a lot of crying and anger from the kids” and was struggling to “keep everything normal without having a breakdown”. This mother’s account was echoed in many (89.7%) other partners who were having similar experiences. In contrast, of the parents who were no longer together when the father went to prison, 80% of the mothers indicated that they were the primary carers of the children before, while 20% said that both parents played an equal part. Most of the single mothers mentioned the emotional and behavioural impact that his departure had on the children. One mother recounted, “It caused a lot of upset with [A] and affected his schooling and temper. His friends know about dad. [A] is very angry and embarrassed now that he’s found out”. Yet another mother described her experience as “a worst nightmare, watching what the children are going through”. For the most part, the women had tried to get along with their ex-partner for the children’s sake (e.g. “We get along still because of the children. We talk all the time. I take the kids to visit. He’s not a bad person, just an idiot sometimes”).

After Release Of the couples who were in a romantic relationship, the majority (31 out of 39) stayed together after his release. Just over half of the parents were living together again when he returned to the community. This relatively low number of cohabiting parents after release was due to several reasons: some men had returned to prison or could not return home due to licence conditions, and some couples were “taking things slow”. For the 31 couples whose relationship continued after his release, 80.6% of the women said that things had improved. One partner described that the relationship was “a lot better than when he went away”. She attributed this to an anger management course that he had taken in prison

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(e.g. “He’s calmer, hasn’t lost his temper. He’s easier to talk to”). Another partner expressed, “He’s a lot more home and family orientated than before. We’re not rowing as much, which is good. He plays with his daughters”. Despite the improved relationship, for some, the transition was not easy: “In the beginning, it was a challenge. I think he was quite isolated in himself, but he came back to his old self and now we’re fine, apart from him not having a job”. In fact, one partner lost the support of her family: “My family won’t talk to me because I’m with him. I’ve had abusive messages from them”. On the whole, however, the father’s return was positive for the families. Improved communication, spending more time together, and a general “calmer” atmosphere were common experiences for these families. For the other 19.4% of couples, their relationship had been “up and down” since his return. One partner describes, “It was fine to start with. He was away a long time. I think he thought things would be different. He was frustrated because he couldn’t find work. He’s only got 50% use of his right arm. He had a few drinks, started gambling to get some money and losing. He goes into self-destruct mode”. This partner’s experience captured the many difficulties that ex-prisoners often face during re-entry and resettlement—that is, unemployment, substance use, and financial problems.

Economic, Health, and Social Circumstances Employment and Training Overall, the women can be described as being in precarious socio-economic situations, insofar as they had low education levels, were mostly unemployed, and had household incomes that fell below the poverty threshold (see Office of National Statistics 2017). As Table 11.1 shows, most of the women had finished school, but few had achieved further educational qualifications, and almost all were unemployed before, during, and after prison. The women’s average household income had decreased significantly while the man was in prison compared to before and after, suggesting that the men were the primary source of income for these families. This corresponds with research which has found that some families become economically worse off when the man is incarcerated (Arditti et al. 2003; Braman 2002). To illustrate, Lanskey et al. (2015) found that 79% of families were living below the poverty threshold before the fathers’ imprisonment (measured at 60% of median weekly income before housing costs). This percentage increased to 91% while the father was in prison, and then decreased to 75% after his release.

214     K. Souza et al. Table 11.1  Women’s socioeconomic situations

Finished school Employed Weekly household income (£) On benefits

Before prison % M (SD )

During prison % M (SD )

After prison % M (SD )

76.3

–

–

31.6

21.1 241.08 (119.76)

97.4

23.7 212.84 (114.31)

181.57 (82.60)

97.4

97.4

The women’s narratives indicated that many were interested in pursuing an education and employment. However, childcare obligations were cited as a major barrier (e.g. “I wish. I have no time. It’s stressful being a full-time mum”). Job seeking difficulties were also frequently mentioned (e.g. “I’m having difficulties finding a job. I’ve sent out a lot of CVs and just waiting on phone calls”). This corresponds with research which has found that the high demands of being a single mother as a result of the father’s imprisonment hinder women’s ability to work outside of the home and earn an income (Austin et al. 2002). The fact that the women lacked educational qualifications and work experience exacerbates the problem, as this may limit her employability and restrict her earning potential. Mothers with young children may additionally face challenges in having to weigh the practicality of childcare costs against the feasibility of pursuing the types of low-skilled and low-paying jobs that reflect her level of education and work experience. As a result, almost all of the women in our sample were on social welfare benefits, which is not uncommon (Sugie 2012).

Women’s Health To ascertain the health status of the women, we asked whether they had any physical and mental health conditions before, during, and after their (ex-) partner’s imprisonment, and to describe their symptoms if they did. In addition, the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12; Goldberg 1978) was used which is a standardised measure of current psychological well-being. It contains 12 questions which are rated on four-point Likert scales, with scores ranging from 0 to 36 (high scores indicate problems). The women were also invited to disclose (yes/no) whether they had used any illicit drugs

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before, during, and after their (ex-)partner’s imprisonment, and to specify the number of units of alcohol they consumed on an average day. As Table 11.2 shows, just over one-quarter of the women in our sample had physical health problems while the man was in prison. Over one-third of the women disclosed mental health problems and this number increased significantly after his release. For many women, her mental health condition was made worse by the man’s current situation (e.g. “I’ve had to return to counselling and increase my medication”). The women employed various strategies to help them cope with her (ex-)partner’s imprisonment. Some women used a daily routine to keep themselves busy (e.g. looking after the children and family pets, household chores, taking children to playgroups, painting/decorating). Twenty-two per cent of the women were taking medication for various physical ailments (e.g. dystonia, asthma, sleep problems, coeliac disease, hip and back pain, cervical cancer) and mental health problems (e.g. depression, anxiety). Five women disclosed that they had been to counselling and eight had received psychiatric outpatient care. Overall, the women perceived that their general health (as measured by the GHQ) had declined from during to after prison. However, the women’s self-reported alcohol consumption and illegal drug use had decreased significantly from before to during and after his sentence, which is positive. Table 11.2  Women’s health

Physical health problems Mental health problems GHQ total score Alcohol units per day Illegal drug use *p