Advocates have long raised concerns about the potential for partner violence after a spouse’s or partner’s return from prison, but few programs or policies exist to prevent it. In an era in which experiences of incarceration and reentry—and by extension, experiences of a partner’s or coparent’s incarceration and reentry—are commonplace in low-income urban communities, the safety of families reuniting after a prison stay merits serious attention. The current study examines qualitative data from 167 reentering men and their partners to identify contextual influences on post-prison partner violence. Insights from the data offer a valuable starting point for future research and for considering how prevention could effectively target economic, physical, social, and cognitive conditions at multiple social-ecological levels.
Partner violence after reentry from prison
Putting the problem in context
Key Points
- Applying the Social Ecological Framework to qualitative interview data on post-prison partner violence from reentering men and their partners, we identified contextual influences on partner violence at multiple ecological levels.
- Narratives suggested that violence arose amid the adverse cognitive, physical, and social conditions that surrounded couples’ intimate and coparenting relationships during the period of reentry from prison.
- These conditions included (1) poverty and economic exclusion, (2) deteriorated communication and lack of information, (3) exposure to violence, and (4) social isolation and disempowerment.
- Results suggest that systemic change, across ecological levels, is needed to prevent violence in couples reuniting after incarceration.
Abstract
© 2023 RTI International. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Contents
Almost half of Americans have experienced the incarceration of an immediate family member, and one in five women have had an incarcerated intimate partner.1 Formerly incarcerated men and their partners report extraordinarily high rates of partner violence—often 10-fold those observed in the general population.2, 3, 4
Understanding the Context for Partner Violence After Reentry
Applying the Social Ecological Framework to qualitative interview data on post-prison partner violence from reentering men and their partners, we identified contextual influences on partner violence at multiple ecological levels. Narratives suggested that violence arose amid the adverse cognitive, physical, and social conditions that surrounded couples’ intimate and coparenting relationships during the period of reentry from prison. These included (1) poverty and economic exclusion, (2) deteriorated communication and lack of information, (3) exposure to violence, and (4) social isolation and disempowerment. Results suggest that systemic change, across ecological levels, is needed to prevent violence in couples reuniting after incarceration.
Understanding the contexts in which violence arises is critical to effective prevention and response.5, 6, 7, 8, 9 To fill this gap, RTI researchers analyzed qualitative data from 167 participants in the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration. The Post-Incarceration Partner Violence Study enrolled men incarcerated in state prisons and their female partners and interviewed them around the time of the male partner’s return from prison (e.g., “reentry”). Using modified grounded theory,10 the team applied inductive and deductive codes to deidentified, verbatim transcripts in ATLAS.ti; reviewed and themed the data gleaned from Boolean-type queries; and collectively and iteratively developed analytic memos on each theme.
Social-ecological context for post-prison intimate partner violence
Note: This framework applies data from the Multi-Site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting and Partnering to adapt the general social-ecological framework for intimate partner violence proposed by Bell and Naugle.11
The Social-Ecological Framework suggests that contextual influences at multiple ecological levels influence individuals’ experiences of violence (Figure 1).12, 13 Multi-site Family Study participants perceived four distinct pathways by which the distal contexts of their lives (indicated by the red “Policy & Society” ring and orange “Community & Lived Environment” ring) shaped more proximal contexts (indicated by the yellow “Couple & Family” ring and green “Individual” ring), which in turn shaped their experiences of partner violence. These pathways related to the economic, cognitive, physical, and social conditions surrounding their relationships.
Economic Conditions: Exclusion and Poverty
Consistent with prior research,14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 economic conditions placed constant strain on relationships between reentering men and their partners. At the individual level, reentering partners struggled to secure income from legal employment—which, at the couple and family level, brought household financial strain and high-stakes conflicts over the shortage of money to meet basic needs. These strains were shaped by community-level shortages of legal employment and a density of opportunity for criminalized activity—which participants saw as perpetuated at the societal and policy levels by conviction-related employment barriers, a lack of institutional support for post-prison workforce reintegration, and fines and fees imposed by the criminal justice system. They were further exacerbated by societal-level gender norms positioning men as family economic providers (an unattainable scenario for most participating couples). In this environment, financial strain and conflict sometimes escalated into the use of violence.
Cognitive Conditions: Deteriorated Communication and Lack of Information
Like many couples reuniting after an incarceration,20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Multi-site Family Study participants were affected by deteriorated communication and an erosion of mutual awareness of one another’s lives during imprisonment. Shaped at the policy level by the imposition of physical separation during incarceration and institutional and policy barriers to open dialog, many couples lacked knowledge of important aspects of one another’s lives during incarceration. When couples resumed unimpeded communication upon the male partner’s release, they often experienced high-intensity, recurrent conflicts around one or both partners’ actual or perceived intimacy with others, household routines, and divisions of labor. These conditions made it difficult to maintain stable routines or agreements that could facilitate secure, interdependent collaboration. Instead, one or both partners sometimes attempted to control the other’s behavior using manipulative or abusive tactics.
