Introduction

Between 1989 and 2021, the National Registry of Exonerations recorded 2970 exonerations in the US, 161 of which occurred in 2021 alone (National Registry of Exonerations, 2021). With a growing number of exonerations, the study of wrongful convictions and the broader Innocence Movement (an organized effort to understand and prevent wrongful convictions) has expanded significantly in recent years. Scholars have made strides in determining the extent, causes, and consequences of wrongful convictions (Garrett, 2020; Norris et al., 2020), and they have also begun to understand exonerees’ reentry experiences more fully, highlighting the unique difficulties that exonerees face as they recover from their wrongful convictions (Haimson, 2021; Madrigal and Norris, 2022; Shlosberg et al., 2020). Largely missing from this body of research, however, is an exploration of the shifting social processes through which the experience of wrongful conviction harms family life over time. Given the general significance of family support during reentry (Mowen et al., 2019) and its particular importance for exonerees (Nowotny et al., 2021), developing a fuller understanding of the social processes that shape familial disruption following wrongful convictions is crucial. This sociological perspective on familial disruption supplements and deepens existing research, which has focused primarily on how the psychological traumas of wrongful imprisonment have reverberating consequences on family life (Grounds, 2004; Scott, 2009).

In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the U.S. to explore the “relational costs of wrongful convictions,” defined as the harms that men’s familial relationships sustained at the moment of wrongful conviction, during the period of wrongful imprisonment, and thereafter in the men's post-prison lives. By situating participants’ familial relationships in time to explore how the relational costs of wrongful convictions unfolded gradually and evolved over the course of participants’ journeys, I focus on the persistent harms that affected participants’ family lives from the moment of wrongful conviction up to the time of the interview. In so doing, I reframe familial disruption as a fluid social process rather than the product of exonerees’ individual psychological traumas (Grounds, 2004; Scott, 2009).

Literature Review

Imprisonment and Family Life

Research on the collateral consequences of incarceration has exhaustively documented the harms sustained by the loved ones of incarcerated persons (Comfort, 2007; Murray and Farrington, 2005; Umamaheswar, 2021; Wakefield and Wildeman, 2013). The shame, anger, and alienation that family members feel (Braman, 2007; Comfort, 2007; Jardine, 2019; Kotova, 2019) often go unacknowledged in a culture driven by punitive sentiment (Arditti, 2012), and families are forced to devise creative strategies to cope with the difficulties of familial incarceration (Comfort, 2007; Comfort et al., 2007). Penal harm moreover extends into the reentry period, which generates unique challenges for family members, upon whom 40–80% of reentering persons rely (Liu and Visher, 2021). Reentering persons’ pre-prison difficulties (related to, for example, their mental health and substance abuse issues) often re-emerge following their release, and family members’ resources may be strained in trying to support their reentering loved one while contending with their own independent challenges (Travis and Waull, 2003). Family reunification is even more challenging in cases where familial relationships have historically been marred by conflict (Liu and Visher, 2021; Travis and Waull, 2003). Although the specific obstacles that family members face may vary, the negative impact of imprisonment on family life endures well beyond the incarceration period.

The last few decades witnessed a significant increase in scholarship on the impact of imprisonment on family life, but research on the aftermath of exonerations has only recently begun to accrue (Haimson, 2021; Nowotny et al., 2021; Shlosberg et al., 2020; Westervelt and Cook, 2012). This literature has demonstrated that, as is true of imprisonment more generally, the consequences of wrongful imprisonment also extend to exonerees’ families and communities (Brooks and Greenberg, 2021; Burnett et al., 2017; Grounds, 2004; Jenkins, 2013, 2014; Konvisser, 2015). Like all loved ones of incarcerated persons, the families of wrongfully convicted persons incur financial costs, and they may be stigmatized, victimized, and ostracized simply by virtue of their association with their wrongfully-convicted relative (Burnett et al., 2017; Grounds, 2004; Jenkins, 2013; Naughton 2014). Family members of the wrongfully convicted often assume their loved ones’ release from prison will trigger a natural reversion to normalcy in the family setting, but reentry is instead characterized by conflict and feelings of estrangement because of the traumas that wrongfully-convicted persons carry from their imprisonment terms (Haimson, 2021; Scott, 2009). For example, Grounds (2004) found that the psychological burdens generated by wrongful imprisonment persisted in wrongfully-convicted men’s reentry, as the men found themselves unable to cooperate with even minor requests from their intimate partners because of their prolonged loss of autonomy in prison. Although Haimson (2021) found that exonerees were in many ways better supported than individuals on parole, their familial relationships still suffered because of the pains and everyday habits that lingered from their period of wrongful imprisonment.

