The effects of incarceration on family and community life

• In Event: Prisoners and Prisons (Panel 3 of 3)

Abstract

This presentation reviews trends and advances on the effects of incarceration on family and community life, focusing on research completed within the last ten years and identifying four major challenges to progress. It argues that incarceration is a consequential experience that fundamentally alters family life and communities for millions of people. In some places, most notably the United States, incarceration is central for understanding the lives of many families and their broader communities. That said, the very nature of incarceration in the United States presents significant challenges for researchers who hope to isolate the effects of incarceration from broader experiences of deep poverty, entrenched racism, social marginality, and vulnerability throughout the life course. This presentation thus centers on the murky complications and thorny measurement issues that prevent a full accounting of incarceration’s influence on family and community life, discussing four distinct challenges: 1) measuring incarceration well, 2) questions around who counts as family and community, 3) selection issues and systems of overlapping disadvantage that make it difficult to isolate incarceration effects, and 4) issues of generalizability across contexts.

Author

• Sara Wakefield, Rutgers University