"It Feels like You're Going through the System Too:" the Spillover of Carceral Supervision Statuses across Family Members

Background & Purpose:
A large body of scholarship has linked incarceration with a host of negative effects on families, including increased financial strain, household and relationship instability, and negative health outcomes. However, while the disruption of incarceration on families is well documented, other forms of carceral control, such as probation, parole, and electronic home monitoring can cause disruption as well. These collateral consequences of carceral supervision on family members, however, have not received adequate attention.

This study addresses this gap by exploring the impacts of carceral supervision in family homes through the accounts of 45 co-residing family members who serve as the primary support provider for a loved one under supervision. Their proximity and strong social ties make them vulnerable to experiencing spillover effects from their loved one’s supervision status. Their experiences reveal the inadequacies of viewing carceral supervision through an individual-centered lens and call for understanding carceral supervision as a family-based carceral practice.

Methods:

I draw on semi-structured interviews with 45 adult co-residing family members who provide material and emotional support to a loved one on probation, parole, or electronic home monitoring in Chicago. The average duration of these interviews is approximately 1.5 hours. The interviews focused on four key domains of everyday life—work, school, family, and home life. To capture the nature of family member’s legal responsibility to the state, I also triangulate participant interview data with public documents from the Illinois Department of Corrections and private home site agreement forms provided to me by participants detailing their legal responsibilities and rights restrictions.

Results:

Findings demonstrate that carceral supervision statuses extend beyond individuals and into the lives of family and other household members, creating material and emotional hardships in key spaces of everyday life. Family members encountered disruptions in their work and school lives due to their loved one’s supervision status that negatively impacted pay, opportunities for advancement, and academic trajectories. Supervision statuses reshaped family dynamics in the home by shifting relationships roles, increasing household tension, and disrupting the lives of children. Further, the threat of incarceration—inherent in all supervision statuses—created conditions of legal uncertainty, fear, and anticipatory stress that negatively affected participants’ psychological and emotional well-being.

Conclusion and Implications:

This study is the first empirical research to use the legal violence framework to examine supervision statuses within carceral family households. In doing so, it draws attention to the legal mechanisms that reproduce state violence within families and how family members with no previous criminal legal involvement become entangled in the carceral web. In doing so, it places entire households under the purview of the state supervision and transforms private homes into new carceral spaces. Findings suggests social workers should advocate for policies that increase supports for family members, including new forms of compensation for the material carework they provide.