Dangerous Masculinity

Fatherhood, Race, and Security Inside America's Prisons

Anna Curtis

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813598369
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For incarcerated fathers, prison rather than work mediates access to their families. Prison rules and staff regulate phone privileges, access to writing materials, and visits. Perhaps even more important are the ways in which the penal system shapes men's gender performances. Incarcerated men must negotiate how they will enact violence and aggression, both in terms of the expectations placed upon inmates by the prison system and in terms of their own responses to these expectations. Additionally, the relationships between incarcerated men and the mothers of their children change, particularly since women now serve as "gatekeepers" who control when and how they contact their children. This book considers how those within the prison system negotiate their expectations about "real" men and "good" fathers, how prisoners negotiate their relationships with those outside of prison, and in what ways this negotiation reflects their understanding of masculinity.

Chapter 1

Neoliberal Responsibility and “Being There” as a Father

In 2007, men accounted for 92.8 percent of incarcerated persons in the United States, and more than half of these men were fathers.1 Even though the incarceration rate has slowed down over the past few years, the overall number of incarcerated persons has remained fairly steady. Roughly 1.5 million U.S. children (approximately 2.2 percent of those under the age of eighteen) have a father in prison.2 Socioeconomic status has a significant impact on incarceration and, therefore, on children’s likelihood of experiencing parental incarceration. Half of all children born in 1990 to high school dropouts had a father who had been imprisoned by the time they were fourteen.3 Like other aspects of the criminal justice system, children of color disproportionately bear the brunt of parental incarceration. By the time they turned fourteen, one out of four black children born in 1990 had a parent incarcerated as compared to one out of twenty-five white children born in the same year.4

The penal institution is the primary mediator of prisoners’ access to their families, as well as the major institution shaping how and when they can enact both masculinity and fatherhood. By isolating them from their families, the institution of prison severely limits prisoners’ attempts to perform fatherhood either as an identity or as a set of practices.5 Indeed, prison rules, and the staff members who enforce them, circumscribe prisoners’ access to phone privileges, writing materials, and visits. Prisoners are often housed far from families, making visits costly, and the experience of visiting prison can be, for both children and adults, emotionally difficult. Arranging to touch base with family via the phone can be challenging because prisoners’ schedules are dependent on COs and calls are expensive. In 2013, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a ruling that capped the costs of interstate phone calls for prisoners. Calls within states, however, remained untouched, and most state prisons use telephone services that charge exorbitant sums when prisoners call home.6 Writing letters is less expensive, though stamps, pens, and paper cost more in prison than they do in the outside world. Many prison systems also mark letters with a stamp warning that the letter comes from a correctional facility. For some families, the stamp causes enough embarrassment that they do not want to receive letters.7

The loss of a father to incarceration is strongly correlated with negative outcomes for children, including an increase in family instability, financial hardship, compromised attachment between fathers and children, diminished psychological well-being, and an increase in social stigma. Despite these negative consequences for children, a father going to prison can also decrease violence and instability in the family unit.8 For men who do not have a history of domestic violence, the research generally supports the assertion that keeping incarcerated men in contact with their children decreases the negative impact of parental incarceration on children. The best way to do that, however, remains a matter of debate, in no small part because fatherhood programs require financial resources and, if they are to be effective, a brief suspension of the normal routine of prison life.

Improving or maintaining parent-child ties also positively impacts incarcerated fathers. While access to housing and employment have an enormous impact of the likelihood of men recidivating, the maintenance of strong ties to children is also correlated with a decreased chance of returning to prison after release.9 In order to maintain ties with children, incarcerated men must successfully navigate relationships with the mothers of their children, both during and after incarceration.10 Doing so can be tricky since incarceration decreases trust between coparents, changes the power dynamic between them, and increases the chances that mothers will repartner. There must also be space in the prison facility for communication with family, including phone calls, letters, and physical visits.

According to a 2010 national survey of wardens from male and female prisons, most prison facilities offered some kind of parenting program.11 Parenting classes that only involved the incarcerated parent were the most common kind of program, with 51 percent of male facilities offering such a program. Parenting programs that directly involved children were far less common, with only 10 percent of male facilities reporting this kind of parenting program. While research on the efficacy of parenting programs is still developing, what research there is suggests that programs that directly include the children are more effective at promoting the parent-child bond.12 From this perspective, the high levels of contact during the special visits that were a part of the Healthy Connections fatherhood programs were rare and valuable.

