Being locked away in a prison cell for years on end can be devastatingly lonely for people behind bars. Aside from mail, TV, radio, and guest visitation, their access to the outside world is limited. Perhaps, lesser known is how loneliness impacts the loved ones of incarcerated people.
A 2018 report by Essie Justice Group found that 1 in 4 women in the United States, and nearly 1 in 2 Black women, have a loved one who is incarcerated. The nonprofit organization surveyed women with incarcerated family and found that most experienced “extreme isolation.”
If untreated, chronic isolation can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, depression, and anxiety. A lack of social connection is also a risk factor for suicide. That’s one of the reasons why the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness a public health crisis in May.
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“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity,” Murthy said in a report.
For insight on loneliness prevention for Black women enduring social loss due to incarceration, we spent time in conversation with Gina Clayton-Johnson, founder and executive director of Essie Justice Group. Her organization aims to break isolation, heal trauma, and build political power among women with incarcerated loved ones through its Healing to Advocacy membership program.
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WORD IN BLACK: Gina, at what point does loneliness set in for Black women navigating the incarceration of a loved one?
GINA CLAYTON-JOHNSON: There are two moments that are incredibly isolating that I have seen and experienced. I think the first is at that moment of the initial arrest where there is confusion and fear around who to reach out to, who to share the changes of all of the circumstances [with]. And the needs, right? You need support. You need an attorney. You need advice. You need rides to court. You need to take time off work to be able to go to court. You need to be able to explain it to the kids. You need all of these things. And so that feeling of, “wait a second, I actually don’t have people that I can turn to with all these questions,” translates into a feeling and a confrontation with isolation.
The second moment is when the sentencing has happened and someone is incarcerated. That loss… that finality of, okay, we’re looking at X number of years without this person and a new reality of driving to go do prison visits. And how do I get there? And how much does that cost? And how do I explain why we’re not going to show up at the birthday party because we all got to get in the car and drive for five hours? That creates a kind of long drain. You know, that slow isolation.
WIB: What resources does a woman need to ease the burden of isolation? Who should be stepping in at those critical points to help her?
GCJ: Other women who get it, who’ve been there. That’s what we’ve seen work. There’s a whole other answer to this question in terms of what the actual systemic needs are for preventing this kind of harm from taking place in the first place, which I think we are very interested in. But, I mean, what we need is to be able to have community with one another.
WIB: Can you share more about systemic-level change? Is the government at all responsible for remedying loneliness among Black women, considering how it’s historically criminalized and separated Black families?
GCJ: Yes, I absolutely believe the government needs to be stepping in. These are government programs and policies that have created these conditions, right? And so the solution, I think, has to be to listen to community and to import and to apply community-based solutions in the face of these devastating political decisions. The War on Drugs was a racist political project and that resulted in the mass control of our communities. And we’re seeing so much of the harm of that 50 years later.
WIB: What would you suggest the government do to reverse the harms done toward Black women and their families?
GCJ: I believe there’s so much that we can do inside of our policies and inside of our government systems. First of all, we need to remove ourselves from patterns of government-sponsored harm that do not work. I think public safety strategies really need to catch up with data-driven times and apply solutions such as community to address issues of houselessness, address issues of interpersonal violence, etc. Not extraction, separation, punishment. Those things haven’t been working. If they were working, we would be the safest society in the world because we are the most incarcerating society in the world.
WIB: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
GCJ: I wouldn’t want to end our conversation without saying that women with incarcerated loved ones are the reentry system of this country. Meaning that, when someone comes home — regardless of gender — from jail or prison or immigration detention, they’re coming home into the life of a mother or an auntie or a girlfriend or a sister or even a daughter who is then caretaking for that reentry process in a way that doesn’t look like the nine-to-five case worker or the probation officer that the person checks in with. It’s actually the person who looks at that individual in their eyes and notices the first signs of any loss of hope. Or is able to say, “you know what? I know the thing that you need right now is actually just a new shirt and to have access to some dignity” because that’s the first step to that next step of going, “let’s go get you a job and let’s go remind yourself of your worth.”
Those critical pieces are being done and performed at the expense of women, Black women in particular, who are coming out of pocket to pay for the reentry work that we all know is so important, that we’re all invested in happening successfully.
So, when I think about what the government can do, I think we ought to be compensating the reentry caretakers of this country.
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