Families confront roles, responsibilities of rural jail incarceration, study finds

Families of men held in rural jails play an important role when it comes to navigating and making sense of the legalities, consequences and often conflicting responsibilities that accompany incarceration in rural jails, according to a new study by a UB sociologist.

Nearly half of the U.S. population has experienced the incarceration of a sibling, child, partner or parent. Despite that widespread reality, families have no official place in the criminal justice system. Still, they create and take on substantial support roles for incarcerated people both during and after the incarceration, according to the study’s author, Allison Dwyer Emory, assistant professor of sociology and criminology, College of Arts and Sciences.

“Families are problem-solvers,” says Dwyer Emory. “They’re on the front lines of addressing issues within the family, including serious problems like addiction, alcoholism and other sometimes overwhelming challenges.”

Dwyer Emory interviewed 41 family members of men held in a rural New York jail for her paper published in the journal Social Problems. Her semi-structured interviews proceeded conversationally, but included questions asked to all study participants to frame and deeply understand how families experienced jail incarceration in a rural county.

Jails are distinct from prisons, but not as well studied. New York prisons hold people who have been convicted of a crime and sentenced to incarceration for more than a year. People in jails have either received a sentence of less than a year following a conviction or are being detained while their case works its way through the courts. Roughly two-thirds of people held in jails nationally have not been convicted. They’re jailed because they were deemed ineligible for pretrial release, or the money required for bail could not or was not raised.

“Some families in this study chose not to post bail, despite having the means, because they saw jail as a safer place than the community for their loved one to be,” says Dwyer Emory. “I also spoke with many family members who initiated the incarceration in some way, by calling in a technical or parole violation, or by reporting the initial crime.”

It’s a surprising finding to emerge from the study, but Dwyer Emory points out that rural communities often lack the infrastructure and services that families in urban areas rely on to help address problems.

The jail, under these circumstances, was seen by some as an ally, a means of accessing whatever services might be available to an incarcerated individual.

It was a matter of life or death, according to Dwyer Emory. Family members said it was clearly not an ideal option, but they feared outcomes like an overdose if nothing was done. They were out of options in the community.

“Many of the families I talked to were dealing with issues of addiction, but because of the scarcity of resources characteristic of rural America, they couldn’t access the services needed to manage issues like opioid addiction or serious mental health needs,” she says. “In this context, the jail was one of the only institutional responses available to families.”

But not everyone shared the perception of jail as an ally.

“Some families saw the jail as something to work around,” says Dwyer Emory. “The constraints of incarceration were not helping, but families worked to plan legal strategies or to help with the re-entry phase that follows a release from incarceration.”

A final, broadly defined perspective to come out of the interviews was people who felt there was nothing they could do once the jail was involved. They maintained personal relationships with the incarcerated individual, but didn’t see any way they could help with their situation.

Jail marked the end of their involvement.

“Relinquishing responsibility was a relief for some families members,” says Dwyer Emory. “There was sadness and mourning for families, but they felt that a problem that was out of control for them had been handed over to another authority.

“This group included many mothers with young children who were focused on managing the fallout of incarceration for their family but weren’t actively engaged with the jail or the legal process.”

Dwyer Emory says families are working hard but need additional support to manage the social problems they face — including incarceration. The criminal justice system is focused on the individual going through the process, but Dwyer Emory says it’s necessary to understand how that individual is embedded within a family system.

“Some families approached the jail about being a partner but were shut down,” she says. “It’s time to start thinking about families as potential partners with shared rehabilitative goals when addressing the needs of an incarcerated person.”