By Raquel Delerme
In the United States, there are almost two million people held in jails and prisons today, and 113 million people who have a family member who has ever been incarcerated. Research shows that, of those family members, women do the lion’s share of labor related to caring for an incarcerated person. This includes making long and costly visits to facilities that are often remote and far away from incarcerated people’s hometowns, sending money to subsidize the cost of expensive hygiene and food products, and spending hundreds of dollars a month on phone calls and other telecommunication to stay connected. In “‘It’s Heartbreaking. It’s Expensive. It’s Hard’: How the Carceral Care Economy Harms Black and Latine Mothers”, I examine this resource extraction and the caring labor of mothers to highlight the high financial and emotional costs of having an incarcerated adult child.
Using in-depth interviews with mothers with incarcerated adult children, I found that mothers perform care work and engage with what I call the carceral care economy. I define the carceral care economy as a marketplace of overpriced goods and services for incarcerated people, and labor, time, and money from their family members on the outside. In the article, I argue that under the current neoliberal configuration of the criminal legal system, mothers are forced to participate in the carceral care economy to stay connected to their incarcerated children and ensure their survival. The mothers I interviewed discussed the unaffordable and bloated prices of basic necessities like hygiene products, food and clothing items, and the bureaucratic, time-draining hoops they must jump through to visit their imprisoned children. This engagement with the carceral care economy puts their mothering into sharp focus – they make constant decisions about their employment, other children and dependents, and various responsibilities based on their incarcerated children’s needs.
The mothers in my sample were overwhelmingly employed in care work occupations and often saw their labor market participation as a necessary vehicle to providing unpaid care for their incarcerated children, even if that labor took precious time away from themselves. Though the mothers engaged the carceral care economy, they also resisted it in both formal and informal ways. That is, while caring for an incarcerated adult child is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, it also engenders resistance in ingenious ways. For instance, some mothers limited their financial contribution, putting caps on what the state was then able to use for restitution. Other mothers directly engaged the facilities where their children were incarcerated to fight for gender affirming care, appropriate substance use treatment, more nutritious food, and better living conditions. Furthermore, some mothers were actively involved in their state’s legislative efforts to reduce the exorbitant fees associated with telecommunications.
Most federal and state prisons contract with private telecommunication corporations, requiring incarcerated individuals to create accounts to communicate with their loved ones on the outside. Family and friends (typically women) deposit money into these accounts so their loved ones can send and receive phone calls, text messages, emails, video calls, or even pictures. A portion of that revenue then goes back to the corporation. The prison telecommunication industry, led by three major corporations, rakes in 1.4 billion dollars annually, extracting from families and, specifically, working-class women of color to fuel it. Though there are now caps by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the cost of phone calls, fees associated with telecommunication remain a barrier to connection between those on the outside and their incarcerated loved ones. Instead of facilities providing services and goods at little or no cost, earnings from abhorrently low wages and contributions from family and friends must act as scaffolding to support incarcerated individuals’ basic necessities.
A small but important win in Los Angeles made all calls within county jails free of charge starting December 1, 2023. As more cities look to follow Los Angeles’ lead, future advocacy might encourage states to reduce their criminal legal system budgets rather than relying on families, and more often women, for the millions of dollars in revenue fines and fees create.
One thing is clear: our reliance on carceral solutions to social ills is harming families and communities beyond those who are locked up. As Black and Latine men bear the brunt of mass incarceration, the women connected to them are left to fill in the gaping holes of the United States’ so-called social safety net. As I write in Gender & Society, “The tentacles of the U.S. criminal legal system, emboldened by the neoliberal principles of profit and financialization, engulf poor and minoritized communities disproportionately, facilitating social stratification and inequality. This inequality not only impacts currently or formerly incarcerated individuals but is dependent on family and social network members too—many of whom are mothers.”
Raquel Delerme is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines gendered and racialized labor extraction with a focus on incarceration and the climate crisis. Her work has been published in Gender & Society and The Conversation.