Uneasy partnerships: Prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism
| Author | Leonidas K Cheliotis,Tasseli McKay |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211006181 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Uneasy partnerships:
Prisoner re-entry, family
problems and state
coercion in the era
of neoliberalism
Leonidas K Cheliotis
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Tasseli McKay
Duke University, USA; RTI International, USA
Abstract
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on
interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on
Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of pris-
oner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined
strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering indi-
viduals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on prob-
lems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-
parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive
intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protec-
tive services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such
requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which
former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state.
Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of
punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the
strains faced by former prisoners’ households and the tactics they used to deal with
them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.
Corresponding author:
Leonidas K Cheliotis, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Email: l.cheliotis@lse.ac.uk
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2021
DOI: 10.1177/14624745211006181
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
2022, Vol. 24(4) 692–714
Keywords
collateral effects of incarceration, domestic violence, family problems, neoliberal penal-
ity, prisoner re-entry, state coercion
Each year, an estimated 637,400 Americans are released from prison, roughly 9
million are discharged from jail, and around 874,800 are under parole supervision
in the community (Carson and Golinelli, 2013; Kaeble and Cowhig, 2018). For the
overwhelming majority of them, the fraught process of re-entry into free society is
further complicated by experiences of deep poverty (Kirk, 2019; La Vigne et al.,
2003). In addition, most re-entering persons return to family relationships that
have been strained or otherwise weakened as a result of physical separation
from their partners and children during the period of incarceration (Comfort
et al., 2018; McKay et al., 2018a; Wakefield and Wildeman, 2014). Still, too
little is known about the ways in which the pressures of prisoner re-entry, poverty
and family life intersect to condition proactive engagement with the legal system
among re-entering individuals and their family members. By implication, knowl-
edge has remained lacking as to the circumstances under which former prisoners
and their families may sideline the feelings of mistrust they commonly hold toward
the state, and actively solicit or otherwise accept its coercive presence in their lives.
Recent decades have seen a significant expansion in scholarship on the post-
release effects of imprisonment, with a growing number of pertinent studies duly
extending their scope beyond former prisoners themselves to address their families
as well. Although such scholarship has made notable strides in terms of mapping
and accounting for the adversities of life after prison, it has tended to be limited in
one or more of the following three respects. First, research on re-entry often
acknowledges that family problems and individual, household or local economic
plight bear a relationship to each other, but too seldom specifies or elaborates the
relationships at issue (for exceptions, see Haney, 2018; Harding et al., 2019;
Wakefield and Wildeman, 2014; Western, 2018, 2006; Uggen et al., 2005). As a
result, an array of pressing issues remain understudied. Most starkly, although
poverty and abuse or other damaging forms of conflict have long been known to
be highly prevalent in the lives of formerly incarcerated persons and their family
members (Hairston and Oliver, 2011; McKay et al., 2018a; Stansfield et al., 2020),
there is as yet no systematic research on the linkages between them in the context
of prisoner re-entry.
Second, research on re-entry has focused primarily on documenting the linger-
ing effects of imprisonment, with less attention to the mechanisms that former
prisoners and their family members employ to respond to the challenges they
face, whether separately or together. What scant research ascribes agency to
them is typically trapped within an overly rigid dichotomy, suggesting that they
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