The Spatial and Temporal Logics of Carceral Seepage in Black Girls' and Women's Family Life

Background and Purpose:

Carceral logics— institutional surveillance, monitoring, and punishment—extend beyond the criminal legal system, permeating youth and family-facing systems such as child welfare system (CWS) and public education (PE). This multisite qualitative study explores how this phenomenon of carceral seepage shapes family life, disrupts social bonds, and influences how Black girls and women imagine their relational futures. We address two research questions: 1) How does carceral seepage manifest across different institutional contexts, shaping Black girls' and women's family life over time? and 2) How do they make meaning of these relational disruptions and their sense of family?

Methods:

We draw from two separate and larger projects, each conducted over 24 months. One project used phenomenological methods to examine how young adults navigated the CWS and juvenile legal systems in an urban Northeastern city. The second employed narrative methods in two "elite" public high schools in an urban Midwestern district, investigating racial inequality through organizational routines and street-level discretion. This analysis includes data from 13 Black girls and women directly impacted by these systems.

Through memoing, we identified the undermining, destabilization, and loss of familial arrangements as a central theme in both projects. Using collaborative thematic analysis, we focused on participants' core or defining moments—interpretative superordinate themes pertaining to the contact with the CWS and narrative "scenes" of alternative school transfer. Carceral seepage provided a sensitizing framework, guiding our interpretation of mechanisms of family disruption across systems and over time.

Findings:

We identified three interrelated findings. First, carceral seepage pervaded participants' lives across both institutional contexts (CWS and PE) and developmental periods (adolescence through adulthood). Institutional record-keeping, including CWS case notes and school transcripts, functioned as a form of epistemic injustice, limiting participants' autonomy and voice.

Second, carceral seepage disrupted familial relationships, altering rituals of care and everyday responsibilities integral to family life. Black girls impacted by the CWS experienced both direct and ambiguous loss, struggling to maintain shared family narratives. Similarly, Black mothers experienced educational institutions as undermining their caregiving roles, limiting their self-determination and decision-making about their children's schooling.

Third, participants' imagined familial futures were fundamentally altered by their experiences with these systems. Black girls, articulating clear visions of ideal family life, emphasized safety, stability, connection, and adequate material resources, aiming to compensate for CWS-imposed losses. Black mothers, confronting institutionally-imposed instability, reimagined their educational familial futures to anticipate continued uncertainty rather than stability.

Conclusions and Implications:

This research highlights parallel mechanisms of carceral seepage across seemingly disparate systems, significantly shaping family life in the US. Families are disrupted not only as physical arrangements but also as symbolic, ongoing, and shared narratives, altering relational roles, rituals, and obligations. Carceral seepage is also temporal, constraining how Black girls and women imagine their relational futures and undermining their ability to form connections and maintain a sense of belonging. These findings underscore the importance of investigating carceral logics across multiple systems and call for research and policy that address how carceral seepage systematically destabilizes Black family life.