Understanding Family and Childhood in the Shadow of Incarceration

Abstract

More than 1.5 million children in the United States have a parent who is currently incarcerated. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, children of incarcerated parents remain among the least visible subjects of carceral governance — profoundly shaped by state intervention while remaining outside its moral and legal imagination. This thesis investigates how children and families navigate care, kinship, and identity under parental incarceration, and what it means to make a life in the shadow of the carceral state. Drawing on a literature review, an online ethnography of Reddit testimonies, and primary fieldwork conducted in partnership with Forever Family, an Atlanta-based nonprofit, the thesis argues that the existing risk literature — however accurate as a description of probability — is insufficient as a description of what actually happens inside the people it predicts. The outcome-focused literature documents what incarceration takes from children. It cannot document the daily labor of repair, the tactical creativity of families navigating systems not designed to serve them, or the specific, costly, ongoing work of refusing an intergenerational trajectory that structural conditions make easy. Anthropology offers the tools to reach those dimensions. Drawing on Veena Das, Orisanmi Burton, Laurence Ralph, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis reframes the carceral family not only as a site of loss but as a relational space where care and obligation are continuously negotiated. The central argument remains constant throughout: children of incarcerated parents are not passive victims of individual family failure but subjects of a structural condition that demands structural analysis, and that understanding what they make, together, in the wake of that condition, is what ethnographic work is for.