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

Chapter 16. Coping: Murielle & Dale

Chapter 16 Coping: Murielle & Dale Although many of the family members who were closest to prisoners struggled with stigma, isolation, and depression, most had also developed ways to cope. In many cases, however, their coping repertoires were limited, typically characterized by more avoidant strategies.1 The most common coping strategies, for example, did not make use of extensive social networks or involve disclosing information about a prisoner’s status. More often they were strategies that involved severing or diminishing relationships—with family, friends, or the incarcerated relative—or private strategies such as prayer. Moving On With all of the problems associated with maintaining a relationship with someone in prison, one might expect families to simply cut ties altogether. This was, among families in this study, surprisingly rare. While many family members did reduce contact with their incarcerated relative as time went by, they usually did not break ties entirely, and some actually increased their contact. Attending school or work was more dif‹cult and friendships and family ties were often strained, but most of the people who were closest to the incarcerated family member from the outset did not cut their ties completely. Out of the ‹fty families in this study, in only two families did a relative who was closest to an offender completely cut ties after he was incarcerated, and when they did so, they moved to another state. This “starting over” method is one of the more radical coping strategies that a person might employ. While few family members cut ties altogether, a more attenuated version of diminishing social relations with the incarcerated family member was common. Prison raises a number of impediments to maintaining close relationships. Murielle, for example, has been raising her two daughters on her own for some time. “Both fathers are incarcerated, both of their fathers. My oldest daughter’s father has been incarcerated for the last sixteen years, and my youngest daughter’s father has been incarcerated for the last thirteen.” Murielle was married to Dale, the father of her second daughter, for the ‹rst ten years of his incarceration. To be honest, I did not take and expose my daughter to that a lot, because I didn’t want her to see the environment and I didn’t want her to see her father incarcerated. What I’d learned to do with my ‹rst daughter when her father became incarcerated, I told her that he was away at school to make it a lot easier for her to accept, and if anybody asked her, you know, “Where is your dad?” “He’s away at school.” That pretty much worked for awhile, and then when the kids get older they become more inquisitive, and [they would ask] “Well, if he’s at school, why can’t he come home?” And the couple of times that I did take her down, she couldn’t understand why. Both of them pretty much the same, the same attitude, and I guess it’s the same with any kid. They want to know why they can’t come. And when you get to that door and you have to say good-bye, they want to know why you can’t get on the van or the bus. And they turn around with this look on their face. “Isn’t he coming, Mom?” “No, he’s not coming, he has to stay here.”2 As Dale’s wife, Murielle felt obliged to visit him; she divorced him, in part, because she didn’t want her daughters to have to confront the criminality of their fathers so directly. For her, it was too much to manage both her own relationship with Dale and the threat of stigma for her daughters. Now that the marriage is over, believe it or not, Donald, when I called downtown last year to ‹nd out when the divorce became ‹nal, and the girl told me it was ‹nal on December 23, I took a deep breath and . . . 201 Coping and it was almost as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders , because trying to be the wife of somebody incarcerated . . . it’s like you are not just you, you are you and them, and you can’t say, “That’s not me. I’m somebody else.” As much as she was relieved to be divorced, she knew that she had really just made a transition into another kind of...