Conceptualizing the effects of imprisonment on families: Collateral consequences, secondary punishment, or symbiotic harms?
| Author | Shona Minson,Rachel Condry |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619897078 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619897078
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619897078
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Conceptualizing the effects
of imprisonment on families:
Collateral consequences,
secondary punishment, or
symbiotic harms?
Rachel Condry and Shona Minson
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
This article explores how we might best understand the effects of imprisonment on
families and why this is important to a full understanding of prison as a form of punishment.
The effects on families have broadly been understood within previous literature in one
of two ways: either as ‘collateral consequences’, or as a form of secondary punishment
extended to the family member. We suggest that the first of these descriptions is at best
insufficient and at worst subordinating and marginalizing, while the second is inaccurate
when family members have not committed an offence. We offer instead the concept of
‘symbiotic harms’ which we define as negative effects that flow both ways through the
interdependencies of intimate associations such as kin relationships. The characteristics
of these harms can be more fully described by a term which encompasses their relational,
mutual, non-linear, agentic, and heterogeneous properties.
Keywords
Collateral consequences, family, prisoners’ families, prisons, punishment
Introduction
As social scientists, how we talk about and describe the lives of the people we study mat-
ters and indeed can contribute to their lived experience. The notion of the consequences
Corresponding author:
Rachel Condry, Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, St Cross Building, St Cross
Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX1 3UL, UK.
Email: rachel.condry@crim.ox.ac.uk
897078TCR0010.1177/1362480619897078Theoretical CriminologyCondry and Minson
research-article2020
Article
2021, Vol. 25(4) 540–558
of social reaction to naming or labelling has been entrenched in theoretical criminology
for decades. This article aims to explore new ways of conceptualizing the effects of
imprisonment on families of prisoners. We suggest that the language which has most
commonly been employed to describe these harms may have contributed to their exclu-
sion from scholarly accounts of punishment. As Garland (1990: 1) has argued: ‘[t]he
institutional framework of modern penology tends to narrow our perceptions of the phe-
nomenon and obscure the social ramifications of punishment’.
For punishment theorists to more explicitly engage with the effects of punishment on
families we may need new terminology. In this article, we suggest a new analytical
approach that might help to facilitate greater engagement and integration of what have
until now been two distinct bodies of scholarship: the body of punishment theory that
considers the collateral consequences of punishment for prisoners themselves, and the
body of criminological work on the harms wrought by imprisonment on families.
Currently there is little connection or dialogue between the two but as the field of prison-
ers’ families research is growing rapidly in size and depth it should be seen as an integral
part of wider debates about the reach and nature of punishment in society. In order to
achieve this aim, greater clarity in how we conceptualize and describe what happens to
families of prisoners is needed.
Our approach draws upon and consolidates a rich body of previous research in the
field which provides strong evidence of the effects of imprisonment on families. In this
article we consider the ways in which these effects have been understood within current
scholarship, before suggesting a new analytical approach. The effects on families have
often been gathered under the term ‘collateral consequences’, but as we will explore in
the article, this term has other meanings and lacks precision and sufficiency for this pur-
pose. Another way such effects are understood is as a form of secondary punishment
which attaches to the family member because of the offender. We suggest that under-
standing or explaining the harms in this way prevents proper theorizing of the harms, as
they are not ‘punishment’ in the legal sense, but a punishing experience. We propose that
the harms experienced by prisoners’ families can be more fully described by a term
which focuses specifically on the domain of the family, and encompasses their relational,
mutual, non-linear, agentic, and heterogeneous properties, without naming them as inci-
dental, collateral or neutral. To that end we offer the term ‘symbiotic harms’ as a useful
conception which will allow scholars to better capture and analyse the effects on indi-
viduals when a family member is imprisoned.
For the purposes of this article ‘prisoners’ families’ are those who have kin relation-
ships with a person serving a sentence of imprisonment. They may be partners and chil-
dren, or parents, siblings, and other relatives, although ‘quasi’ kin such as close friends
might also be important here. We are looking specifically at the harms linked to sen-
tences of imprisonment, rather than those which come about from criminal justice con-
tact or supervision more generally. Although we do not consider it within this article, we
do think that the analysis we propose could extend to the harms linked to arrest, trial, and
community sanctions. There is much that could be said about prisoners’ families’ interac-
tions with the ‘shadow carceral state’ (Beckett and Murakawa, 2012), but that too is
beyond the scope of this article.
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