Who Pays: The Familial Debt of Incarceration

• In Event: Prison Working Group: The intersection of family and incarceration: Mental health, parenting, and familly dynamics

Abstract

An abundance of research has exposed the complex ways that the carceral state extends outside prison itself, drawing in families and communities in consequential ways. One of the most consequential ways is through carceral debt, as families and kin provide an array of support to loved ones in prison. Particularly in the U.S. context, the carceral state relies on these forms of familial support to sustain itself. In doing so, it reconfigures relations of care and parents’ identities as caretakers, while also draining them of much-needed resources. This paper explores the resources that flow from families into the penal system--and the racialized and gendered dimensions of this financial extraction.

Based on U.S. data collected across New York state, the paper analyzes the many forms of financial support that families and communities provide to loved ones in prison. These data were drawn from an original survey carried out with over 500 New Yorkers with incarcerated family members and 200 qualitative interviews with a subsample of them—all carried out by NYU’s Prison Education Program Research Lab. Guided by a distinct conceptualization of the social webs of debt, the paper analyzes the concrete ways familial debt draws coveted resources away from kin networks. It documents the different streams of resources that flow from families into penal institutions: from commissary costs to telecommunication expenses to legal fees to child support to visitation costs. It quantifies these debt streams, revealing that New Yorkers spend an average of $21,000/year to support incarcerated loved ones. And it explores the reciprocal effects of carceral debt on family and community life, tracing how debt is managed in familial networks and is entangled in familial relations of care. It concludes by drawing out the larger implications of familial debt for understandings of the afterlives of incarceration.

Authors

• Lynne Haney, New York University

• Lynne Haney, New York University