Women, and particularly women of color, bear a large portion of the financial and emotional burden when family members become involved with the criminal justice system, a report has found.  A diverse coalition of 20 groups from across the US examined the impact incarceration has on families and communities. Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families focuses on four areas: coping with fees and fines; meeting basic needs; keeping families connected, and health impacts.  The report highlights the disproportionate way in which women are affected emotionally, physically and financially by loved ones’ involvement with the criminal justice system. The report also covers some of the specific challenges facing transgender people and Latinos, and their families, and calls for the elimination of the bar against public benefits for people with felony convictions and the restoration of former felons’ voting rights.  Two Oakland-based social justice organizations, Forward Together and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, partnered with Research Action Design, a worker-owned collective, to write the report. More than 1,000 people across 14 states participated in interviews and focus groups.  For Shamika Wilson-Johnson, whose husband, Damon Shuja Johnson, is incarcerated in southern California, the impact is clear. Her husband was initially held relatively close to her and the children in the Bay Area, but once he was transferred to Solano, Wilson-Johnson – who is raising two children on her own and putting herself through a master’s program – could pay up to $1,000 a trip to visit him.  Johnson was sentenced to 25 years to life for first-degree murder and armed robbery, although Wilson-Johnson argues that he was wrongly convicted.  “[When he was in jail in the Bay Area] he would get visits [from his family] every week or every other week, now he’s in a place where we can barely get there once or twice a year,” she said. “Now I’m trying to save every extra little penny I get so we can maybe go down to see him for the holidays, ‘cause I know it’s going to be hard.”  While she says that phone calls help, “they are only 15 minutes; that isn’t enough time to say what you need to say let alone to read your kids a story. It leaves the children without a father and parents without their children. So, y’know, it takes a toll.”  Who Pays? argues that the trauma and long-term stress affecting family members who support their loved ones through incarceration can also result in mental and physical ailments. Wilson-Johnson, who is recovering from abdominal surgery aimed at helping her control her diabetes, struggles financially to keep her family afloat and connected. “If I have to choose between [the children] eating and me eating, of course I choose them. So sometimes I eat unhealthy snacks, and sometimes I go without.”  “People who are able to stay in touch and maintain contact do far better,” Alicia Waters of Forward Together, one of the organizations that wrote the report, told the Guardian. “They have far fewer negative health outcomes, they have far better re-entry success, and far lower rates of recidivism. However we talk about family, that is the stabilizing factor.” Re-entry success means returning to mainstream society by maintaining stable housing and employment and avoiding issues with the criminal justice system.  Transgender women of color with a loved one in prison had particular problems, she said, because they were “more likely to be criminalized because of their acts of survival”, and a criminal conviction generally bars someone from visiting a penitentiary. Because transgender women are often discriminated against in the formal job market, many turn to sex work and other underground economic options to support themselves, according to Waters.  The cost of maintaining contact through phone calls and visits put more than a third of the report’s respondents into debt. One in five of the families surveyed for the report said they took out a loan to deal with extra costs such as these. Yet some expenses were mandatory, Waters said.  “People with convictions are saddled with copious fines, fees, and go into debt to pay these fees, largely because they’re living in poverty to begin with,” she said.
Women of color are particularly susceptible to majority of physical and financial stress when a family member becomes involved in criminal justice system