Family Cost in the Modern American Carceral State: A Descriptive Study from a North Carolina Jail

Abstract

The shadow of mass incarceration in the United States casts over the lives of the justice-involved, but also, at twilight, over the lives of their families. Drawing on family demography and carceral studies, I study the financial effects of incarceration on survivor (nonincarcerated) families in the ambit of a local North Carolina jail. Often born of necessity, a domain of costs threaten the family economy when a member is incarcerated, with the potential to worsen or create economic disadvantage. This vulnerability, I contend, is particularly manifest for families that must interact with jail systems, understudied locales that nevertheless contribute to the calculus of inequality as much as prisons. Here, previous work on the financial costs of imprisonment become emblematic of the issues at hand, but also inaugurate new analysis. Using a descriptive survey strategy, I examine the demographics, relationships, and expenditures of an exploratory sample of individuals supporting a jail-incarcerated family member in Durham, North Carolina. Study results magnified a narrative of incarceration as an engine for gender and racial stratification—specifically of Black mothers at odds with costs of keeping their incarcerated sons fed, safe, and dignified. Comparison of jail-related expenditure across a spectrum of income groups also revealed class disparity—whereby low-income families were furnishing the most to support the incarcerated. Subsequent consideration is then given to the apparatus of jail in a system of financial extraction, and how families find intelligibility in its imposed paradigm of costs and burdens.