Barriers to Father-Child Relationships

The men at both facilities in this study experienced four distinct barriers to successful father-child relationships. First, many men struggled to believe that they had something of value to offer their children.13 Several researchers have examined this issue, as this is an area in which policies in prison might be adjusted in order to create space for men to remain connected to their families.14 Justin Dyer, a human development and family studies scholar, suggests that opportunities to learn new job skills might help incarcerated men feel like they are “providing” for their families or that programs that allow men to fulfill roles as playmates could make significant differences in how men see themselves. Such programs include allowing men to record themselves reading children’s stories or encouraging men to keep journals that they send home.15

The fact that the performance of fatherhood and certain aspects of the performance of masculinity within prison undermine one another contributes to the difficulty that incarcerated men have viewing themselves as good fathers. Emotional connections with children and family introduce vulnerability and can undermine practices that communicate strength, independence, and masculinity within prison. For example, correctional staff treat prisoners’ connections to the outside world as a privilege that can be rescinded or limited in order to encourage obedience to the rules. Using isolation as a motivation to encourage criminals to reform is one of the original organizing principles of the American prison system and remains a central method of control.16 As such, there is a strong incentive among incarcerated men to cut ties with the outside world in an effort to ease their own pain as well as the pain of their families.17 Incarceration does provide some men with the motivation to become or remain connected with their children, but time in prison can also diminish a man’s belief that he is a good father and increase his feelings of helplessness.18 Despite the prison system’s emphasis on isolation, male prisoners who remain connected to their families may be less likely to recidivate, and most prisoners return to their communities upon release.19

Some prisoners are more successful at remaining committed fathers than others. Sociologist Brad Tripp found that despite the difficulties of remaining in contact, men who focused their fathering obligations on remaining in contact with their children, providing emotional support, and teaching children to be well behaved considered themselves to be better fathers than men who emphasized the importance of activities such as playing with children. Regardless of which orientation they took to fathering from prison—contact versus activities—all the men in Tripp’s study emphasized the importance of providing financial support.20 Both inside and outside prison, the ability to fulfill the breadwinner role remains a central component of successful fathering. Not only is this something that is basically impossible to do from prison, but incarceration also has a devastating effect on future employment.21 Whether incarcerated fathers identify as breadwinners, nurturers, or both, a prison sentence can undermine their ability to support and connect with their children. There are a limited number of programs aimed at keeping incarcerated men connected to their families.22

Second, men struggled to manage their relationships with the mothers of their children. These relationships had often been tumultuous before men arrived at the facility, and the stresses of incarceration increased that instability. Mothers could refuse to bring the children for visits or to let someone else (usually the prisoner’s mother) do so, could refuse to pay for phone calls, and could prevent children from seeing or reading letters from their fathers.23

The fatherhood groups at both facilities primarily focused on what men could do to address these first two barriers. At the adult facility, the group facilitators advised fathers to be consistent in their communication with their children and spend time considering their coparents’ perspectives, as these coparents controlled access to their children. At the youth facility, the group facilitator focused on becoming a good man, a man who could offer children a valuable role model, in order to be a good father.

The third barrier to men’s successful relationships with their children was the cost of contact with families. Phone calls were cripplingly expensive, and writing materials, such as paper and stamps, were also quite costly (though much more reachable for many men). Family visits were inconvenient, time-consuming, and potentially emotionally difficult for children, coparents or other family, and the men.

The fourth barrier was the most difficult to overcome: the bureaucracy and security apparatus of these prisons made maintaining connections with the outside world difficult. Conflict with prison staff or other prisoners resulted in loss of contact privileges, time spent in solitary confinement, loss of jobs (and the minimal income that came with them), and changes in prisoners’ security ratings.24 Additionally, prisoners were moved from facility to facility with little warning, both in response to their security levels dropping and as part of the DOC’s strategy to minimize the possibility for stable gang formation in prison.

The third and fourth barriers were beyond the scope of the mandate at Healthy Connections because the fatherhood programs at NCI and SY were individualized, neoliberal projects. That is, they sought to change the prisoners rather than the prison system, with an emphasis on individual responsibility. From the perspective of the staff at Healthy Connections, this was a more realistic approach. There was little state support for programs that aimed at reorganizing prison to make it easier for prisoners to access families, particularly in the adult facility. There was, however, money available to fund programs that focused on teaching prisoners to take responsibility for their actions. Sociologist Suzan Ilcan refers to this as a “responsibilizing ethos,” which “supports the idea that certain individuals and groups can maximize their own social and economic advancement themselves and take hold of all possible opportunities that can improve their conditions of life, no matter how fair or unjust.”25 It is a cultural mentality that is essential for making sense of the larger neoliberal economic changes that swept across the United States in the late twentieth century. Bending to fit these neoliberal expectations is necessary for any nonprofit that intends to survive the repeated cuts to the social welfare net, and Healthy Connections was no exception.26

Men at the youth facility faced an additional barrier that the program had difficulty addressing: few job options exist for a young ex-convict. Most of the fathers at the youth facility were serving sentences of fewer than five years, whereas nearly all the men at the adult facility were serving sentences of more than ten years. Returning home and facing the challenges of reintegrating into the outside world were very real hurdles for the young men, and they experienced anxiety about how successful they were going to be when forced to face the job market. In particular, these men expressed doubt about their ability to get legitimate jobs. This doubt was based on previous experience that accessing work in the legal economy was difficult.

