“I really wanna put eyes on these guys”: Caregiving in prisons, pandemic, and protest

Abstract

In this article we use our collaborative work with a support group for families of incarcerated people in upstate New York—including participant observation, interviews and focus groups from 2019-2020—to highlight how COVID-19 exacerbated challenges they already faced in caring for kin across walls. We focus specifically during the summer of 2020 when New York state prison visitation was closed to prevent the spread of COVID, showing how families struggled to stay connected and also organized to fight the carceral system. We suggest that through these acts of resistance and care, people on the outside caring for incarcerated kin during the pandemic can be understood as what Joy James calls the “captive maternal.” Understanding these women as “captive maternals” within a system structured by racial capitalism renders explicit the way the logics of captivity extend beyond the walls of prisons and jails to shape the experiences of their kin on the outside. It reveals these women to be not simply compassionate individuals caring for people they love, but rather as resistors fighting through their acts of care the logics of abandonment, disposability, and anti-blackness on which contemporary American society is built, and which people nationwide were protesting.