Navigating the Situation: Family Experiences of Jail Incarceration in Rural America

Abstract Jails occupy a distinct place in the criminal legal process where people are incarcerated amidst the uncertainties of pretrial processing, plea negotiations and legal decision making, system entry and exit, and transfers of authority between different criminal legal institutions or informal familial control. This liminality creates an opportunity to examine how families make sense of the different and often contradictory roles available throughout the criminal legal process. Using qualitative interviews with family members and romantic partners of men detained in a rural county jail, this study examines how families both define a role for themselves and make sense of the jail as an institutional support or hindrance in addressing the underlying situation. Four distinct perspectives emerged shaped by both whether family members assumed primary responsibility for managing the incarcerated person’s needs, and whether they perceived the jail to be a constructive or restrictive institution toward achieving their goals for the incarcerated person and family. The intersection of these constructs forms a framework that both captures the experiences of families in the study and sheds light on how this distinct criminal legal context fits within broader literatures on imprisonment, legal processing, and family management.