Family members of wrongfully-convicted persons also separately endure their own suffering, prompting Jenkins (2013) to distinguish between wrongful convictions’ “primary victims” (wrongfully-convicted persons themselves) and “secondary victims” (the families of wrongfully-convicted persons). For example, children of the wrongfully convicted experience depressive symptoms as they confront the “pains of injustice” (Jenkins, 2013: 124) in addition to the strains that typically accompany parental imprisonment (Murray and Farrington, 2005). The difficulties that family members face are sharper still in cases involving “double trauma,” where both the “original victim” and the wrongfully-convicted person belong to the same family unit (Jenkins, 2013: 130).

As Condry and Minson (2021: 549) argued, a “long-term perspective” on the impact of incarceration on familial relationships is important because these relationships “are interwoven and embedded at a material, emotional, and metaphorical level,” and they often pre-exist the prison sentence, withstand imprisonment, and continue when a family member is released from prison. Despite research indicating that familial estrangement begins during the early periods of wrongful imprisonment as family members start to lead largely independent lives (Grounds, 2004), and in spite of abundant evidence documenting the destabilizing consequences of wrongful convictions, scholars have yet to situate exonerees’ social relationships in time to explore how familial challenges associated with wrongful convictions evolve. In this article, I extend research on the impact of wrongful convictions on family life by exploring the relational costs of wrongful convictions over three distinct stages of participants’ wrongful conviction experiences: The moment of wrongful conviction, the period of wrongful imprisonment, and the post-prison period.

Methods

I collected data for this study through in-depth, remote interviews with 15 exonerated men over a period of 4 months. Each of these men was wrongfully convicted for a violent crime and later exonerated following a period of incarceration that ranged from 4 to 30 years. 6 of these men identified as White, 6 identified as Black, and 3 identified as Hispanic. The men were between 27 and 69 years old at the time of the interview, with a median age of 49.

Exonerees constitute an extraordinarily hard-to-reach population (DeShay, 2021), and recruitment was thus challenging, especially because the traumas attached to wrongful imprisonment (the focus of the broader study) may have made some men understandably hesitant to revisit these experiences specifically even if they were amenable to discussing other dimensions of their wrongful conviction experience. Before beginning recruitment, I obtained IRB approval from my home institution, and I also submitted a research proposal to the Innocence Network Research Review Committee, which consists of exonerees, exonerees’ family members, advocates, and lawyers/staff at organizations connected to the Innocence Network—a loosely-affiliated network of organizations supporting exoneration efforts. Members of the Innocence Network Research Review Committee provided feedback on my research proposal and suggested some minor modifications to the study design before approving the study.

I began recruitment by reaching out to staff and lawyers at individual innocence organizations, and by posting recruitment flyers in social media groups devoted to supporting exoneration efforts. When these recruitment strategies proved largely unsuccessful, I constructed my final sample through a combination of snowball and theoretical sampling. Relying on professional contacts, I directly emailed and (remotely) met with several exonerees. Some of these men participated in the study, while others connected me with different men who became participants. One participant also forwarded my study flyer to a listserv of exonerees with his endorsement of the study, which facilitated recruitment of several more participants.

