Carceral kinship and social sorting: A framework for analyzing differential punishment through kinship ties

This article develops the concept of carceral kinship to show how familial presence, absence, and perceived “fitness” operate as informal technologies of governance within juvenile justice. Seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in courts, prison, and juvenile detention in Freetown, Sierra Leone, revealed how relational visibility structures legal outcomes: children with present, legible kin are more likely to be granted bail, represented, or released, while those deemed socially unaccompanied routinely encountered delay, prolonged confinement, and transfer to adult prison. In a legal system shaped by colonial afterlives, humanitarian logics, and competing imaginaries of childhood, kinship is read as evidence of moral personhood, rehabilitative potential, and social worth. Children in conflict with the law are punished less for what they have done than for the futures they are presumed capable of inhabiting. Through assessing kin, legal actors translate class, disability, geography, and gender into actionable forms while leaving them formally unnamed. Carceral kinship marks the frictional space between lived kinship, its legal codification, and the institutional adjudication of personhood. Within the moral infrastructure of juvenile justice, recognition, protection, and abandonment are distributed through kinship.