The carceral family — incarcerated parents and the kids left behind

The numbers that anchor the carceral family literature are sobering when laid side by side. About 2.7 million U.S. children have a parent currently incarcerated; estimates of those who have ever had a parent incarcerated run to 5 million or more. Black children are roughly seven times more likely than white children to experience parental incarceration during childhood. For Black children born in the late 1990s to fathers without a high school diploma, the lifetime risk of paternal imprisonment approaches one in two. This is not a tail-risk event. It is a statistically expected feature of childhood for a defined population. Any theory of American family policy that does not center this is theorizing about a country that does not exist.

Megan Comfort's concept of secondary prisonization names what happens to the people the institution does not formally hold. They are searched, scheduled, surveilled, and disciplined by the rules of the facility every time they enter it. They internalize those rules. They begin to dress for the visit in ways the facility approves, to speak on the phone in ways the recording will not flag, to manage their children's expectations in ways the institution shapes. The carceral system extends, through these channels, into living rooms and bedrooms it does not legally occupy. The family becomes an annex of the prison without ever crossing the wall. This is one of the more disquieting findings in the literature, and one of the most underappreciated in policy.

For decades, prison phone calls were one of the most aggressively monetized utilities in the country. Per-minute rates of $1 or more were common; a single call could cost the family ten or fifteen dollars. Vendors paid commissions back to corrections departments, creating a state interest in keeping rates high. The result was a system in which the poorest families in the country were paying the most to maintain the most fragile connections. Recent FCC action has compressed these rates, and some jurisdictions have moved toward free calls, but the legacy of the phone-call economy is decades of families who could not afford to talk to their incarcerated parent or spouse as often as they needed to. The Law 3 connection was being taxed.

The visiting room is one of the strangest spaces in American life. It is a public-facing surface of the carceral state that most citizens have never seen. The room has rules about what can be worn — no underwire, no certain colors, no open toes. It has rules about what can be brought — sometimes a small bag of quarters for the vending machines, sometimes nothing. It has rules about touch — a brief hug at the start and end, hands on the table otherwise. Children are inducted into these rules early. A toddler learning not to climb on a parent in the visiting room is learning, in a very early lesson, that the parent's body is not the family's anymore. Whatever else this does, it is a transfer of authority over intimacy from the family to the state.

A substantial share of state prisons are located far from the urban centers where most prisoners' families live. Bus rides of four, six, eight hours each way are common. The geography is partly historical accident, partly deliberate — prisons were sited as rural economic development projects in the 1980s and 1990s. The cost to the family is borne in time, money, and the slow attenuation of visits. Wakefield and Wildeman document how visit frequency declines over a long sentence even when love does not. Distance does its work without anyone choosing it. A child who saw a parent monthly at the start sees them quarterly by year three and biannually by year five, not because of any decision but because the bus is long and the gas is expensive and the school day does not bend.

Children of the Prison Boom is the most rigorous quantitative accounting of the second-generation effects of mass incarceration. Using longitudinal data and careful controls, the authors find that parental — particularly paternal — incarceration is associated with elevated rates of behavior problems, mental health difficulties, homelessness, and contact with the criminal legal system in childhood and adolescence. The effects are not explained away by the factors that put the parent in prison. The institution itself, the separation itself, the stigma itself, the household income loss itself, are doing damage. Their estimate is that mass incarceration has measurably worsened racial inequality in child wellbeing, and that the children of the prison boom are a marker of how punishment is inherited.

When a parent is incarcerated, the household loses income, sometimes the primary income. It often loses housing — public housing rules in many jurisdictions exclude households with certain convictions, and private landlords screen aggressively. It loses the second pair of hands that handled school pickups, childcare, errands. It often gains expenses: the commissary deposits, the phone bills, the travel for visits, the legal fees for the case and any subsequent custody adjustment, the lost wages from court appearances. Western and others have shown that the net financial effect on the household is sharp and durable. The carceral system, in addition to whatever else it does, is a mechanism for the downward mobility of the families of the incarcerated.

The labor of keeping the carceral family intact falls disproportionately on women, and disproportionately on Black women. Mothers of incarcerated men show up at the visiting room when wives cannot. Grandmothers take in grandchildren when their daughters are incarcerated. Aunts and cousins become standby parents. The work is daily, physically and emotionally taxing, and largely invisible in the public discourse about crime, which prefers to focus on the offender and the victim and to leave the women holding the children out of the frame. Naming this labor — as Comfort, Christopher Wildeman, and others have — is part of the Law 5 revision the literature is doing on behalf of a system that does not name it.