Race and class emerged early as important themes in the data, and I therefore deliberately recruited men of color to diversify the sample, which up to that point consisted mostly of White, middle- to upper-middle-class men with no history of criminal legal contact. In an effort to sample based on emerging themes rather than exclusively through snowball sampling, I reached out to several non-profit exoneree support organizations (unaffiliated with the Innocence Network), and I relied on the National Registry of Exonerations to connect with specific exonerees’ lawyers and request that they forward my study flyer to their clients. Despite its relatively small size, my final sample contains a wide range of perspectives that were shaped by participants’ different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, prior incarceration histories, and early life-course experiences.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to eliminate geographic restrictions on sampling a hard-to-reach population, I conducted the interviews on the phone or on Zoom (a password-protected video conferencing platform), depending on participants’ preferences. I sent participants an informed consent form via email before the interview date, and I obtained oral consent before beginning each interview. I assigned pseudonyms to protect participants’ confidentiality and anonymity, and I redacted identifying information (such as the dates of their wrongful imprisonment or the names of the states in which they were wrongfully imprisoned) in the interview transcripts. Participants received a $20 e-gift card as a small token of my appreciation for their time and their willingness to share their stories (and in accordance with the guidelines offered by the Innocence Network Research Review Committee). The interviews generally lasted approximately 1.5 h (with some extending over 2.5 h), and they consisted of mostly open-ended questions related to three thematic areas, each of which covered participants’ familial relationships.

  1. (1)

    Participants’ early life-course years. In addition to asking participants for basic demographic information (related to their age, marital status/history, parental status, employment history, etc.), I asked participants questions such as “Can you tell me what your childhood was like?”, and “Can you describe what your relationship with your parents was like when you were growing up?”

  2. (2)

    Participants’ experiences being wrongfully convicted and thereafter wrongfully imprisoned: Here, I asked participants questions such as “Can you describe the circumstances of the crime for which you were wrongfully convicted?”, “How did your family respond to your wrongful conviction?”, and “What was the hardest part of being in prison?” In this portion of the interview, I also asked participants about their relationships with other incarcerated men, correctional officers, and their loved ones outside prison during their period of imprisonment.

  3. (3)

    Participants’ release and reentry experiences: In the final segment of the interview, I asked participants questions about their pathway to release and exoneration, the challenges they faced upon reentry, and their present-day wellbeing. Questions here included, for example, “Can you tell me how you came to be released from prison?”, “Can you describe any challenges you have faced since being released from prison?”, and “How do you think being wrongfully convicted has affected your life?”

I employed a constructivist grounded theory approach to data analysis (Charmaz, 2014). The findings discussed next emerged through an inductive, iterative process of data collection and analysis involving the search for reappearing themes in the data until the point of saturation, beyond which continued data collection was unlikely to yield new findings. Using Atlas.ti—a qualitative data analysis software—I first developed initial codes and searched for emerging patterns in codes across interviews. At this stage, codes were both descriptive (e.g., “marital status” or “employment history”) and analytic (e.g., “mistrust during reentry”). Next, I performed focused coding to develop more abstract categories, and I used analytic memos to draw connections between codes and categories. For example, “mistrust during reentry” was coded as part of the broader “reentry challenges” code. Throughout the analytic process, I deliberately searched for negative (anomalous) cases that represented divergences from emerging patterns in the data, and I used these cases to refine themes and return to the field to collect more data where necessary. Finally, I synthesized the data to develop the “relational costs of wrongful convictions” framework, around which I organize the findings described in the next section.

Findings

I present findings in three sections to illustrate how the relational costs of wrongful convictions unfolded over participants’ wrongful conviction journeys, which spanned several years (and in some cases decades). I specifically explore how wrongful conviction and imprisonment represented a transition that harmed participants’ familial relationships across three points in time: (1) The moment of wrongful conviction; (2) the period of wrongful imprisonment; and (3) the post-prison period. First, I describe participants’ recollections of their family members’ response to their wrongful convictions to reveal how familial harms initially emerged through the collective trauma that participants and their loved ones endured at the moment of wrongful conviction. Next, I highlight how the nature of these costs shifted as family members (especially among participants lacking socioeconomic privilege) withdrew their support during the period of wrongful imprisonment. Finally, I explore the enduring relational costs of wrongful convictions following participants’ release from prison as the men attempted to relink the few familial ties they had remaining. I thus explore how the relational costs of wrongful convictions evolved over time, culminating in family lives that many men found difficult to rebuild even years following their release from prison.

