Prison and Incarceration Research

Paul Feigenbaum (English) will present his WIP, "Prison Letter Exchanges: Writing Constraints, and Freedoms, on Both Sides of the Fence."

Gene Zubovich (History) will serve as discussant to get our conversation started. 

 

Keith Griffler (Africana and American Studies) will present his WIP, "“We Will Do Anything for Our Freedom”: Black Women in the Civil War and the Origins of Postemancipation Prison Labor in the South"

Erin Hatton (Sociology) will serve as discussant to get our conversation started. 

 

Allison Dwyer Emory (Sociology and Criminology), presenting " Navigating the Situation: Family Experiences of Jail Incarceration in Rural America."

Jarrett M. Drake (Africana and American Studies) will be the discussant.

 

Log-in to access the paper (when available) here.

 

Abstract: Jails occupy a distinct place in the criminal legal process where people are incarcerated amidst the transitions of pretrial processing, system entry and exit, and transfers of authority between different criminal legal institutions or the informal control of the community. This liminality creates a unique opportunity to examine how families make sense of the different and often contradictory roles available to them throughout the criminal legal process. Using qualitative interviews with family members and romantic partners of men detained in a rural county jail (N=41), this study examines how families navigate through the contradictions inherent to jail incarceration. Despite engaging with the same facility, families had very different experiences shaped by whether they undertook responsibility for managing the incarcerated person’s situation and whether they perceived the jail as a primarily restrictive or constructive institution. The intersection of these two constructs forms a framework for understanding how families made sense of both their part in the criminal legal process and the role of the system in addressing the underlying situations of their incarcerated family members.