Hidden costs of Incarceration: Part One

EDITOR’S NOTE: The writer of this column from the League of Women Voters knows the subjects of this story through family and friendship. Paul is a pseudonym to protect his children.

Early in June 2023, police knocked on a door in an upper-class neighborhood in eastern Maryland, the kind of neighborhood where the low-end home is worth over half a million. They had a warrant for a father of two and a husband, but he was at work. Police served a search warrant and after several hours left with computers and phones. Later that day, they arrested Paul and charged him with 20 counts of cybercrime, charges that will haunt him for 20 years beyond his prison sentence, or longer, and have already impacted his relationship with his children.

Paul’s kids were preteens, young enough not to understand the charges, old enough to feel the stigma should the news being passed on social media make it to their friends.

On the day the police booked Paul, none of his family and friends believed he could be guilty. He’d hidden his drinking and internet activity well. For most of their married life, Paul and his wife shared a home with in-laws, with his wife’s sister and her husband for a decade. Recently, Paul and his wife bought her parents’ home. His in-laws moved into the apartment in the basement. Paul had planted fruit bushes and built a woodworking shop. When he wasn’t gardening, woodworking or hanging out with his kids, he traveled as a WWI reenactor or put together complex puzzles. He and his family attended church regularly, until the pandemic hit.

Being a frontline worker managing service stations increased his stress and isolation. Sometime in 2022, he dove into an internet rabbit hole and began a criminal double life. It lasted about five months.

In the first hours of incarceration, he sat in a holding cell, waiting to be booked. On the inside, he’d stay in isolation, to detox and quarantine. At the same time, on the outside, his wife, who works with a dual-diagnosis population – people with mental illness and addiction – tried to leverage her knowledge of the complex criminal justice system to find out what was happening.

The first 48 hours were a communication black hole. What should she tell her daughters about their dad’s absence? That he was working and would be home later?

As the 48-hour marker approached, she received a message from his defender. He agreed to plead guilty to the serious cybercrime charges against him. Paul knew he’d need to take responsibility to heal from his addictions, rebuild his spiritual health and restore his relationship with his family. First, he’d face months of incarceration, through his kids’ birthdays – it wasn’t the same without Dad – and holidays. To communicate with their father, Paul’s wife would have to pay for every text message and phone call, incoming and outgoing, while navigating what to reveal to the kids and scheduling the calls and visits.

Contact with prisoners is often obstructed. Lockdowns after fights, outbreaks of sickness in the post-COVID era and understaffing may impede the ability of visitors, including family and clergy, to contact the incarcerated. Prisoners scheduled for transfer out of local jails to other institutions may be moved without warning to prisoners, families or chaplains, resulting in an inability to visit, call or contact. These transfer procedures sometimes last weeks. Furthermore, family members and clergy may show up for a scheduled visit and be turned away without warning, even during intake.

Leah Wang reported in a 2022 post for the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-partisan, non-profit research and advocacy organization, that “family contact can help incarcerated people cope with being locked up and reduce their chances of returning to prison.” While recidivism, the likelihood of being reincarcerated, is somewhat slippery, it’s critical to note that age, type of crime and positive family and psycho-social networks contribute to reduced rates of re-incarceration. (Also, noteworthy are the gaps in research. This area is ripe for a larger body of research.)

The current body of evidence supports the need for social bonds between family and the incarcerated to break the cycle of broken systems contributing to incarceration.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Survey of Prison Inmates, 47 percent of people incarcerated in state prisons had a child under 18, affecting about 1.25 million children in the most recent dataset from 2016. Yet, “millions of families and minor children throughout the country are punished emotionally, economically and otherwise by a loved one’s incarceration.”

The impact on children shows up in long-term patterns perpetuating the cycles of poverty and disadvantage. Those incarcerated in 2016 had one or more experiences with poverty and disadvantage, not causations of their crime but correlating factors. 17 percent spent time in foster care, 32 percent had an incarcerated parent, 11 percent experienced homelessness before turning 18, 19 percent lived in public housing, and 43 percent came from families needing public assistance at some point. In short, they had insecure systems of support. Incarceration further frays household finances. It stretches positive emotional and social connections while isolating them within networks of others with dysfunctional systems of support. The increased stressors and tension affect rates of recidivism – the likelihood of returning to prison.

A baby when her father went to prison, Ashley Ford traces the barriers for a child of an incarcerated parent to build a relationship in Somebody’s Daughter. Her family didn’t disclose her father’s charges until after she turned 13, giving her a chance to build her own relationship with her father. Within months of learning of her father’s conviction, a man raped her. Her memoir captures the complexity of being raised poor in Indiana, with a father in prison, and trying to navigate the ups and downs of family relationships.

In her book, Ford traces the years and barriers that she faced in building a relationship with a parent in prison.

This article is the first of a series, in which we’ll explore the costs of incarceration, how these impact families, equity of jail services and the rights of the incarcerated. When it comes to privatization and costs, the LWV position statement seeks to

• Ensure that all correctional systems provide humane, dignified, non-discriminatory treatment of incarcerated people and personnel, including appropriate health care and access to community-based rehabilitation programs.
• Eliminate the practice of solitary confinement.
• Address recidivism by instituting programs that focus on rehabilitation, education, mental health treatment, substance abuse recovery and transitional programs.
• Encourage family and community visitations and ways to maintain contact.
• Eliminate private prisons. Until space in public prisons is available, ensure that private prisons comply with all of the standards for state-run jails and prisons.

The full statement can be read on page 120 of the full LWV Impact on Issues.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan, multi-issue political organization which encourages informed and active participation in government. For information about the League, visit the website www.lwvmontcoin.org; or, visit the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, Indiana Facebook page.