“For a Moment I Feel Free”: Witnessing, Visibility and Care During Familial Prison Visits

• In Event: Roundtable: The Experience of Incarceration

Abstract

Prison visitation has been studied as an opportunity to enhance incarcerated people’s social ties to the outside world, decrease disciplinary infractions inside prison and reduce recidivism upon release from confinement. Important questions remain, however, about the mechanisms behind these outcomes, and the potential for visitation to foster other beneficial impacts such as transcendence beyond the dehumanizing aspects of the prison environment. Analyzing in-depth interviews with men incarcerated in the Northeastern United States, we situate visits within the broader context of the incarcerated person and family members’ societal standings, studying how familial interactions provide reprieve from the day-to-day harshness of prison, foster a sense of belonging and visibility in the family and connections to society at large. Our findings center the emotional and humanizing elements of prison visitation, thus extending research about the qualities of moral and humanistic prisons and providing an intersectional and critical theoretical framework for interrogating dimensions of prison visitation. We analyze the concept of witnessing, demonstrating how family members use visitation to literally, and symbolically view and connect with their incarcerated loved ones, thereby promoting wellbeing, documenting and ameliorating harms and providing care.

Authors

• Johnna Christian, University of La Verne

• Shenique Thomas-Davis, City University of New York