Carceral Welfare: The Familial Debt of Incarceration

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

Abstract

Social scientists have long studied how state welfare and penal systems are linked together. This scholarship tends to examine how the negative effects of incarceration “spill over” into families to undermine their wellbeing and welfare. In this paper, we reverse the direction of causality, examining how families and communities are brought into the carceral state in deeply consequential ways. Centering on the role of carceral debt, we reveal how families provide an array of welfare supports to loved ones in prison—and how the carceral state relies on these forms of familial welfare to sustain itself. In doing so, the state reconfigures relations of care and parents’ identities as caretakers, while also draining them of much-needed resources. Our paper thus explores the resources that flow from families and into the penal system--and the racialized and gendered dimensions of this financial extraction.

Based on data collected across New York state, we analyze the many forms of welfare that families and communities provide to loved ones in prison. These data were drawn from an original survey carried out with over 475 New Yorkers with incarcerated family members and 75 qualitative interviews with a subsample of them—all carried out by NYU’s Prison Education Program Research Lab. The paper analyzes 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 welfare streams, revealing that New Yorkers spend an average of over $8,500/year to support incarcerated loved ones. In addition, the paper explores the reciprocal effects of carceral debt on family and community life, tracing how debt is managed in familial networks and 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

• Tommaso Bardelli, New York University

• Zachary Gillespie, New York University

• Jacob Hood, New York University