scholarly journals Uneasy partnerships: Prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 146247452110061
Author(s):  
Leonidas K Cheliotis ◽  
Tasseli McKay
Keyword(s):  
Child Support ◽  
Family Study ◽  
Child Protective Services ◽  
Protective Services ◽  
Parental Violence ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
Former Prisoners ◽  
State Coercion ◽  
Coercive Intervention

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the Plague: State Surveillance of Low-Income Fathers

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-139
Author(s):  
Monika Jean Ulrich Myers ◽  
Michael Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Child Support Enforcement ◽  
The Social ◽  
State Surveillance

Foucault’s theory of state social control contrasts societal responses to leprosy, where deviants are exiled from society but promised freedom from social demands, and the plague, where deviants are controlled and surveyed within society but receive some state assistance in exchange for their cooperation.In this paper, I analyze how low-income fathers in the United States simultaneously experience social control consistent with leprosy and social control consistent with the plague but do not receive the social benefits that Foucault associates with either status.Through interviews with 57 low-income fathers, I investigate the role of state surveillance in their family lives through child support enforcement, the criminal justice system, and child protective services.Because they did not receive any benefits from compliance with this surveillance, they resisted it, primarily by dropping “off the radar.”Men justified their resistance in four ways: they had their own material needs, they did not want the child, they did not want to separate from their child’s mother or compliance was unnecessary.This resistance is consistent with Foucault’s distinction between leprosy and the plague.They believed that they did not receive the social benefits accorded to plague victims, so they attempted to be treated like lepers, excluded from social benefits but with no social demands or surveillance.

Strategic Planning in the Office of Child Support Enforcement

2000 ◽  
pp. 595-610
Author(s):  
Tom Killmurray ◽  
Gaile Maller ◽  
Keith E. Bassett ◽  
Lily C. Matheson ◽  
Robert C. Harris ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Strategic Planning ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Child Support Enforcement

The Effect of Child Support Enforcement on Abortion in the United States*

2012 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn E. Crowley ◽  
Radha Jagannathan ◽  
Galo Falchettore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Child Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Support Enforcement
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