Wrongful Conviction as Shared Familial Trauma

Diverging from the typical legal processes and outcomes involved in the prosecution of criminal cases, the men’s wrongful conviction trials were distinctively traumatic because of the shock they and their families felt when their faith in the legal system was irrevocably disrupted. The relational costs of wrongful convictions initially emerged in the men’s narratives as they described how the emotional harms generated by the early stages of the wrongful conviction process were borne almost equally by themselves and their family members. The moment of wrongful conviction in particular represented a shared trauma between participants and their loved ones. In the excerpt below, for example, note the similarities in Alexander’s (45, Black, served 16.5 years of wrongful imprisonment) memory of his own response to his wrongful conviction and that of his family members:

When I got convicted I was probably even more shocked and a feeling of despair because going to trial I really felt and believed that I was going to get found not guilty because they had so many versions to what happened, and my whole thing is if you’re telling the truth, the truth doesn’t change.

(…)

They was shocked. I know my parents was shocked. They didn’t believe for one second that I did what I was accused of. My parents, my sister, my brother, my friends, people that knew me, they couldn’t believe it, so everybody was in shock, and especially even more when I got found guilty. It was just a lot was expecting the not guilty verdict…just because a lot of my family and friends sat through the trial, so they heard what was said and they just heard all the inconsistencies and knew that they was lying and I guess was expecting that not guilty verdict. So when the guilty verdict came it was just even more of a shock. The reality really sunk in for everyone.

(Alexander)‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Benito (52, Hispanic, served 30 years of wrongful imprisonment) also captured how the early relational costs of wrongful convictions manifested as families collectively endured the injustice of their loved ones’ wrongful convictions. The moment of Benito’s wrongful conviction was one of “extreme anguish” for him and his family partly because the “family affair of horror” “was something that we actually experienced together.” Highlighting the fusion of the men’s trauma and that of their family members, Benito recalled how a “wave of angst” spread through the courtroom as all his loved ones felt “the injustice that’s just happened.” Like Benito and Alexander, almost every participant in the sample described the outrage and anger that their family members felt at the moment of wrongful conviction. Fred (61, White, served 21 years of wrongful imprisonment), for example, stated that his family and friends “were in disbelief,” and Samuel (38, Black, served 15 years of wrongful imprisonment) explained that his loved ones were “really devastated” when he was wrongfully convicted.

Elsewhere, I have described wrongful conviction as a form of “racialized cumulative disadvantage” that exacerbated pre-existing socioeconomic challenges that Black and Hispanic participants had endured earlier in their life course (Umamaheswar, 2022). This racialized cumulative disadvantage was also evident in how men spoke of their family’s responses when they were wrongful convicted. Although men of all backgrounds described the moment of their wrongful conviction as a trauma that they shared with their family members, Black and Hispanic participants additionally recalled a helplessness that stemmed from their family’s inability to advocate successfully on their behalf. Steve (45, Black, served 26 years of wrongful imprisonment), for example, described how “most people were supportive” when he was wrongfully convicted. However, he then immediately revealed how disempowered he felt as a young, Black man facing the criminal legal system with limited social and economic capital: “I’m young and I’m Black. See, your family can believe you, but they don’t know what to do and they only have so many resources.‬” Like Steve, Diego (57, Hispanic, served 9 years of wrongful imprisonment) stated that his family “obviously stood by my side and always believed me,” but he simultaneously lamented that his family members were “off in their drug and drug sales” and “it’s not like they stood up and went to bat for me.” Although all participants described the specific moment of wrongful conviction as a collective experience in which their lives and those of their family members were inextricably linked, this pivotal moment also laid bare the diverging experiences of men whose families were able to leverage significant resources in their support and those whose families lacked this kind of capital.

Whereas the early relational costs of wrongful convictions were primarily derived from the trauma the men and their family members endured together, as I describe in the next section, the relational costs of wrongful convictions (especially among socioeconomically-disadvantaged participants) shifted as family members withdrew their support over the course of the wrongful imprisonment period.

Wrongful Imprisonment and Familial Deterioration

The harms of imprisonment on family life are filtered through familial relationships that may alleviate or worsen these harms for both the incarcerated person and their family members (Condry and Minson, 2021), Despite the force of participants’ familial support when they were wrongfully convicted, the sense of solidarity that the men shared with their family members faded over time as many of them endured their prison sentences in relative isolation, sharpening the pain of their wrongful imprisonment terms.

