Dorothy Gaines knows firsthand the burdens prison can put on a family. She was in federal prison for seven years with three children at home.
"My oldest daughter was 18," she says. "She had to come out of college and try to take care of them. So it was a lot of stress on her, as well as a lot of stress with me worried about them."
Gaines, now 67, has been out for 25 years — long enough, she says, to see the effects she believes her prison time had on all her children, but especially on her son, who was 9 years old at the time. For more than 10 years now, he has been serving his own prison sentence.
Now, Gaines tries to make sure she never misses a phone call from him and sends him money so he can buy food from the commissary, even though she can't always afford it. This year, she's worried she'll lose her housing by the end of summer.
"I'll go without sometimes, so I can make sure I can accept a phone call from him," she says. "I try and put some type of money on his book so he can have soup or something he can eat. I know what it's like to go to bed hungry."
Nearly 1 in 2 Americans has had an immediate family member incarcerated, with Black people being more likely than white and Hispanic people to experience this. That's a problem, in part, because having a relative in prison is expensive.
According to a report released this week from FWD.us, an advocacy organization aimed at criminal justice reform, having a loved one in prison or jail is estimated to cost families across the country nearly $350 billion each year — about four times the amount the federal government estimates it costs taxpayers annually to operate the nation's prisons and jails.
On average, people with a family member behind bars spend around $4,000 a year on their incarcerated loved ones, the report says.
"That's a lot of money for anybody," says Zoë Towns, the organization's executive director. "It's important to understand that it's actually falling on those families that can least afford it."
Towns' organization, in partnership with researchers at Duke University and NORC, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 1,600 people and conducted focus groups to identify the wide range of costs that come with having a family member in prison or jail: Families pay for emails and phone calls to their loved ones. They spend money traveling to visit them. Like Gaines, they send what they can for commissary purchases.
Families lose income too, before and after incarceration. During prison or jail time, the person behind bars can no longer make much money themselves, and often other family members have to adjust — staying home or cutting their hours, for instance, to care for children. And even afterward, the person incarcerated and their family members often keep making less money, the report found.
Other organizations have identified this financial burden as well: In 2015, the Ella Baker Center For Human Rights found that nearly 2 in 3 families with someone behind bars were unable to meet their family's basic needs.
The FWD.us report comes at a time when incarceration rates across the U.S. are creeping back upward after more than a decade of decline. Felicity Rose, the organization's vice president of criminal justice policy and research, says it also comes at a time when more Americans are worried about affording basic necessities, like groceries and housing.
"We thought it was really important to help bring those issues together so people can see how they're related, because they are related. There's a lot of people and families in this country who are impacted by incarceration. And the numbers that we had about how that impact was felt were really not comprehensive enough," says Rose.
The study has its limitations. Survey respondents estimated many of the costs themselves, for instance. The findings reached by other organizations on how much prison and jail actually costs people also vary widely. In 2017, for instance, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated the country's prison and jail systems cost taxpayers and the families of incarcerated people around $180 billion per year.
But Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, says specific numbers aren't as important as simply the act of trying to quantify what incarceration does to families.
"The value of that number is that it's a way to say that this matters," he says. "That number is typically more than anyone would imagine, and it's a number that, when you look at it in the context of poor families, is completely inappropriate … What you end up with is a very expensive, inefficient way to make poor people have a harder time to succeed."
Yet some of the ways in which that happens are hard to quantify.
Lex Steppling, a community organizer who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1990s, says both his father and stepfather spent time in prison. Steppling had to drop out of high school to work. But even so, he says his younger brother had a tougher time adjusting to life without their fathers.
"My brother's dad was very handy. He was a mechanic, he was a carpenter. My brother really had an aptitude for that," he says. "So he gets taken out of the picture, and then my brother doesn't have that person anymore."
Steppling says his brother lost out on having those skills passed down from one generation to the next, and ended up spending time in prison as well.
"It's very painful to have people in your family just snatched up out of your life and thrown into a fortress," he says. "What it does to people's work prospects and the generational strain it puts on families is immeasurable."
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