Holding On

Family and Fatherhood during Incarceration and Reentry

Tasseli McKay, Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, Anupa Bir

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780520305250
• eBook ISBN: 9780520973312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Holding On reveals the results of an unprecedented ten-year study of justice-involved families, rendering visible the lives of a group of American families whose experiences are too often lost in large-scale demographic research. Using new data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering—a groundbreaking study of almost two thousand families, incorporating a series of couples-based surveys and qualitative interviews over the course of three years— Holding On sheds rich new light on the parenting and intimate relationships of justice-involved men, challenging long-standing boundaries between research on incarceration and on the well-being of low-income families. Boldly proposing that the failure to recognize the centrality of incarcerated men's roles as fathers and partners has helped to justify a system that removes them from their families and hides that system's costs to parents, partners, and children, Holding On considers how research that breaks the false dichotomy between offender and parent, inmate and partner, and victim and perpetrator might help to inform a next generation of public policies that truly support vulnerable families.

CHAPTER ONE

Returning Incarcerated Fathers to the Family

JOEY’S STORY

Under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights, during an interview in prison less than a week before his scheduled release, Joey, a father of four, recalled the precious early days of his youngest child’s life. Already “on the run” [his words] at that time for multiple crimes but not yet apprehended, Joey described himself as yearning to bond with his infant daughter. She was not with her mother, whose pregnancy had included a struggle with addiction, but with her maternal grandparents, who had taken her into their home on the outskirts of the city. The grandmother had encouraged Joey’s visits, he said, even though they both knew the risks of allowing someone onto the property who had outstanding warrants for his arrest. He described the grandmother’s generosity:

She wasn’t supposed to . . . but she let me out there. She let me feed and bathe my daughter. And fall asleep with her in my arms and just—she let me be a dad. But there was rules: no guns, no drugs in the house. Which I automatically knew. I’d leave [the guns and drugs] in the city and drive out to the country. Turn off my phone. Throw it in the glove box. Go in the house, and just forget I was who I was.

But Joey had been caught and sentenced to prison. The baby’s grandparents cut off all contact with him. He also lost touch with his oldest child. At the time of his interview for our study, with his release date less than a week away, he was intently focused on reconnecting with his other two children, twin daughters who had been three years old when he was incarcerated and had been living with their maternal grandparents in the five years since. When he walked out of the prison gates, Joey would join their household—and see his family in person for the first time in almost exactly sixty months.

Since Joey didn’t want his daughters to know he was in prison, they had never visited him in person. Weekly phone calls had been his only mode of communication with the twins since his arrest. But Joey described an ongoing close relationship with the two girls, full of inside jokes and good-natured teasing. Pushing his sleeves up to display muscular arms covered in black-inked tattoos he received while in prison, Joey recounted a recent phone conversation, saying that five years ago, before he went to prison,

I used to break out the Crayola markers, and I used to let them color in the tattoos and stuff. And [now] they’re like, “Daddy?”

“What?”

“When you get home, do we get to color in your tattoos?”

I’m like, “Yeah. Daddy’s got a lot more tattoos.”

“Well, we’ve got a lot more markers.”

• • • • •

In the United States today, Joey’s story is not uncommon. Over half the 2.2 million people in jails and prisons are parents, 2.7 million children have a parent behind bars, and one in every four women has a family member in prison (Lee et al. 2015; Pew Charitable Trusts 2010). Yet these point-in-time estimates drastically understate the reach of the incarceration system, as people cycle in and out of penal institutions. In 2015, for example, over 4.6 million people were supervised under community corrections, often after having been incarcerated (Kaeble and Glaze 2016). And there is no reliable count of the potentially millions more who, though not currently incarcerated or under community supervision, spend time in a correctional facility during a given year.

These huge numbers have not been matched with commensurate efforts to measure and understand the intricacies of family life during incarceration and reentry. Correctional surveys pose few questions about kinship networks and close relationships. General surveys on family well-being fail to fill the information gap. As leading scholars in the field have noted, “very few of the data sources used to examine the well-being of families include information on incarceration, and those that do are extraordinarily limited in scope” (Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman 2016). Although important gains in knowledge about the effects of incarceration have been extracted from existing data sources—most notably the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health—these studies were not designed to understand incarceration as an evolving process that encompasses time before, during, and after imprisonment, nor as involving people who are both prisoners and family members. The result is a fragmented, piecemeal approach to gaining knowledge about incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people’s embeddedness in family life and the “repercussive effects” of the criminal justice system on families (Comfort 2007). Calls have been made for more holistic research to capture the complexity and fluidity of family life as it intersects with incarceration and reentry, but these calls have often gone unheeded in quantitative research.