Physical Conditions: Exposure to Violence
Multi-site Family Study participants often described partner violence arising in the context of one or both couple members’ individual mental health symptoms, particularly post-traumatic stress (including hypervigilance and dissociation) and other forms of traumatic adaptation; struggles with addiction; and unrelenting anger at their partners and their larger circumstances, particularly around the ways that encounters with the criminal justice system had changed their families and life prospects.25, 26
Participants described struggles with addiction as arising in community environments where highly addictive substances were readily available (as documented in prior research27, 28) and exposures to violence and trauma were common. Violence and trauma exposures were gendered, with men more often relaying experiences with street and prison violence, and women more often describing prior sexual violence and partner violence victimization as well as traumatic pregnancy, birth, and parenting experiences (e.g., loss of custody).
Other community-level dynamics, including a perceived lack of protection from the criminal justice system or other government entities and a sense of harsh and inconsistent implementation of criminal justice policies (including violent police-civilian encounters) contributed to a sense of overriding physical vulnerability and the need for constant defense. Partners reported heightened reactivity and sometimes had difficulty responding nonaggressively to each other in charged situations.
Social Conditions: Isolation and Disempowerment
Extending prior theory,26 Multi-site Family Study participants saw abusers’ attempts at domination as shaped by their own perceived helplessness in the wider social and economic environment (particularly prison). Where general-population research has shown that abusers often isolate victims from sources of social support,29, 30, 31 women in this study often already faced social isolation at the community level because of their partner’s criminalized activity and the stigmatization of incarceration. This social isolation and victims’ dependence on abusive partners’ coparenting contributions (particularly child care or small contributions to children’s day-to-day material needs) further extended their vulnerability to abuse.
Safe Return: A Context-Responsive Intimate Partner Violence Intervention
for Reentering African American Men and Their Partners
The Safe Return Initiative brought together stakeholders in partner violence and victim services, batterers’ programs, fatherhood programs, and parole agencies to support reentering men and the safety and well-being of their intimate partners and coparents. The project incorporated stakeholders’ insights along with the wisdom of formerly incarcerated African American men and their partners who had experienced violence in their relationships.
Safe Return produced a set of culturally specific and context-informed resources for (1) facilitating healing for victims, including those who have used violence themselves; (2) transforming norms related to gender, violence, and control that impair the formation of respectful and healthy relationships; (3) addressing practical reentry needs, from employment to direct communication skills; and (4) helping participants connect to trusted community resources, including partner violence services.
Safe Return: Domestic Violence and Reentry includes facilitation guides, handouts, and video vignettes for groups with affected men and women;
Building Bridges includes videos and reports for community-based organizations and public agencies implementing best practices for safe reentry; and
Journey to Healing includes video, dance and theatre resources to support healing among those who have been exposed to partner violence as children or adults.
These resources remain available to those working to end partner violence in African American communities and promote peace and healing after incarceration.
Results of the current study point to a set of strategies that might help to prevent post-prison partner violence by addressing the contextual influences described by those who have experienced it (Table 1).
Context-responsive strategies for preventing post-prison intimate partner violence
| Context | Potential Prevention Strategies |
|---|---|
| Economic Conditions | • Address barriers to post-prison employment that perpetuate economic exclusion of former prisoners and their families. • Implement more robust workforce development programs for the adjudicated and in neighborhoods heavily affected by incarceration.* • Eliminate criminal justice system fines and fees levied against low-income individuals. |
| Cognitive Conditions | • Eliminate forms of criminal justice system surveillance that might impair attention, sense of safety, or cognition among the surveilled. • Offer culturally responsive, local programs that support participants in heavily incarcerated communities in transforming normative beliefs about gender and family roles and cultivating beliefs and agreements that serve them and their families (see text box about the Safe Return program). |
| Physical Conditions | • Limit the use of prison and jail incarceration. • Prohibit conditions of confinement known to cause psychological damage (e.g., overcrowding, solitary confinement).32, 33, 34, 35 • Apply zoning or other physical environment-based strategies to curtail marketing and availability of addictive substances (such as liquor) in neighborhoods heavily affected by incarceration. |
| Social Conditions | • Eliminate barriers to contact during incarceration and support families in establishing open, safe, and healthy communication through trauma-informed relationship education and counselling. • Offer free, trauma-informed mental health and substance use treatment to incarcerated and reentering individuals and partners. • Create services to support returning prisoners and their partners in reconnecting in safe and healthy ways after incarceration. |
For example, the STRIVE Program and other economic success initiatives developed by the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore, Maryland deliver a robust combination of pre-employment services, comprehensive adjunct supports (including transportation and clothing assistance), job retention and advancement programs, and career- and family-focused case management in communities heavily affected by incarceration with guidance and leadership from individuals directly affected by incarceration and economic exclusion.
