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

PART IV. SILENCE

Part IV Silence Oh Lord, trouble so hard. Yes, indeed, my trouble is hard. Oh Lord, trouble so hard. Don’t nobody know my troubles but God. —Vera Hall, Trouble So Hard [D]oes the stigmatized individual assume his differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does he assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? —Erving Goffman, Stigma The preceding chapters have described the dif‹culties that families of prisoners face. Their experiences are, one would think, more than enough to prompt many to protest a regime of criminal sanctions that punishes them along with criminal offenders. Yet, most told no one outside of the immediate family about their relative’s incarceration and the troubles they faced. Indeed, many were even hiding the incarceration from extended family members.1 The silence of these families is, in many ways, counterintuitive. If incarceration in the District and in many urban areas is the statistical norm, why isn’t it socially normative as well? The collateral effects of incarceration on families and communities are, as the previous chapters have emphasized, not only material but deeply social. The chapters in part IV describe how the moral concerns about criminality in›uence other aspects of familial and community relationships. Perhaps the most unexpected ‹nding is that the stigma related to incarceration is visited on the families of prisoners as much as—if not more than—it is on prisoners themselves.2 This ‹nding complicates recent popular and theoretical accounts of shame and criminal sanctions considerably. Over the last ‹ve to ten years, legal scholars and policy analysts have rediscovered social science and, more speci‹cally, social norms.3 It is a rediscovery that has had a signi‹cant impact on discussions about criminal law in general4 and about shame and criminal sanctions in particular.5 Politicians, academics , and prominent critics on TV and radio shows have discussed how we must restore the criminal justice system’s ability to stigmatize and induce shame. Because many perceive contemporary urban culture as outside or resistant to the moral system of social norms they would like to promote, these discussions have gained considerable traction. For example, it has been suggested that, in areas where incarceration is commonplace, there is little stigma attached to a prison sentence. Worse still, many fear that incarceration might even be taking on a positive connotation, an association with masculinity—“rite of passage” is the phrase often used in the press. As a result, many would like to enable the criminal justice system to stigmatize more effectively and induce shame more consistently and to thereby both express public moral condemnation and reduce the likelihood of offense. Shame and stigma emerge in these debates both as expressions of pent-up public disapprobation and as underutilized and cost-effective deterrents. While it is encouraging that policymakers and analysts are interested in how law shapes social meaning and how social meaning shapes human experience and behavior, there is reason for caution. In discussing and promoting policies based on law’s expressive function,6 few analysts have actually observed the effects of the statutes that have been proposed and implemented. That is, those making the law and talking about it don’t know whether the intended effects actually have happened or will. The ‹ndings from the accounts in this book suggest that the symbolically harsh statutes that have been enacted to date do not correlate with their intended effects and that many of their consequences are not Doing Time on the Outside 166 only unintended but undesirable. Rather than simply deterring potential offenders from future crimes, the most signi‹cant impact of the stigma related to increased incarceration has been the silencing and isolation of families of prisoners, an effect that few legal analysts anticipate . 167 Part IV: Silence ...