Holding on: family and fatherhood during incarceration and reentry
All author proceeds support the powerful work of Essie Justice Group on behalf of people with incarcerated loved ones.
Revealing the results of an unprecedented ten-year study, Holding On argues for a next generation of public policies to protect (not punish) vulnerable families.
“A seminal, deeply thoughtful, and methodical book that sets the stage for what is possible when the realms of criminological studies and family studies converge."
—Punishment & Society
“a must-read for policymakers…accessible enough for use in undergraduate and graduate sociology, policy, and psychology courses.
— Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
“a hopeful and empathic book that packs significant policy-relevant analysis into a slim volume."
—Men and Masculinities
“Holding On is a triumph! A must-read for policy makers, a gift for scholars of incarceration and the family, and an exemplar of the ambitious, multi-method, and humanizing analysis we desperately need in an era of criminal justice reform."
—Sara Wakefield, Assoc. Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and Co-Author, Children of the Prison Boom
“Holding On is a compelling read that will be useful particularly to policymakers and activists who need evidence toward prison reform and program funding allocations."
—Gender & Society
Holding On reveals the results of a path-breaking ten-year study of almost two thousand justice-involved families, rendering visible the lives of a group of American families whose experiences are too often lost in large-scale demographic research.
Using new data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering — in which families completed a series of intensive couples-based surveys and qualitative interviews—Holding On sheds rich new light on the parenting and intimate relationships of justice-involved men, challenging long-standing boundaries between research on incarceration and on the well-being of low-income families.
Proposing that the failure to recognize the centrality of incarcerated men’s roles as fathers and partners has helped to justify a system that removes them from their families and hides that system’s costs to parents, partners, and children, Holding On considers how research that breaks the false dichotomy between “offender” and parent, “inmate” and partner, and victim and perpetrator might help to inform a next generation of public policies that truly support vulnerable families.