Relationship Instability and Income Packaging: How Partner Incarceration Reshapes Economic Opportunity

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 7. Inequality and the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

While partner incarceration is an especially severe form of union disruption, it represents a common way that relationship trajectories can structure mothers’ economic lives in significant and distinct ways—alongside other kinds of trajectories like union dissolution and continuous partnership. This paper is interested in examining how the carceral state reorganizes women’s economic behavior as they navigate additional financial obligations, addressing their incarcerated partners’ needs, and keep the household afloat overall. Furthermore, I argue that partner incarceration should be included within the literature on how changing family circumstances influence how women generate income.

How do relationship trajectories—partner incarceration, union dissolution, and continuous partnership—shape the income packaging approaches that socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers use to make ends meet financially? Using longitudinal data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (Years 1, 3, and 5), I run latent class analysis and multinomial logistic regressions to understand how different relationship trajectories predict how mothers income package. In this paper, income packaging refers to the combination of different income-generating strategies that mothers rely on. In exploring how combinations of strategies make up distinct classes and how those classes differ across relationship trajectories, I rely on intersectionality as a theory and a methodological approach.

The findings of this study illustrate how the structure of low-income mothers’ income packages can look especially different depending on their relationship trajectory. Mothers who experienced partner incarceration were likelier to rely on a more polarized and constrained income package profile while mothers with continuous partnerships opted for simpler income packages. Mothers who experienced union dissolution tended to have a similar approach as the mothers who experienced partner incarceration, only they had more flexibility in addressing their changing circumstances.

Author

• Tanajia Moye-Green, Stanford University