Tim (49, White, served 17 years of wrongful imprisonment) summarized the views of most participants when he stated, “When an innocent person goes to prison, their family, their friends, their loved ones, strangers, go to prison with them. It’s hard to get by every day.” Like other affluent, White participants in the sample, however, Tim was unusually fortunate in the familial bonds he retained during the course of his wrongful imprisonment. Tim stated that “95% of the family” supported him when he was wrongfully convicted, and his relationship with his family “just got stronger” over time. Christian (38, White, served 4 years of wrongful imprisonment) described how the prosecution used his “affluent” and “successful” family against him when he was wrongfully convicted, but he still felt fortunate because he “had a great support system from friends, family and strangers,” and the letters he received each day from people on the outside motivated him to keep fighting his case. Similarly, Fred (61, White, served 21 years of wrongful imprisonment), who described his experience growing up in a suburban household as “very good,” reported that he retained a great deal of familial support when he was wrongfully imprisoned:

I had the support of my family and people who knew me in the world, but I just kept fighting and thinking of ways I could do this, and my parents hired... they hired the best attorney they could.‬

(Fred)

Daniel (69, White, served 14 years of wrongful imprisonment) acknowledged that he had significantly more socioeconomic privilege than “the average exoneree” because he came from a “middle-class family” and had a “pretty good life growing up.” However, the original victim in Daniel’s wrongful conviction case was a family member, and his wrongful conviction thus imposed unique harms on his family life (and on his children in particular). Daniel stated that “absolutely the worst part of my incarceration was seeing how [my children] were deprived of a normal childhood.” Although family members took turns taking care of his children while he was wrongfully imprisoned, he felt that “they were treated like redheaded stepchildren wherever they went.” The disruption Daniel experienced in his relationship with his children was worsened by the “pains of injustice” (Jenkins 2013: 124) the children experienced because (as witnesses at the scene of the crime for which Daniel was wrongfully convicted), they knew irrefutably that Daniel was innocent. Despite all these challenges, Daniel described how his ties to his children persevered and even motivated his continued fight for freedom when he was wrongfully imprisoned:

But for me, the thing that gave me strength to fight it…because hey, I was very suicidal…was my children. That I had to survive, I had to find a way to get out of there and go home for them. Not for myself. I didn’t even give a damn about myself. Life or death meant nothing to me at that point in time other than how it would impact the lives of my children.

(Daniel)

For men who lacked socioeconomic privilege, on the other hand, wrongful imprisonment represented a period of drastically diminishing familial support that was shaped by two distinct social processes. First, participants lost familial support when loved ones grew weary as the men’s wrongful imprisonment sentences wore on. Second, participants experienced a sense of social displacement because their family structures underwent drastic changes during their period of wrongful imprisonment (Westervelt and Cook, 2012). As participants tried to remain involved in families that looked very different from the families they left, their sense of alienation was exacerbated by their awareness that they were losing years in prison for crimes that they did not commit.

Although Samuel stated that his family was “really devastated” when he was wrongfully convicted, he immediately added that they “eventually got over it, moved on.” Underscoring the sense of betrayal he felt as he steadily lost the support of loved ones on the outside, he stated, “it was friends and family that I know for a long time [who] abandoned me.” Similarly, Alexander reported that “everybody was in shock” when he was wrongfully convicted because they all knew he was innocent, but he “only really felt close to [his] immediate family” during his period of wrongful imprisonment. Alexander described other family members and friends who had initially supported him as “people who come into your life for a little bit, a couple months, and then they disappear for years, they they’ll come back for a couple months, then they disappear again for years.” Alexander “didn’t like that,” and he pointed to the negative impact of his diminished support when he explained that what would have helped him the most was “just to probably have more people help me work on my innocence, whether that be family or friends because in prison it’s hard to get stuff done, so you have to rely on other people outside of prison.”

Participants whose family members did not believe in their innocence were even more isolated during their periods of wrongful imprisonment. Billy (54, White, served 30 years of wrongful imprisonment) shared that he had “two parents who loved me and would give me anything,” but he had experienced extensive contact with the criminal legal system that began when he was a teenager. Although Billy’s mother supported him for the full duration of his wrongful imprisonment term, Billy’s relationship with his brothers highlighted the rifts that were generated by family members’ skepticism about participants’ innocence:

They believed I was guilty because of the track record I set for myself, the things I was doing, the way that I lived.‬ And for years we never stopped talking, but it was never good conversation. And whenever I would say that I was innocent, there was always that hesitation in that, “Yeah. Okay. Let’s talk about something else” basically. Because I think they believed that I was guilty.

