A profound portrait of the hidden injustices that trap fathers in
a cycle of punishment and debt.
In the first study of its kind, sociologist Lynne Haney travels into
state institutions across the country to document the experiences of
the millions of fathers cycling through the criminal justice and
child support systems. Prisons of Debt shows how these systems
work together to create complex entanglements—rather than "piling
up" in men's lives, these entanglements form feedback loops of
disadvantage. The prison–child support pipeline flows in both
directions, deepening parents' debt and criminal justice involvement.
Through moving accounts of men struggling to be fathers from behind
prison walls and under the weight of support debt, Prisons of Debt
exposes how the criminalization of child support undermines the most
essential of familial relationships. Haney argues that these state
systems can end up producing exactly the kind of parent they fear and
loathe: bitter, unreliable, and cyclical fathers. Based on
observations of 1,200 child support cases and interviews with 145
indebted fathers in New York, California, and Florida, Prisons of
Debt reveals the actual practices of child support adjudication
and enforcement alongside the lived realities of fathers trapped in
those systems. The result is a rigorously documented analysis of how
poor men are too often denied their rights of citizenship and of
fatherhood.