Children of incarcerated parents often carry the stigma of the parent's conviction in school, with peers, with extended family, with their own self-narrative. Teachers sometimes adjust expectations downward when they learn of a parent's incarceration. Peers can be cruel. Some children become secretive about the parent's whereabouts, telling classmates the parent is "working away" or "in the military." The labor of managing the social presentation of the family's situation is a Law 4 planning labor children should not have to perform. It accumulates as a chronic vigilance about disclosure — a smaller cousin of the deportation conversation's vigilance, but in the same family of imposed strategic self-management.

When a parent is incarcerated, custody of the children is rearranged through a patchwork of formal and informal arrangements. Some children stay with the other parent. Many stay with grandparents. Some enter the foster system, particularly when the incarcerated parent was the sole caregiver. Federal law, particularly the Adoption and Safe Families Act, can move children toward termination of parental rights when a parent is incarcerated for more than fifteen of any twenty-two months — a clock that ticks regardless of whether the parent committed any act of neglect beyond the incarceration itself. Mothers, who are more likely to be primary caregivers at the time of incarceration, face elevated risk of permanent loss of parental rights. The carceral system thereby compounds itself: a sentence becomes, in some cases, a permanent severance of the family.

Children of incarcerated parents learn things that are hard to unlearn. They learn that adults can be taken. They learn that the state is a participant in the family. They learn that love can be maintained, with great effort, across plexiglass and per-minute phone bills. They also learn, in many cases, a particular dignity and a particular skill — the ability to maintain a relationship across structural obstacles, to forgive the institution while not forgiving the institution, to extract from a fifteen-minute phone call the maximum density of care. These are not skills any child should have to develop. That they develop them is testimony to the love operating in the family, not to the legitimacy of the system that requires the development.

The last decade has seen meaningful reform pressure on the carceral family front: phone call rate reductions, in-person visit protections against replacement by video-only visits, sentencing reforms that reduce the population taken, increased attention to the children of incarcerated parents in social work and education. Some of this is symbolic, some material. The underlying decarceral project — sending fewer parents in the first place — has proceeded unevenly, with some states reducing prison populations substantially and others continuing to expand. The Law 5 revision is partial and contested. But the framing has shifted: the children of the prison boom are now visible in a way they were not in 1995, and that visibility is itself a precondition for everything else.

The carceral family is a Law 5 phenomenon because it forces the country to revise the story it tells itself about punishment. The story said: the offender pays. The carceral family says: the children pay, the partners pay, the grandparents pay, the neighborhoods pay, the next generation pays. Once that ledger is visible, the question of whether the punishment was worth it cannot be answered without reference to the bill the second generation is paying. This does not, by itself, decide policy. It does, however, change the moral grammar of the conversation. A country that has half a million children of incarcerated parents at any given moment is not a country whose family policy can be discussed without first naming that. The collective revision is, in part, the simple act of refusing to discuss family without discussing prison.

1. Wakefield, Sara, and Christopher Wildeman. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 2. Wildeman, Christopher. "Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage." Demography 46, no. 2 (2009): 265–280. 3. Comfort, Megan. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 4. Western, Bruce. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. 5. Western, Bruce, and Becky Pettit. "Incarceration and Social Inequality." Daedalus 139, no. 3 (2010): 8–19. 6. Travis, Jeremy, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn, eds. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014. 7. Travis, Jeremy. But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2005. 8. Glaze, Lauren E., and Laura M. Maruschak. Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2008. 9. Foster, Holly, and John Hagan. "The Mass Incarceration of Parents in America: Issues of Race/Ethnicity, Collateral Damage to Children, and Prisoner Reentry." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 623, no. 1 (2009): 179–194. 10. Murray, Joseph, and David P. Farrington. "The Effects of Parental Imprisonment on Children." Crime and Justice 37, no. 1 (2008): 133–206. 11. Lee, Hedwig, Tyler McCormick, Margaret T. Hicken, and Christopher Wildeman. "Racial Inequalities in Connectedness to Imprisoned Individuals in the United States." Du Bois Review 12, no. 2 (2015): 269–282. 12. Roberts, Dorothy E. "The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities." Stanford Law Review 56, no. 5 (2004): 1271–1305.