Parental incarceration often involves caregivers explaining the absence of a significant attachment to a child. Developmental scholars suggest that bibliotherapy and storybooks can provide both illustrative and explanatory frameworks for caregivers to discuss difficult topics with children. Storybooks paired with caregiver wisdom might help children to understand and adjust to the loss of a parent. However, scientific-based derivatives of caregiver experiences and communication practices integrated into storybooks are largely absent from the literature. To address this gap a qualitative community-based action research study was carried out in three contiguous phases, with 22 caregivers during 8 focus groups in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area. Phase one entailed exploring caregiver-child communication practices related to parental incarceration. The second phase involved creating topic-specific stories integrated with bibliotherapeutic principles drawn from caregivers' perceptions and narratives. The third phase included developing a web portal to host digital storybooks and companion resources. Catalytic validity was established through collaboration with the project team. Data analysis resulted in a robust theoretical framework and grounded theory entitled, Caregivers' Family Relations Assessment and Communication Strategies (C-FRACS). Findings assert caregivers' prerogatives on child well-being as a priority as it intersects with communication practices and epistemological concepts of explaining jail, prison, and parental incarceration to children.
Recent studies have illuminated how families are affected by prison staff engagement during prison visits. Prison staff, by virtue of their positions, exercise power and authority over families during prison visits processes and potentially play a vital role in shaping inmate-family experiences. Although some interactions with prison staff may be cordial, others have been reported as stressful for visitors, especially families with children. Yet many family visitors endure stressful encounters since visits can serve as portals for bonding between inmates and their families. Over the past two decades, some prisons in the United Kingdom (UK) have invested in developing family-oriented practices and visits protocol, where prison staff oversee the visits process. This is in contrast to prison staff who tend to take on a police-officer mentality whereby policing behaviors or personal philosophies are aligned with implied suspicion, mistrust, and apprehension towards inmates and families. Given such, prison staff interpretation of their roles and engagement with families is of research interest. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to understand how UK prison staff interpreted their roles during family visits and determine why this evolution towards family-focus visiting took place. To answer the research inquiry, a heterogeneous sample of prison staff from private and public sector prisons and advocacy center contractors employed at two prisons in the United Kingdom were recruited to provide broad perspectives on staff roles during the process of the visit. Within these facilities, we interviewed a total of 13 (n=13) staff members. Data collection and semi-structured interviews occurred at two prison facilities and two advocacy centers. Three researchers conducted cross-case analyses and applied triangulation methods to establish a clear chain of evidence documented through step-by-step processes: audit trails; flexible and parallel data analysis during data collection, and first-and second-order coding processes. Findings from this study indicate that prison staff perceives their roles during the visiting processes as an evolution from traditional corrections-based punitive practices (i.e. policing) to a visiting program capable of accommodating three goals: low-stress family visits, inmate conformance, and reduced recidivism. This study adds to the literature on detailing how prison staff dichotomous roles were interpreted as balancing tensions between institutional controls and minimizing traumatic experiences for visiting families through prison-based interventions.
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