The Carceral Shift: Understanding and Theorizing Women’s Invisible Labor in the Aftermath of Crime

• In Event: When Families Pay: Carceral Harms, Financial Debt, and Neoliberal Power

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). Yet, there is a limited amount of feminist theorizing in the scholarship on prisoners’ and offenders’ families (Hannem 2011). Recently, Gueta and Condry (2024) have looked at the important intersection between mothers of victims and those of offenders and pointed out the need to theorize their shared experiences of accountability, burden of care, and coping and resistance through a feminist lens. The current paper adds to this new line of research to understand holistically women’s experiences as family members and intimates in the aftermath of crime. 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, Japan’s patriarchal and capitalistic values put the gendered and unequal distribution of offender care into sharp relief (Kita 2023). This paper argues that there is a pressing need to challenge the practices by the male-dominated criminal justice system to exploit women’s labor in the aftermath of crime and urges scholars to conceptualize the expectations for women to work the “carceral shift”.

Author

• Mari Kita, Eastern Illinois University