Session: The Emotional and Psychosocial Impacts of Carceral Systems on Families (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Previous research has examined the political, economic, and social impact of mass incarceration on detained individuals and those sentenced to community supervision. However, there has been less research on the ways in which the broader carceral state -a nexus of punitive institutions, policies, practices across systems-impacts families. As a result, the over 113 million people in the United States who have ever had an immediate family member confined from full participation in public life remain a largely invisible population whose policy and service needs are unknown (Sawyer & Wagner, 2023). This symposium directly addresses this conceptual and empirical gap through four papers that use diverse methods to examine different elements of the carceral state and its impact on families.

Each symposium paper will serve as a case study for how a part of the carceral state shapes family life in the United States. Drawing upon Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, Presenter 1 examines dually-involved Black and Latina girls and young women's trajectories from the child welfare system to the juvenile legal system and eventual reentry to their communities. Within these trajectories, Presenter 1 focuses on the girls and young women's shifting familial experiences, underscoring their experience of relational loss as a result of dual-involvement. Presenter 2 uses narrative inquiry to explore the impact of sibling incarceration on Black young people, foregrounding how having an incarcerated sibling impacts an individual's development, relationships with other family members, and access to support. Presenter 3 follows with a comparative case study of school push out from neighborhood schools to alternative schools. The presenter will examine Mothers' attempts to exercise their legal educational right for their children to remain at their neighborhood school and prevent transfer to alternative schools. Presenter 4 closes the symposium with an analysis of the 2019 Minnesota Student Survey data. The presenter uses quantitative analyses to assess rates of adolescent substance use dependent upon exposure to parental incarceration, with particular implications for families living in rural areas.

Together, these papers draw on multiple methods including phenomenological, narrative, case study, and quantitative approaches to: 1) conceptualize the impact of the carceral state as occurring at the level of the family system rather than at the individual level; 2) provide important insights on the ways families experience policy, practice, and programs within the carceral state; and 3) interrogate the ways policy shifts and larger structural transformations could better serve families and provide the conditions necessary for them to flourish.