Joey’s poignant telling of his story echoes the compartmentalization of family relationships as separate from incarceration in two important ways. First, his desire to leave guns, drugs, and his cell phone behind—and enter a space where he could “just forget who I was” by sinking into the comforting, encompassing role of fatherhood—underscores his own sense of disjuncture between the demands of his criminalized livelihood and the joys and heartbreaks of parenting. Second, his decision not to tell his children he was incarcerated, even at the cost of not being with them in person for five years, further underscores his commitment to keeping separate his identities of father and of prisoner. Perhaps it should not be surprising, therefore, that this compartmentalization carries over into the distinct silos within which society collects the data needed to fully understand Joey’s situation: correctional data on Joey in his prisoner status on the one hand, and child welfare systems data on his daughters and the two separate sets of custodial grandparents on the other.

THE MULTI-SITE FAMILY STUDY ON INCARCERATION, PARENTING, AND PARTNERING

Joey does exist as both a father and a prisoner, and his children’s lives have been profoundly affected by the criminal justice system, however aware they may be of that fact. In this book, we pull these two sets of experiences together—performing the social science equivalent of Joey’s daughters applying their Crayola markers to their father’s black-inked prison tattoos to add the color and multidimensionality of family life.

To accomplish this task, our book presents the findings from the largest and most comprehensive study to date of the interplay between imprisonment and family relationships: the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering. This was a groundbreaking study designed specifically to understand families’ experiences of incarceration and reentry over time. Funded to document the implementation and impact of a set of federal demonstration programs serving justice-involved fathers with minor children and their female partners, the Multi-site Family Study aimed from the outset to investigate questions about almost two thousand families’ experiences of the incarceration of their fathers. Its findings offer an unparalleled opportunity to use a unifying analytic lens to delve deeply into the experiences of incarcerated and reentering fathers, their partners, and their minor children.

The little existing research that considers the family life of prisoners focuses more heavily on incarcerated women as mothers than on incarcerated men as fathers (Rebecca Project for Human Rights 2010; Women’s Prison Association 2009; Haney 2010). The Multi-site Family Study’s concentration on prisoners’ experiences of fatherhood is distinctive. We propose that the separation of research on prisoners and on family well-being has obscured the centrality of men’s roles as fathers and partners—and that this separation has helped justify a system that, by removing men from their families, hides the substantial human and other costs to parents, partners, and children. Indeed, the Multi-site Family Study data reveal many justice-involved men to be deeply invested in their roles as fathers, hesitant to subject their partners and children to the financial and emotional burdens of interacting with correctional systems and stymied by the conflicting needs of their families and the requirements of reentry “success.” At the same time, mothers with an incarcerated or reentering coparent struggle with their children’s desire to see their father and the tolls exacted by prison visiting, the unending and unrecognized costs of maintaining relationships with justice-involved people, and the tremendous work required to keep families stable in the face of sustained hardship.

Our book’s in-depth exploration of the issues raised by the massive increase in incarceration in the United States over the last four and a half decades—which has affected millions of families living in socioeconomically marginalized communities across the nation—challenges these false boundaries. The Multi-site Family Study brings valuable new perspectives to issues of widespread importance as the United States moves toward understanding the full harms the country’s social experiment with mass incarceration has inflicted and the policy reforms necessary to reduce those harms moving forward.

TWO OVERLAPPING BUT UNCOORDINATED SYSTEMS

The critique of separating people’s identities as parents and as prisoners concerns more than data collection. The systems organized around these two identities—the health and human services systems set up to support low-income families and the criminal justice system set up to adjudicate and punish “offenders”—have remarkably few points of interaction. Yet a sizable proportion of families involved with one of the two systems is also involved to some degree with the other. For example, households in which a father has been or is currently incarcerated are more likely to use Medicaid, food stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families than otherwise similar households who have not experienced a father’s incarceration (Sugie 2012; Pruitt Walker 2011). The overlap is to be expected: the same factors that put people at risk of criminal justice involvement (such as living in poverty or having little formal education) also heighten the likelihood of a family’s need for government entitlements like food stamps or housing support (Western 2006). Furthermore, involvement with the two systems is synergistic. Incarceration deepens poverty and potentially results in the loss of parental guardianship of children; placement in the foster care system predicts future involvement in the criminal justice system (Western and Pettit 2010; Courtney et al. 2009; Roberts 2002).

