Divided House: Domesticity and Marginality in a Carceral State

• In Event: The Consequences of Criminal Justice System Contact for Families and Children

Abstract

Though mass incarceration-era interventions separate disadvantaged families on a vast scale, scholarship on domesticity has not fully considered how forcible separation shapes domestic life at the margins. Analyzing data from 1,112 households separated by imprisonment, I find that the forcible separation of prisoners’ households produces paradoxically exposed forms of intimacy during (and long after) incarceration. Divided families stretch scarce domestic resources across home and carceral spaces. Enacting intimate moments and relationships in institutional spaces during imprisonment (and well-surveilled homes after release) distorts family functioning in ways that promote exploitation and abuse. The partitioning of the domestic world also shifts the nature and division of domestic labor, with women picking up the work left undone by their partners and that which is abdicated by the state.

Author

• Tasseli McKay, Duke University