Advocates have long raised concerns about the potential for partner violence after a spouse’s or partner’s return from prison,22, 23, 24, 25, 36, 37 but few programs or policies exist to prevent it. In an era in which experiences of incarceration and reentry—and by extension, experiences of a partner’s or coparent’s incarceration and reentry—are commonplace in low-income urban communities,18, 38, 39, 40 the safety of families reuniting after a prison stay merits serious attention.
Effective partner violence prevention requires a robust understanding of the individual, family, community, and societal or policy contexts under which it arises.12, 41 Yet prior research has focused largely on describing individual incidents, victims, and perpetrators or (more recently) individual victimization or perpetration trajectories.42 Further, research on the intimate partner violence experiences of incarcerated and reentering men and their partners has been scarce.
The Post-Incarceration Partner Violence Study synthesized the insights of reentering men and their partners to identify how economic, cognitive, physical, and social conditions operated across the individual, family, community, and societal levels to shape post-prison partner violence. Their insights offer a valuable starting point for future research and for considering how prevention could effectively target these conditions and effect systemic change across social-ecological levels.
The authors are indebted to participants in the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting and Partnering for sharing the experiences and insights that made our work possible. We also wish to thank the National Institutes of Justice, and particularly Senior Science Advisor Angela Moore, for supporting this research. Finally, we appreciate the anonymous peer reviewers whose feedback strengthened this work and the RTI staff who brought it to publication, including Jeri Ropero-Miller, Annie Gering, and Rebecca Brophy.
RTI Press Associate Editor: Jeri Ropero-Miller
References
1Enns PK, Yi Y, Comfort M, Goldman AW, Lee H, Muller C
et al.
What percentage of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated? Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS). Socius 2019;5:2378023119829332.
2Breiding MJ, Smith SG, Basile KC, Walters ML, Chen J, Merrick MT. Prevalence and characteristics of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence victimization—National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011. MMWR Surveill Summ 2014 Sep;63(8):1–18.25188037
3McKay T, Landwehr J, Lindquist C, Feinberg R, Comfort M, Cohen J
et al.
Intimate partner violence in couples navigating incarceration and reentry. J Offender Rehabil 2018;57(5):273–93. 10.1080/10509674.2018.1487897
4Wildeman C. Imprisonment and infant mortality. Soc Probl 2012;59(2):228–57. 10.1525/sp.2012.59.2.228
5Bent-Goodley TB, Williams OJ. Community insights on domestic violence among African Americans. Seattle (WA): City of Seattle & Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community; 2004. Retrieved from http://idvaac.org/wp-content/uploads/Seattle_CommInsights-1.pdf
6Chan WY, Hollingsworth MA, Espelage DL, Mitchell KJ. Preventing violence in context: the importance of culture for implementing systemic change. Psychol Violence 2016;6(1):22–6. 10.1037/vio0000021
7Groblewski J. Domestic violence in context: unmet needs and promising strategies. Madison (WI): Center for Family Policy and Practice; 2013. Retrieved from http://www.ncdsv.org/images/CFPP_DVinContextUnmetNeetsAndPromisingStrategies_3-2013.pdf
8Williams OJ. Concepts in creating culturally responsive services for supervised visitation centers. Minneapolis (MN): Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community; 2007.
9Williams OJ, Oliver W, Pope M. Domestic violence in the African American community. J Aggress Maltreat Trauma 2008;16(3):229–37. 10.1080/10926770801925486
10Birks M, Mills J. Grounded theory: a practical guide. London: SAGE; 2015.
11Bell KM, Naugle AE. Intimate partner violence theoretical considerations: moving towards a contextual framework. Clin Psychol Rev 2008;28(7):1096–107. 10.1016/j.cpr.2008.03.00318430501
12Assari S. Multilevel approach to intimate partner violence research and prevention. Int J Prev Med 2013 May;4(5):616–7.23930176
13Dahlberg LL, Krug EG. Violence: a global public health problem. In: Krug E, Dahlberg LL, Mercy A, Zwi AB, Lozano R, editors. World report on violence and health. Geneva (Switzerland): World Health Organization; 2002. pp. 1–56.
14Schwartz-Soicher O, Geller A, Garfinkel I. The effect of paternal incarceration on material hardship. Soc Serv Rev 2011;85(3):447–73. 10.1086/66192524839314
15Uggen C, Vuolo M, Lageson S, Ruhland E, Whitham HK. The edge of stigma: an experimental audit of the effects of low-level criminal records on employment. Criminology 2014;52(4):627–54. Available from: 10.1111/1745-9125.12051
16Visher CA, Debus-Sherrill SA, Yahner J. Employment after prison: A longitudinal study of former prisoners. Justice Q 2011;28(5):698–718. 10.1080/07418825.2010.535553
17Western B, Kling JR, Weiman DF. The labor market consequences of incarceration. NCCD News 2001;47(3):410–27.