For many prisoners, fatherhood is primarily a set of aspirational goals. Even the most involved incarcerated fathers have very little contact with their children. Much of the research on incarcerated fathers focuses on what happens when men return home. For example, sociologist Anne Nurse argues that the inability of paroled juvenile fathers to keep the primarily financial but also relational promises they made to the mothers of their children while incarcerated increased distrust and hostility between the coparents once men returned home.27 The disjuncture between promises and action often resulted in decreased contact with their children. Indeed, once men leave prison, they face significant difficulties reconnecting with their children, including limited work options, negative or nonfunctioning relationships with their children’s mothers, and tensions between the demands of parenting the children they live with and their noncustodial children.28 However, these issues often develop well before men return to their communities.29 Incarceration places its own set of pressures on incarcerated men and their families. What happens to fathers as they transition back into the community is important, but their time in prison plays a key role in shaping incarcerated men’s identities and practices as both men and fathers.

The demographic characteristics of incarcerated men look quite similar to those of nonresidential fathers in general, something that was reflected in the group of men I interviewed. The majority of participants in this study were minority men without high school degrees who occupied the lower socioeconomic rungs of American society and became fathers via nonmarital births. Only three of the forty-nine men that I spoke to were (or had been) married to the mothers of their children, and of those three, only two had fathered all their children within the context of marriage. Two of the three who had been married were white.

Focusing on Communication at NCI

The staff at Healthy Choices focused on communication as a central component of fatherhood at the North Correctional Institution because it was practical. It was something all the men could potentially achieve, even if they weren’t returning home in the near future. It didn’t necessarily require that anyone bring his children to visit (though that would help facilitate communication). All communication required was for caregivers to refrain from blocking letters mailed home from the prison, something that many men could hope to achieve. Phone calls from prison were limited to fifteen minutes and were expensive, but even an occasional phone call could make a difference in the level of communication between a father and child.30 The emphasis on communication was the most successful aspect of the fatherhood program, one that sought to help men see themselves as having something to offer their children and to provide the motivation to work through issues with their coparents.

Fifty-nine of the ninety-two (62 percent) handouts in the adult fatherhood programs included some kind of encouragement to think about how children are seeing or experiencing their father’s incarceration.31 Of those fifty-nine handouts, twenty-six (44.07 percent) exclusively addressed the child’s perspective, thirty documents (50.85 percent) encouraged men to consider the children and coparents’s point-of-view simultaneously, and the remaining three (5.08 percent) aimed at getting men to consider how they had been parented and in what ways that might influence, either positively or negatively, their own approach to parenting their children. In addition to the thirty documents combining mother/child perspectives, an additional five handouts encouraged men to think about the experiences and perspectives of their children’s mothers (or whoever was functioning as the coparent) and how that might affect their ability to parent and connect to their children. Only six handouts (6.52 percent) focused primarily on how men thought about themselves as fathers.32

The men in the fatherhood groups at NCI enjoyed the groups and spoke positively of their experiences with the program. As we discussed being a father in their interviews, twenty-six of the thirty-five men (74.29 percent) listed specific reasons they valued the program. The most common thing men felt they gained from the program was knowledge about being a father (n = 10). G, for example, applied to participate in the program because he wanted to be a better father. He frequently participated in the group, often by trying to tell younger men about the “reality” of incarceration and the barriers to fatherhood. During one of the group meetings of G’s cycle, the group facilitator, Alice, passed around a handout that discussed the challenges presented by distance. The sheet referenced both the physical and the emotional distance that incarceration creates between fathers and children. The loss of the parental role was listed as one of the issues that can intensify emotional distance. Alice asked the group how that loss affected their self-esteem. G was quick to say, “I’m not a father. I know I’m not a father.” Alice, in an effort to encourage him, replied, “You can still be a father [in prison]; you just have to work harder.” She continued, suggesting that with “some kids, it’s going to be a lot of work. Is it worth it? It’s gonna look different, but is it worth it?” G, unwilling to commit, shrugged as he said, “Somewhat. Possibly.” Still, G spoke positively of the program during one of his interviews. We spoke about Alice and laughed a little about how much she liked to talk. He enjoyed participating in the group enough to say, “It would have been nice if they had extended [the program] for a longer period of time [ . . . ] It took [until] the closing point to get people to feel open enough to talk.”

G, at forty-eight, was older than many of the men in the program and had spent long stretches in prison, yet his desire to be a father and his belief that he had failed in the endeavor were shared by many men. The program’s emphasis on co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Masculinity, Fatherhood, and Race inside America’s Prisons
• Chapter 1. Neoliberal Responsibility and “Being There” as a Father
• Chapter 2. Little Me versus My Princess: Fathers’ Expectations about Gender
• Chapter 3. Unruly Boys and Dangerous Men: Security and Masculinity in Prison
• Chapter 4. Game Faces and Going Up the Way: Enacting Masculinity in Prison
• Conclusion: The Conditions of Possibility
• Appendix: Methods and Research Setting
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author
• Read More in the Series