Review of “Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers”

Abstract

The criminal legal system is an institution that creates, maintains, and exacerbates inequalities between people entangled in the system and those who escape such entanglement. Contact with the criminal legal system, and the surveillance associated with such contact, has increased rapidly over the past 50 years. In response, a now established body of research documents the repercussions of contact with the criminal legal system for individual and family well-being. In Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers, Lynne Haney provides the first large-scale and rigorous accounting of the mutually reinforcing linkages between the criminal legal system and the child support system. This book is a thoughtful and careful accounting of how these two institutions influence one another to create compounding disadvantages for the vulnerable men who become entangled in these systems. Furthermore, by illuminating how individuals enduring involvement with the criminal legal system and the child support system engage in narratives of fatherhood, this book is also about how these two institutions shape family life.