18Western B, Pettit B. Incarceration and social inequality. Daedalus 2010;139(3):8–19. 10.1162/DAED_a_0001921032946
19Wildeman C, Western B. Incarceration in fragile families. Future Child 2010;20(2):157–77. 10.1353/foc.2010.000620964136
20Comfort M. Doing time together: love and family in the shadow of the prison. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press; 2008. 10.7208/chicago/9780226114682.001.0001
21Fishman LT. Women at the wall: A study of prisoners’ wives doing time on the outside. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press; 1990.
22Freeland Braun JM. (2012). Intimate partner violence during the transition from prison to the community: an ecological analysis (Doctoral dissertation, Portland [OR] State University). Retrieved from https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/511
23Hairston CF, Oliver W. Safe return: domestic violence and prisoner reentry: experiences of Black women and men. New York: Vera Institute of Justice; 2006.
24Hairston CF, Oliver W. Women’s experiences with men’s incarceration and reentry. In: Immarigeon R, editor. Women and girls in the criminal justice system. Volume 2. Kingston (NJ): Civic Research Institute; 2011.
25Oliver W, Hairston CF. Intimate partner violence during the transition from prison to the community: perspectives of incarcerated African American men. J Aggress Maltreat Trauma 2008;16(3):258–76. 10.1080/10926770801925577
26Hampton R, Oliver W, Magarian L. Domestic violence in the African American community: an analysis of social and structural factors. Violence Against Women 2003;9(5):533–57. 10.1177/1077801202250450
27Cunradi CB, Mair C, Ponicki W, Remer L. (2011). Alcohol outlets, neighborhood characteristics, and intimate partner violence: ecological analysis of a California city. J Urban Health;88(2):191–200. 10.1007/s11524-011-9549-6
28Cunradi, CB (2014). Alcohol outlet density, drinking contexts and intimate partner violence: a review of environmental risk factors. J Drug Educ;44(1–2):19–33.
29Coohey C. The relationship between mothers’ social networks and severe domestic violence: a test of the social isolation hypothesis. Violence Vict 2007;22(4):503–12. 10.1891/08866700778155400817691556
30Katerndahl D, Burge S, Ferrer R, Becho J, Wood R. Differences in social network structure and support among women in violent relationships. J Interpers Violence 2013;28(9):1948–64. 10.1177/088626051246910323262818
31Lanier C, Maume MO. Intimate partner violence and social isolation across the rural/urban divide. Violence Against Women 2009;15(11):1311–30. 10.1177/107780120934671119755628
32Haney C. The psychological impact of incarceration: implications for post-prison adjustment. Santa Cruz (CA): University of California; 2001.
33Haney C. Reforming punishment: psychological limits to the pains of imprisonment. Washington (DC): American Psychological Association; 2006. 10.1037/11382-000
34Kupers TA. Trauma and its sequelae in male prisoners: effects of confinement, overcrowding, and diminished services. Am J Orthopsychiatry 1996;66(2):189–96. 10.1037/h00801709173797
35Kupers TA. Solitary. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press; 2017.
36Bobbitt M, Campbell R, Tate GL. Safe return: working toward preventing domestic violence when men return from prison. Federal Sentencing Reporter 2011;24(1):57–61. 10.1525/fsr.2011.24.1.57
37Oliver W, Williams OJ, Hairston CF. Prisoner reentry and intimate partner violence in the African American community: the case for culturally competent interventions. J Inst Justice Int Stud 2006;4:147–56.
38Comfort M. “It was basically college to us”: poverty, prison, and emerging adulthood. J Poverty 2012;16(3):308–22. 10.1080/10875549.2012.69592322962541
39LopezAguado P. The collateral consequences of prisonization: racial sorting, carceral identity, and community criminalization. Sociol Compass 2016;10(1):12–23. 10.1111/soc4.12342
40Sampson RJ, Loeffler C. Punishment’s place: the local concentration of mass incarceration. Daedalus 2010;139(3):20–31. 10.1162/DAED_a_0002021032947
41Shobe M, Dienemann J. Intimate partner violence in the United States: an ecological approach to prevention and treatment. Soc Policy Soc 2008;7(2):185–95. 10.1017/S1474746407004137
42Beyer K, Wallis AB, Hamberger LK. Neighborhood environment and intimate partner violence: a systematic review. Trauma Violence Abuse 2015;16(1):16–47. 10.1177/152483801351575824370630
Click cover to download publication
