My Brother’s Keeper – and Doctor, and Social Worker: The Repercussive Effects of Incarceration on Family Health and Well-being

• In Event: Public Health Approaches to Incarceration

Abstract

The dramatic escalation of the United States’ incarceration rates over the last four decades has spurred new fields of research on the impact of punitive confinement on health and on family relationships. In this talk, I address the intersection of these fields by analyzing how incarceration affects the health of not only the individual behind bars, but also of that person’s close relatives and romantic partners. Drawing on an ethnography of a case management intervention for HIV-positive people with criminal justice involvement, I analyze how parents, siblings, partners, and children of incarcerated and community-supervised people recognize and respond to their loved ones’ needs in the face of diminished medical, social, and legal resources. In this process of trying to compensate for a lack of government-funded services, family members frequently jeopardize their own physical and mental health through elevated stress and anxiety and decreased time for adequate sleep and exercise. Through a discussion of what I call the “repercussive effects” of incarceration on family well-being, I argue that the broader social and public health costs of contemporary U.S. criminal justice policies have been largely ignored.

Author

• Megan Comfort, RTI International