Abstract
Condry and Smith’s edited volume, Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? is an important contribution to the literature on prisoners and family and the field of prison research in general. The volume features nineteen chapters dedicated to issues affecting the interplay of family and imprisonment. The chapters are well-written, well-researched, and presented in a way that allows the book to flow and cohere around several central themes.
The book is divided into three parts focused on prisoners’ families and social inequality, penal power and human rights, and the lived experiences of prisoners’ families in Europe, North America, and Australia. Each section includes six or seven chapters and the book is prefaced by an introductory chapter, written by the editors. The introduction does an excellent job of setting up the book’s premise. The editors outline four primary issues that the book addresses and which are central to the literature on punishment and families (pp. 2–3): the experience of punishment for family members of the incarcerated; types of inequalities experienced by prisoners’ families; prisoners’ family members’ views on social justice; and and how can the points of view of prisoners’ families help us understand human rights in general.
The editors acknowledge that one of the book’s primary goals is also to move the literature toward a “new” sociology of punishment that considers the family as a substantial unit worthy of inclusion in any discussion of penal processes. The editors argue that little attention has been paid to the family as an extension of the penal system (p. 3). Indeed, while much of the penal literature has not focused on harms to the family system, these issues have nevertheless been discussed at length in the social work literature and the literature on victimization. Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? provides a way not only to locate the family in the sociological literature on punishment, but also to highlight it as an important and distinct area of study. Acknowledging that the effects of punishment on the family are not simply ancillary to the individual offender, but that families are primary victims of the penal system, allows the volume to carve out an important area of research.
Part I includes six chapters focusing on how social inequalities are perpetuated by penal punishment. The section starts with several chapters that outline solid theoretical frameworks and the scope of the problem. Arditti’s Chapter 3 introducing a “Family Inequality Framework” explains how parental incarceration contributes to a network of social inequality affecting the family. In Chapter 4, Wakefield and Wildeman expand on their previous research, indicating that overall racial inequality in the United States is deepened by the incarceration of African American men, through the mechanism of family cohorts. Other issues addressed in this section include the tension of re-negotiating gender dynamics within a family upon the return home of an incarcerated male family member (Comfort, Chapter 5), the effects of social exclusion as evidenced through the powerful narratives of children of the incarcerated (Dennison and Besemer, Chapter 6), and overall in relation to children’s exclusion from other important social relationships (Oldrup and Frederikson, Chapter 7).
Overall, Part I helps set the stage for understanding the following chapters through the lens of social inequality as experienced by families through punishment mechanisms. Dennison and Besemer’s Chapter 6 in particular presents compelling data to highlight the lived experiences of children of incarcerated parents. Furthermore, their chapter provides a solid look at how social inequality not only permeates systems of punishment affecting the incarcerated, but how it is also interwoven with the experiences of children affected by the system.
The most important aspect of Part II is the recommendations and concrete solutions to current problems in penal policy offered by the authors. The chapters in Part II focus on the relationship between policy and practice and each does an excellent job of teasing out the ways policy negatively affects families of the incarcerated and offering solutions and recommendations for remedying these problems. Of particular note is Chapter 10 by Loucks and Lourieo, where the authors provide a comprehensive explanation of the issues surrounding Scotland’s attempt to implement Child and Family Impact Assessments within the penal system. The authors note: The requirement for a Child and Family Impact Assessment alone is not enough: we must also consider who will ask these questions; when will they ask; whom will they ask; what will they ask; how will they ask; and what will they do with the information. If the process itself is not sympathetic to the needs of, and pressure on, children and families, the risk is that families will suppress information, which potentially prevents them from receiving vital information and assistance. (p. 161)
From introducing the concepts “acute” and “chronic pains,” as they are experienced by members of an incarcerated person’s family during different stages of their imprisonment, in Lanskey, et al.’s Chapter 12, to contrasting the legal rights of children of incarcerated parents with their actual treatment by the system presented by Minson in Chapter 9, Part II presents strong data, and even stronger analyses.
The focus of Part III is empirical; specifically, all the chapters use interview data to examine varying aspects of the impacts of punishment on prisoners’ families. While some of the chapters use interview data to extrapolate on and better understand existing frameworks of punishment (e.g., Hutton, Chapter 15), others, such as Knudsen (Chapter 19), use qualitative data to reveal new structures of understanding lived experiences. In the final chapter, Knudsen deftly uses interview data from children of incarcerated parents and other informants to explain how secrecy surrounding parental incarceration in Canada also hides the pains, needs, and experiences of children affected by the system.
The editors of this volume did an excellent job of introducing the problem and explaining the importance and relevance of the book, selecting authors and topics, and putting those chapters together in a thoughtful and meaningful way. My criticisms are minor. Perhaps the section headings could have been better thought out and some of the chapters moved to different sections. Nevertheless, these are but minor editorial remarks in contrast to the wealth of information, data, theory, and application that this book offers. It is more than worth the reader’s time to dig into the excellent content offered in this volume.