Alysha McDonald wants you to know that incarcerated people – and their loved ones – are not as different from you as you might think.
McDonald is currently in the last year of her PhD in Sociology at McMaster University. Her work focuses on reintegration, identity, freedom and risk management of incarcerated men.
Her thesis work has involved interviewing and hanging out with previously incarcerated men, to see what reintegration looks like for them in their daily lives.
At first, McDonald thought the study was going to be all about social networks and relationships. But as the work progressed, it became more about how they managed matters like identity, risk, and supervision, being on parole or on probation, McDonald said.
“Just basically how they navigate supervision every day,” she said.
“That was the thing that most consumed their lives.”
It’s an interesting topic in the context of the criminal justice system, which aims to manage offenders’ risk to public safety, she said.
McDonald’s study looks at the other side of it: How previously incarcerated men themselves manage their own risk of reoffending, breaching a condition, or being reincarcerated, and “how they see risk management in tandem with freedom, relationships and identity.”
Ripple effects
One of the biggest misunderstandings she comes across in her work, McDonald said, is the perception that people who have been incarcerated are “abnormal … that they’re not like us, and there are distinct emotional, psychological, social things about them.”
But that’s “absolutely not the case for most of the people that I’ve spoken to.”
The experience of being incarcerated affects a lot of people worldwide, she said, especially in Canada, and especially among groups that are overrepresented in the prison system — including Indigenous and Black individuals.
“It has a wide impact, and is very much a rippling effect,” she said.
McDonald recently published a paper titled Who cares?: The burdens of care borne by the loved ones of incarcerated men. The paper explores the many ways people are impacted by having a loved one in prison.
That includes “mundane daily impacts that you wouldn’t necessarily think of,” McDonald said, such as having to pay the high cost of a phone call to talk to your loved ones — in some cases, it’s as much as a dollar a minute — or the logistics of visiting someone in prison and what you can bring with you.
But there are also matters like navigating social relationships when you have a loved one who is incarcerated.
“Having to explain that to a new friend or a family member who might not understand can be a lot more complicated than it initially might seem.”
When the justice system doesn’t meet certain needs, it often falls on family members to pick up the slack — such as planning for release, rehabilitation, and even legal advocacy. These are what McDonald, and her colleagues call the “burdens of care.”
“The prison system kind of lets these things fall to the wayside,” McDonald said. “There’s a deficit there. And so, when those needs are not met, typically either nothing happens and the person really struggles, or their loved ones take [them] on.”
Changing policy
In addition to her own study, McDonald is working on other projects, including a Canada-wide reintegration study led by the University of Alberta. The first of its kind in Canada, this large-scale project is examining the factors contributing to the successes and barriers of community re-entry among people released from provincial prisons.
McDonald presenting her work.
She’s also partnered with the John Howard Society of Ontario for part of her dissertation, and is working with them to create policy reports and briefs based on her PhD findings. She’s hoping that this work will reach stakeholders in the criminal justice system and have a positive impact on people’s re-entry experiences.
She’s also hopeful that people might read the work and relate to it, or see themselves in it.
Last year, she presented her work as a guest lecturer in a class at McMaster. Afterwards, a student approached her to say that “ it really resonated with them and their experience of having a loved one incarcerated,” McDonald said.
“A lot of people think the challenges stop when you leave the prison system. And that’s not the case,” McDonald said.
The participants in her study have told her that their life only gets more complicated after release, as they deal with stigma around incarceration, trying to find employment with a criminal record, repairing relationships and disclosing their past to new people.
“I think people who have criminal records are often, you know, vilified in the media and painted with a wide brush stroke,” McDonald said.
“But it’s an extremely complex population. It’s a population with a lot of difficult experiences — which I think most of us can relate to.”