Despite this well-documented interconnectedness, people caught up in the criminal justice system are seldom asked about their intimate relationships or parenting status, even when this knowledge could be used to inform decisions to support family ties or leverage family strengths. Likewise, family welfare system records may simply document incarcerated parents as not being present in the household; the scope of case workers’ interactions with families seldom includes contact with loved ones who are in jail or prison. Not only do these systems fail to offer integrated support, but they often work against each other. For example, continued accrual of unpaid child support payments while fathers are incarcerated often results in massive arrears that decimate recently released men’s earnings, foment acrimony between parents, and cause fathers to avoid seeing their children out of shame or feared confrontation with the children’s mother (Pearson 2004; Rodriguez 2016). Likewise, visitation policies and regulations at correctional facilities are often out of sync financially and logistically with the reality of families’ lives, which can decrease contact between loved ones, lead to deteriorating relationships, and increase recidivism risk (Bales and Mears 2008; Beckmeyer and Arditti 2014; Christian 2005).

The systems’ lack of reference to each other and the consequent absence of shared data replicate the separation between the real-world operations of criminal justice and family in much of the academic and gray literature on these issues—scholars of one area are not expected or even encouraged to think about the other. Researchers who do try to bridge the divide are often stymied by data limitations—with marital status or number of minor children frequently being the sole indicator of family life in correctional data, and yes/no measures of parental incarceration commonly being the sole indicator of criminal justice involvement in family well-being data (Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman 2016). Ethnographers frequently speak to people’s involvement in both the criminal justice and family welfare systems, since their qualitative methodology concentrates on the lived experiences at the crux of the entanglement of the family and the justice system (Sered and Norton-Hawk 2014; Haney 2010; LeBlanc 2003). But quantitative research that combines these two lenses is sorely needed as well, to enable generalization to larger populations of interest, detect causal effects, and provide a foundation for evidence-based policy recommendations.

WHAT EXISTING DATA TELL US ABOUT JUSTICE-INVOLVED FAMILIES

Existing data do provide a foundation of knowledge on the numbers of prisoners with families, despite the data limitations. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated, through surveys of people in jails and prisons, that over half of incarcerated people are parents of minor children and that the number of incarcerated parents increased 79 percent between 1991 and midyear 2007 (Glaze and Muraschak 2010). In addition to having ties to children, many incarcerated and reentering fathers are in committed intimate relationships, often involving marriage or cohabitation prior to incarceration (Lattimore, Visher, and Steffey 2008). Analyses of a national sample of state prisoners indicated, for example, that 44 percent of men were married or living with an intimate partner at the time of their arrest.¹ A defining feature of mass incarceration is its disproportionate impact on communities of color (Tonry 2011). Recent research estimated that 44 percent of African American women, compared to 12 percent of White women, have a family member currently in prison (Lee et al. 2015). And African American children born in 1990 were estimated to have a 25.1 percent risk of having their fathers imprisoned by the time the children reached age 14, compared with a 3.6 percent risk for White children born the same year (Wildeman 2009).

In addition to providing a sense of the overall numbers of people affected, a burgeoning literature published over the last two decades provides insight into the material costs to families of incarceration. The costs of visitation, phone calls, legal fees, and support of an incarcerated person, for example, impose a serious resource burden on partners and other family members—generating further financial hardship for those whose lives are likely already economically precarious (Arditt...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Returning Incarcerated Fathers to the Family
• 2. “Always Having Hope”: What We (Didn’t) Know about Fatherhood and Incarceration
• 3. “I Do, but I Don’t, Know Where We Are”: Couple Relationships during Incarceration and Reentry
• 4. “None of the Above”: Partner Violence and the Limitations of Research
• 5. “Change Ain’t Going to Happen Overnight”: Operationalizing Reentry Success
• 6. “A Breakthrough Type of Thing”: Measuring the Impact of Family-Strengthening Programs during Incarceration and Reentry
• 7. On the Horizon: The Social Science of Incarceration and Family Life
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index