(Billy)

Alfred (46, Black, served 17 years of wrongful imprisonment) had a very difficult family life even before his wrongful conviction, but he was exceptionally close with his sisters, with whom he had forged a bond through their shared experience of childhood adversity. Alfred explained that his relationship with his sisters was “great” until his wrongful imprisonment, which “totally broke everything” and “tore us all up.” Alfred felt like he “got abandoned” by his sisters when he was sent to prison, and—like Billy—he recognized that his siblings’ lack of support was tied to their skepticism about his innocence. When asked what would have helped him the most while he was wrongfully incarcerated, Alfred forcefully stated, “it really would’ve been to have somebody that I could have called that believed me, that believed that I was innocent, that was fighting here and there, or maybe just doing a little something here and there.‬” Drawing attention to the unique relational costs of wrongful imprisonment, Alfred explained that the hardest part of being in prison had nothing to do with prison itself; instead, it was the rift that his wrongful conviction created between him and his sisters. When it became clear that his sisters’ support was not forthcoming, Alfred struggled to cope alone with the injustice of his situation. For Alfred, the worst part of being an innocent man in prison “was the absolute loneliness of being there.”

The hardest part honestly was the fact that what was going on with me and my sisters. I felt like I got abandoned. My mother passed in January of [year redacted]; this happens to me in April of [year redacted]. Just being in there for those 14 years by myself, literally like...yeah, I had my grandmother. People said, “You’ve got a family.” Yeah, but my grandmother is elderly. She’s way in [state redacted]. I can't keep blasting her up for money and killing her phone bill off. It was the absolute loneliness of being there (…) I know I wasn’t supposed to be there and then to be there going through that by myself, for a lack of better words, that was the most difficult part.

(Alfred)

Whereas some participants grappled with family members’ withdrawal of support during their period of wrongful imprisonment, those men who retained some support in prison nevertheless experienced familial deterioration simply due to the passage of time, as loved ones on the outside gradually passed away. Westervelt and Cook (2012) described the “frozen grief” that exonerees feel when they lose loved ones during their wrongful imprisonment terms, underscoring the pain of losing access to the collective rituals that offer individuals closure after a loved one’s death. Whereas all incarcerated persons likely face this “frozen grief,” participants’ grief amplified their sense of resentment as they grappled with the reality of being in prison for crimes they did not commit. Samuel, for example, lost a grandmother, an aunt, three uncles, and two great-aunts over the course of his 15 years in prison. Mourning his inability to obtain any form of healthy closure, Samuel explained that he was forced “to say goodbye to them through obituaries,” and he described the helplessness he experienced watching his familial ties steadily disappear over time while he served a prison sentence as an innocent man:

It makes your heart swell up a bit. I want to say, “Damn it.” I just pretty much…I mean, I had to grow up to the realities of the world that you serving all this time for having an unlawful conviction and you can’t even see or say bye to your family members, you know?

(Samuel)

Illustrative of how the men’s wrongful convictions had cascading effects on their loved ones over time, Simon (49, Black, served 26 years of wrongful imprisonment) reported that his conviction had a “huge impact” on his immediate family, and his mother in particular was “devastated” by it. Simon’s mother passed away exactly “1 year and 27 days” after he was released from prison, and he believed that his wrongful conviction marked the beginning of his mother’s deterioration in health as the heart condition to which she eventually succumbed worsened over the years. Simon described his wrongful conviction as “the first step of my mom to her destiny,” and he shared his certainty that she stayed alive only long enough to witness his release from prison:

I think me getting convicted was the first step of my mom to her destiny. My mom passed away from a bad heart. She ended up having defective heart...she had a defective heart disease. I truly believe had I stayed in prison, I don’t think my mom would have passed away because she would have fought until I was released. And I think the stress on my mother seeing her baby boy in prison with a life sentence…I think the stress was... I think she stressed more so throughout the 26 years than I did. And she responded... She just wouldn't talk about it. She shut down.

(Simon)

As I describe in the next section, when participants later reentered society after serving years in prison as innocent men, they faced immense challenges in rebuilding the few familial ties that had survived their prison terms. Whereas existing research has established the psychological consequences of wrongful convictions on family life in reentry (Grounds, 2004; Haimson, 2021), I shift attention to focus instead on how participants’ family lives evolved during their post-prison lives as they contended with the relational costs of wrongful convictions that had accumulated during their period of imprisonment.

