From Science Advances:
Abstract
Using original data from the Family Incarceration Costs Survey, we present national estimates of the direct financial costs of family member incarceration. We find that most Americans with an incarcerated family member provide them direct financial support. The median monthly direct expense among those who contribute is $172, which represents 6% of their household income. On average, Blacks and Hispanics incur higher direct expenses than whites despite their lower household incomes. Men and women contribute similar amounts, but these direct expenses reflect a larger share of women’s household income. Poor families’ direct expenses are comparable to those of affluent families and are similar to their spending on health care, utilities, and car-related costs. Together, these results suggest that familial incarceration is a prominent line item that strains marginalized families’ already-tight household budgets and is a substantial yet underappreciated mechanism through which mass incarceration has reshaped the texture of American poverty in recent decades.
INTRODUCTION
Despite declines since 2008, the American incarceration rate remains comparatively extreme, historically unprecedented, and concentrated among men with low levels of education or from historically marginalized groups (1–4). The costs of this extent of incarceration have mostly received attention in three areas: (i) the financial costs to taxpayers (5); (ii) the ramifications for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in the form of fines and fees, suffering during incarceration, and life chances after release (6–14); and (iii) the social costs for women and children, ranging from housing instability to lower educational attainment to worse health (15–21).
Although some of the earliest work on the consequences of incarceration focused on the financial costs to individuals with incarcerated family members (22), little recent work has quantified these costs. This is unfortunate for three reasons. First, earlier studies produced sizable estimates of these costs (22, 23). The initial study in this area, for instance, indicated that in a sample of Black women visiting loved ones in a facility in California, the poorest women spent 26% of their income visiting, calling, and sending packages to their incarcerated loved one (16).
Second, few basic necessities are provided by prisons and jails, and departments of corrections often mark up items that incarcerated persons can purchase. Incarcerated individuals almost universally report that food in prisons and jails is unappetizing and leaves them hungry (9, 24). Ramen noodles, a cheap and effective way to satiate this hunger, costs about 35 cents per pack on the outside; in many prisons and jails, ramen costs two to three times that amount (25). This problem is compounded by incarcerated individuals having little opportunity to earn money: The most recent data suggest that the maximum pay rate for an incarcerated person in a Florida prison is 55 cents per hour (26), while Florida prisons charge $1.09 per ramen packet—meaning that it would take 2 hours of work at the highest earning rate to purchase one ramen packet (25). On the outside, even at the federal minimum wage of $7.25, it would take a mere 3 min to earn the necessary 35 cents to buy a ramen packet. This combination of meager pay, insufficient provision of necessities, and high markups leaves incarcerated people sorely reliant on family members to meet their basic needs via the types of contributions we focus on here.
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