Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America

Chapter 7. Pulling Families Apart

Chapter 7 Pulling Families Apart When academics talk about families, they often talk about the harm that comes from familial disintegration. Many lament the lack of dedication to family they see in high rates of unwed mothers, absent fathers, and divorce. These debates take on a special tone when black families are the subject. Consider, for example, Orlando Patterson’s prognosis: [I]t cannot be overstated that, in the ‹nal analysis, the problems [of the black family] can only be solved by Afro-Americans themselves. . . . Not only because it is Afro-Americans themselves, especially men, who now in›ict these wounds upon themselves—through the way they betray those who love them and bear their progeny, through the ways they bring up or abandon their children, through the ways they relate, or fail to relate, to each other, through the values and attitudes they cherish and those they choose to spurn, through the comforting ethnic myths about neighborhoods, through their self-indulgences, denials, and deceits—but also because it is only they as individual men and women who can ‹nd the antidote to heal themselves.1 Patterson puts a positive Afrocentric spin on the conservative (white) message to black men: get a job, respect your wife, raise your kids, and you can save yourself. Patterson is undoubtedly right that individuals in impoverished, crime-stricken, and highly incarcerated neighborhoods can do a lot to help themselves. But there is something strangely myopic about this kind of encouragement. While it is true that individual acts make up our society, our social institutions have been grinding away at some social norms and steadily fueling others. Indeed, the historical and sociological data that Patterson and other researchers cite show just how powerful the in›uence of institutions like slavery, Jim Crow, residential segregation, welfare law, and other Doing Time on the Outside 90 racially biased government policies has been on the shape of black urban families and the quality of family life. Without discounting the sacri‹ces required to keep any family together, it is worth considering just how much we can attribute to the norms that Patterson and others imagine are speci‹c to black Americans . Indeed, though rarely mentioned in discussions about family integrity or family values, there is considerable evidence that the last twenty years of mass incarceration has been pulling apart the most vulnerable families in our society.2 Incarceration has dramatically altered the structure of families in this study in ways that traditional studies measure, increasing the number of single female-headed households and removing many children to the care of extended kin. By the Numbers Extensive research indicates that men, women, and children in poor neighborhoods value family no less than do other Americans but face considerably greater obstacles in maintaining familial integrity.3 Among the foremost of those obstacles are incarceration and its consequences . Marriage and co-parenting are far less common and single female-headed households are far more common in areas where incarceration rates are high. In the District, for example, in neighborhoods where the male incarceration rate exceeds 2 percent, fathers are absent from over half of the families. Among the District families living in the areas with the highest incarceration rates, fewer than one in four has a father present.* * Of the 6,181 families living in areas with the highest male incarceration rates (averaging 16 percent), 4,842—over 78 percent—of those families were without fathers. Figures are based on D.C. Department of Corrections and U.S. Census data. Unfortunately , the data do not distinguish between biological fathers and stepfathers. However, because women with lower incomes are both more likely to remarry and more likely to live in areas with high incarceration rates, it seems likely that not only are there fewer fathers present in areas with high incarceration rates but a disproportionate number of the fathers who are present are stepfathers. See CHANDLER ARNOLD, CHILDREN AND STEPFAMILIES: A SNAPSHOT, Center for Law and Social Policy (1998). The issue is a signi‹cant one because, as Cynthia Harper and Sara S. McLanahan have noted, controlling for income and other demographic factors, “while children in single-mother households, particularly those born to single mothers, have 91 Pulling Families Apart The statistical data suggest that family structure is powerfully shaped by the experience of incarceration. While it might be argued, for example , that it is not incarceration but differences in...