The Enduring Relational Costs of Wrongful Convictions

In this section, I describe two distinct dimensions of exonerees’ reentry challenges in the family context. On the one hand, there was a notable symmetry in how participants described the moment of their wrongful conviction and the moment of their release from prison as momentous occasions that were significant partly because they were shared familial experiences. On the other hand, however, participants were forced to confront the social, emotional, and psychological harms that had accrued during their period of wrongful imprisonment even as new harms emerged in the reentry period.

Despite the familial rifts that occurred during the men’s period of wrongful imprisonment, participants described their release from prison as a collective moment of vindication that they joyfully shared with their loved ones. Fred, for example, vividly recalled the empowering happiness he felt on the day of his release, when he was reunited with his family and finally able to share his story with the world:

They give you street world clothes. So they dress you out of your inmate stuff and they give you clothes. And the pants they gave me were too big, and no belt, so I’m holding on my pants, carrying these two heavy bags. And so then we have to walk from the jail to the bonding office. So, trying to look around at freedom and carrying this stuff. Anyways. And my family’s there. They knew I was getting out. So they’re waiting for me. And so I got to see them and all of that stuff. And the newspaper knew I was getting out, so I was able to give what I wanted to always give. I gave a courthouse interview with the newspaper and the television, and that was great. (…) So I got out just a few days before Mother’s Day. Yeah. Which my mother really liked.

(Fred)

Despite the relief and happiness that the men and their families collectively felt at the moment of release and in the immediate days thereafter, participants realized very quickly that the relational costs that had accrued during their period of wrongful imprisonment would define their post-prison lives. Although exonerees may comparatively be better off than individuals on parole in terms of the social support that they receive when they are released from prison (Haimson, 2021), several participants described this support as tenuous and fragile. Benjamin (27, Black, served 8.5 years of wrongful imprisonment) was released from prison only weeks before the interview, and at the time of the interview, he was focused on “repairing 90 percent of my previous relationships” because (in his words) “I ain't never get no visits from my mom. I ain't never see my grandmother, my siblings. I ain't never see none of them.” Benjamin expressed a deep resentment about his family’s lack of support during his harrowing wrongful imprisonment term, and he described the additional frustration he felt “because everybody got advice” for how he ought to rebuild his ruptured family relationships. For Benjamin, the weight of reconnecting the fragments of social relationships that he felt had not served him when he most needed them was a persistent source of aggravation:

My family abandoned me. All these outside people, they’re trying to explain to me how uncoordinated my family relations are. And telling me that I need to develop relations with my family. It’s like they don’t understand I’ve been abandoned by these people for the last 8, 9 years of my life.

(Benjamin)

Similarly, Alfred had given up hope that he would be able to rebuild his relationships with his sisters because, in his view, there was “too much hurt involved,” and echoing Benjamin, he resented his former fiancée’s efforts to get him to reestablish these connections. Alfred and Benjamin felt a tremendous pressure to relink the broken ties within their families, but they worried that these connections had become permanently undone because they could not move past their family members’ lack of support during their wrongful imprisonment.

Having you wanting to fix everything. Thinking that this can be fixed, the relationship that was there, it can be once again, and all of that stuff, but that’s a fairy tale. That’s the white, shiny horse, and all that other stuff. Just don’t happen. Won’t happen. It’s too much.

(Alfred)

Rebuilding familial ties was difficult also because the men’s links to their families were weaker as a result of drastic changes in family composition and dynamics over time. Benjamin, for example, stated that “it’s like there was this pause on my life where everybody else life kept going forward,” and he explained that he still did not feel “welcome” in his family because he was “like a stranger to everybody.” Despite having been out of prison for a much longer time than Benjamin, Simon similarly described feeling like “the outsider” because he had been incarcerated so long that his entire family structure had changed. Underscoring the uniquely traumatizing experiences of wrongfully-convicted men, Simon explained the lingering resentment he felt when he was forced to confront the challenge of rebuilding his family life as a result of “something that I didn’t do.” Participants therefore grappled with how to adapt to how much their families had changed over time under the specter of the injustice of their wrongful convictions.

