Women’s Labor in the Aftermath of Crime: Toward a Feminist Theorizing of Offenders' Families’ Experiences

• In Event: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Justice-Involved Populations

Abstract

Crime becomes a women’s issue once it touches the lives of families and intimates. Studies have shown it is the women who bear the brunt of an individual’s criminal justice contact, from supporting incarcerated loved ones to operating de-fact halfway houses to caring for the family left behind (Christian 2005; Comfort 2003; Condry 2007; Fishman 1990; Richie 2002). However, there is a limited amount of feminist theorizing in the scholarship on prisoners’ and offenders’ families (Hannem 2011). Drawing on the author’s ethnography of Japanese families of offenders, this paper attempts to theorize the embeddedness of women’s indispensable but invisible labor in the criminal justice process. While the concentration of offender care responsibilities on women is seemingly a common experience in many societies, including the US and the UK, Japan’s patriarchal capitalism puts women’s unpaid work of offender care into sharp relief (Kita 2023). This paper argues that it is crucial to employ a feminist lens in examining not only the experiences of offenders’ and prisoners’ families but also the criminal justice system’s reliance on women’s labor to control crime. Moreover, the importance of broadening the horizons of feminist criminology to recognize the gendered nature of offenders’ families’ experiences is discussed.

Author

• Mari Kita, Eastern Illinois University