Prison and the Family
‘Prison’ and ‘the family’ are apparently incongruous concepts. ‘Prison’ is the outcome of a sentencing decision taken about an individual who is punished through separation from mainstream society, and by extension through disconnection from prior living arrangements and companions. Although the incarcerated may form new attachments to prison life itself, the basic function of imprisonment is delivered precisely through this separation and disconnection. Family is different. Long viewed as one of the essential and universal units of society, although ‘family’ traditionally means persons who are related by blood, marriage or adoption, less conventionally it also conveys a sense of ‘that climate that one ‘comes home to’ …[a] network of sharing and commitments, …regardless of blood, legal ties, adoption or marriage’ (Franklin 1990, 1029). Although family life may not always deliver these things, the concept of family is all about collectivity and togetherness, closeness and home—the very things which are broken apart by incarceration.
Prison and the family sit in an uneasy relationship. The fact of imprisonment of a family member disrupts the family unit from which they are removed, and the prison makes its presence felt far beyond its own walls, through its carceral influence on the family, and on the wider communities within which families are located. Families arguably ‘disrupt’ the prison too—the legal rights of prisoners to maintain contact with loved ones give rise to visitation and other forms of family interaction—supportive of well-being, but often viewed as a threat to the security of the prison itself.
The World Prison Brief estimates that some 11 million people are currently incarcerated worldwide (Walmsley 2016), many of whom will have families. In this era of mass incarceration, the experiences of these families should be a concern for all. Traditionally, prisoners’ families have been designated the ‘forgotten’ victims of crime. The first large-scale study of prisoners’ families entitled ‘Prisoners and their Families’ was conducted by Pauline Morris in England and Wales (Morris 1965). Morris concluded that:
Too often in prison work, the family is thought of as some external appendage, remote and irrelevant to the processes of treatment and training, rather than as a continuous influence upon the man in custody. (Morris 1965, 9)
What Morris highlighted so cogently is that all too often in the past, prisoners’ families were viewed as an adjunct to studies of the impact of imprisonment, not worthy of study in their own right. Since this early study, the scholarly landscape has expanded somewhat with an ever-emerging body of work that engages specifically with the lived experiences of those connected to an imprisoned person. Thus, we have seen classic studies that have expanded our understandings of how the female partners of prisoners engage with the prison and manage their partners’ imprisonment (Fishman 1990; Girshick 1996) including Comfort’s groundbreaking study that introduced the influential concept of ‘secondary prisonization’ (Comfort 2007). A large corpus of work has focussed on the children of imprisoned parents (Boswell and Wedge 2002; Murray et al. 2009, 2012; Hairston 2003). Just recently, we have seen an important large-scale project, the Children of Prisoners: Interventions and Mitigations to Strengthen Mental Health or COPING project that interviewed more than 200 children across four countries: Sweden, Romania, Germany and the UK (Jones et al. 2013). A body of research that recounts the experiences of the parents of prisoners is also emerging (Halsey and Deegan 2012, 2015; Granja 2016) including recent work on the parents of young people in prison (McCarthy and Adams 2017).
A constant theme through much of this work is that prisoners’ families often endure both financial and emotional hardship during a prison sentence, echoing Christian’s finding that ‘staying connected to a prisoner is a time, resource, and labour intensive process’ (Christian 2005, 32). In ‘Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment’, Mauer and Chesney-Lind designated this burden the ‘collateral consequences’ (Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002). Additionally, families of prisoner can often be subjected to a ‘courtesy stigma’ as coined by Goffman (1963, 44), a form of guilt by association (Davies 1980) that can lead to their pathologisation (Knudsen 2016). This can be especially so where a loved one is imprisoned for a particularly serious crime (May 2000; Condry 2007).
Increasingly, we see NGOs with a focus on offering advice and support to prisoners’ families such as, in England and Wales, Prison Advice and Care Trust and children’s charities like Barnardo’s (Glover 2009). Pan-Europe there is Children of Prisoners Europe, a conglomerate of partners across Europe working to raise awareness and advocate on behalf of the children of imprisoned parents including the yearly ‘Not my Crime Still my Sentence’ initiative. At an international level, there is an increasing recognition of the human rights of prisoners’ families in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and through the application of international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the literature on this topic (e.g. Codd 2008; Scharff Smith 2014; Lagoutte 2016; Donson and Parkes 2018), particular attention is paid to the extent to which parenthood should be considered in sentencing practices (Donson and Parkes 2016; Minson 2015).
Approaches and Perspectives
This book positions itself at this troubling and painful interface between prison and the family. Conceiving of family as both ties of kin, love and marriage, and the sense of closeness cleaving to them, it seeks to represent an array of experiences which demonstrate the complexity and significance of this relationship. This is an international and interdisciplinary collection, with contributions from both established and early career scholars representing a range of geographical contexts and from a variety of disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) perspectives. Although appreciating that for some incarcerated persons, prison itself can become ‘home’, and the co-imprisoned can become ‘family’, it focuses primarily on the relationships between prisons and families who engage with prisons in order to maintain ‘family’ with incarcerated persons. At a basic level, it explores the ways in which, when the prison starts to intrude into the family through the incarceration of a family member, the family is affected, by the dislocation of a member from the family unit and by the diverse and associated challenges this situation generated. But more than this, this collection also explores the ways in which prison and the family exist in parallel to and in (often very uneasy) relation with each other, either through lengthy association arising from long sentences, or through a connection that spans communities and generations. In these cases, contributions probe the ways in which prisons and families, each ever present to the other, allow each other mutual entry, and accommodate each other, often with the mediation of organisations positioned between them to facilitate this relationship.
Accordingly, the collection explores a range of perspectives on this situation. Divided into five sections, it deals first with contemporary issues in understanding prisoners’ families. In this section, key thinkers in this field survey the state of the art in scholarship of prison and the family. Criminologist Caroline Lanskey, developmental psychologist Lucy Markson, psychologist Karen Souza and psychologist and criminologist Friedrich Lösel open the collection with their chapter Prisoners’ Families Research: Developments, Debates and Directions which maps the international research landscape. Discussing reasons for its historically low profile, in relation to a narrow binary of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’, they illustrate the subsequent disciplinary shaping of research by psychology, sociology, criminology and social work, and draw attention to methodological and ethical issues and to the link between prisoners’ family research and a social justice agenda. Criminal justice specialist Joshua C. Cochran follows with a chapter on Inmate Social Ties, Recidivism , and Continuing Questions About Prison Visitation in which he examines the state of theory and research related to understanding the impacts of visitation on recidivism, providing an updated and expanded theoretical and conceptual framework related to visitation and recidivism to help guide future theory, research and policy. With Developments and Next Steps in Theorizing the Secondary Prisonization of Families, sociologist Megan Comfort reflects on her own highly influential concept, discussing its original application and the developments in its...