The men experienced the relational costs of wrongful convictions in reentry all the more sharply because—unlike individuals released on parole—they felt entirely abandoned by the state when they were released. Although non-profit organizations, lawyers, and even the media can act as sources of material and moral support for exonerees, it remains true that beyond the possibility of compensation, exonerees are offered little to nothing in the way of state assistance following their wrongful imprisonment (Haimson, 2021). Tim pointed to this challenging feature of exonerees’ reentry process when he said that in the case of someone on parole, “[the state]’ll help you. That’s their job. But if you get exonerated, there’s no person, group, anything.” Samuel further captured the distinctive isolation that exonerees faced when he highlighted the explicit boundary they drew between themselves and men on parole. After his wrongful conviction, Samuel deliberately avoided programming intended for reentering men because of the psychological and social distance he wished to establish between himself and other men who had experienced imprisonment:

We separating ourselves from being mistakenly ID’d (...) We separating ourselves from a lot of that stuff. So we don’t want to be treated like any other person than what we are. We don’t want to be treated like guys that on parole, none of that stuff like that.

(Samuel)

Against this backdrop of limited structural, psychological, and emotional support, the relational costs of wrongful conviction that the men experienced in the family setting were particularly difficult to confront. Participants moreover described the frustration they felt because of the familial challenges generated by the single unique pathway to state support that was available to them as exonerees: financial compensation. The possibility of compensation may privilege exonerees relative to individuals who are on parole (Haimson, 2021), but the notion of compensation nevertheless triggered a great deal of ambivalence among participants. For the men in this study, compensation represented the state’s (material and symbolic) acknowledgement of its wrongdoing, but it simultaneously served as a reminder of how badly the men’s lives had been damaged by their wrongful convictions. Simon, for example, harbored a deep anger toward a state that “decided it was only worth $25,000. That me taking over 25 years of my life, wrongfully being convicted was only worth $25,000.” ‬Benito admitted that his compensation had helped him rebuild his life, but he simultaneously described the trauma of being “recriminalized” during the legal proceedings he had to endure to obtain his compensation:

But then you still feel the toxin of the post-traumatic stress disorder and having then to be re-criminalized. I had to go through all these arduous depositions, interrogations by the state and the city. Everything I’m telling you now I had to memorize in even greater detail. What I was wearing, who I was with. “Who were you with again?" Just to see if there was any type of inconsistency (…).

(Benito)

Benito’s feelings about his compensation were further complicated by the conflict it generated in his social world. In his words, “people started showing some of their true colors” when he received his compensation, and he found himself becoming increasingly mistrustful as he worried that “some people were trying to get at my money.” Benito had an unusual amount of family support when he was imprisoned, but he became emotional as he shared that he could still feel how severely his wrongful conviction had “ripped apart” his family. The familial disruption that Benito endured was a prominent theme in his interview, and he explained how he finally had to “cut the umbilical cord” with his family by moving to a different state to escape conflict over “money issues” when he was released from prison. Illuminating how the relational costs of wrongful convictions shifted over time, ties that had somehow managed to weather the strain imposed by years of wrongful imprisonment withered during reentry because of financial conflicts:

It’s just issues of money, issues of people wanting money. That’s one of these…I had to leave. I became very wealthy after winning my cases and so forth. And I had to protect myself, insulate myself by making a radical move in [a different state].

(Benito)

Compensation was a particularly vexing issue for participants who had not grown up in socioeconomically-privileged families. Samuel, for instance, was raised in “impoverished, low-income neighborhoods,” and he described the pressure he now felt from family members who expected him to support them financially because he had received a hefty compensation following his exoneration. He discussed the “jealousy” he perceived from some family members because of his compensation, and he expressed frustration at being unable to reconnect with his family because of the conflict surrounding his money:

It wasn’t like they was mad because I was home. It was that, “Oh no.” They felt like I should have did more for them or something, so that type of jealousy where you feel like a person’s supposed to give you more than you're worth, whatever that come from, that’s what it is.

(Samuel)

Highlighting the accruing and evolving nature of the relational costs of wrongful convictions, Samuel’s narrative revealed how familial disruptions during reentry could be traced back to rifts that emerged during participants’ period of wrongful imprisonment. