Theme: Family Reunification

• Participants shared how their incarceration harmed their family members, especially their children. The participants, particularly female participants, described the impact of their incarceration on young children who went through traumatic changes to their living situations. As one participant explained:

because of my conviction or my criminal charge and then conviction, my daughter got taken through CPS [Child Protective Services] and then two and a half, three months after I got to prison, I was forced, because child protection didn’t want to keep the case open any longer, I was forced to sign over custody of my daughter to her dad who was [an active addict].

Another participant pointed to the effects of her incarceration on her daughter:

My going to prison, and then the transfer of custody, and from this place to that place, foster care, all that kind of stuff, created a whole other layer of trauma. So now she is 14, and I’m still dealing with a lot of the mental health struggles that she’s dealing with because of the time that I spent in incarceration.

Yet another participant shared that:

I was in an abusive relationship. So when I got arrested, my children had to go live with their father because he was the only person that was attached. Unfortunately, he was the abuser . . . and by the end of the first year of me being home, the roles had changed, and he was being arrested for abuse of my girls.

Among those responding to the poll questions, 41% said they participatede—or were required to participate—in parenting classes.

• Other harms associated with incarceration included the loss of their homes and the emotional pain experienced by family members. Multiple participants explained that as a result of their conviction and incarceration, the home that their family was living in was taken away. That also led to degrees of estrangement that have lingered across time. As one participant described, “I learned in prison that they were losing the house and had to move due to my incarceration. In terms of communicating with family since then, incarceration has put a damper on that.” Estrangement from family members was a common experience among the participants. One participant explained as follows:

I did a 15-year stint, and I have to say that I certainly lost most friends and family while I was incarcerated. And even upon release, those that rejected me during the incarceration still rejected me afterwards. My felony conviction certainly made me the black sheep of the family. Regardless of the accomplishments and what we do afterwards, that felony conviction follows us both in society and within our family.

There were examples of family members who experienced emotional pain during the incarceration period. As one participant noted:

I’m the second out of seven siblings, and I’m the oldest brother. So, my being convicted and being sentenced to life and sending off to prison, definitely it had an impact on my family from my siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents, everybody. And it was particularly traumatizing to my father. He couldn’t even come to visit me while I was in prison.

As another participant explained, “There’s a huge ripple effect. There’s been a huge absence, as a hole in our family that can’t be filled by anything other than, yeah, my convictions definitely affected my family makeup in a lot of ways.”

• The death of family members became more difficult when incarceration meant the individual could not attend the funeral. One of the biggest changes that individuals experienced to their families during their incarceration period was the death of a family member. As one participant noted, “I was in there about seven years, and a lot of my family died off.” The grief often is difficult to process while incarcerated. One participant described as follows:

Also, I missed some deaths in the family. And everybody here know that if there’s a death in the family, the mental experience you go through, especially when you’re down. I’ve seen some brothers; they just start fighting and get put in [segregation] because of the death of a loved one.

When the death reduces the level of external support, it can be even more devastating. One participant described the death of a grandmother: “That was a very profound loss because up until the time she died, she wrote me almost every month while I was incarcerated until she just started to decline in the last year. So that was over 20 years.” And the barriers to attending funerals can extend to the postincarceration phase. As one participant told us,

I had a 10-year sentence . . . because my mom had already had failing health and stuff, I knew that I wasn’t going to see her again. But she did pass away while I was in prison, and I didn’t get to go to her services. And then . . . two years later, my sister passed away. I didn’t get to go to her services . . .. When I got out too, I lost a few people in my family, my brother and two of my nieces. And I didn’t get to go to none of their services either because I’m still here because I’m technically still an inmate because I’m on home confinement. So they pretty much treat you like an inmate.

• During incarceration, and once released, there were costs for some family members to stay engaged and be supportive. This included costs incurred when families had to deal with unfinished business back home. As one participant described:

My family had to go and deal with property I had, so then they had to deal with boxing up stuff and putting stuff in storage and maybe some debt that I had that they had to pay off . . . so that was inconvenient.

Maintaining contact during the incarceration period also was an expense for families. In addition to phone calls (“If you don’t got no money, you ain’t talking to your family”), postage, and the provision of cash so their incarcerated relative could support themselves in prison, there also was the expense related to traveling back and forth for visits. As one participant explained:

My mom, after 15 years of visiting—she was the only one that continued to do that. And sometimes in facilities that were hours away, she would spend more time in the car driving to and from than the actual visiting taking place.

In addition, there was the chance that welcoming the person back into the family home could involve incurring costs. One participant shared that:

I don’t have my license anymore, and my family really has to take me everywhere. It’s just more stressful and more arguments because I have to beg them, or I have to bribe them in order to take me to the things that I have to go to. And if I don’t go to the things, then I get in trouble for it.

Finally, in some families there were costs associated with wanting to support the returning family member when others in the family were opposed. As one participant explained: “There’s some family that want nothing to do with me. Some family fight with other family because this one supports me, and they don’t think the one should, so it’s tough.”

• Even after their release, many persons continued to have only limited contact with family, sometimes by choice and sometimes as a condition of their sentence. For some persons, the efforts they made for personal growth and healing could be threatened by being around family and friends who were themselves struggling with addiction and mental illness. As one participant explained, “I was always the mess up, and I just reunited with my brother after 12 some years, and I just found out the rest of my family has fallen apart as I’ve pulled myself together.” A female participant described the difficult choices she needed to make to maintain her own recovery: “My parents are addicts. They are still addicts, so I don’t really go around them because I want to live a better life.” Other forms of estrangement are the result of decisions by the legal system. For example, one participant noted, “I have three kids that I don’t get to see because I was incarcerated, and I don’t have any assistance to help me get a lawyer to be able to get help with getting my kids back right now.” Another participant was not permitted to be in contact with her mother: “I had a financial crime, and it was against my mother, and so I have supervision for five years . . . technically on paper she’s considered my victim, so I can’t have any contact with her.” Among those responding to the poll questions, 36% shared that their charges prevented them from reuniting with their family.

• The postrelease period often required a significant adjustment for family members as for the individual just released. Not everyone had assistance in reuniting with their family, and some adopted a perspective to understand what it must have been like for their family back home. As one participant put it:

Your family didn’t leave; you left them. And that perspective really helped me. So, when I’m coming home, I’m meeting kids that weren’t even born or little children that are now grown adults. And so when they have fear of me, I understand it.

Another participant reflected on what it feels like when the family has not changed but you have: “What I’ve learned is most family only see you how you left them. And I was very young when I got incarcerated and to me it seemed like you grow, you change, you make the adjustments.” Yet another shared the experience of how family members might experience their return to the family:

The whole family dynamic was different when I got home, and on top of that they all had a look their eye, like, who came home? Is this a new man that came home or is this the old trouble-making monster that we used to know? Which was crazy in their eyes. We hadn’t talked about this in the last 18 years.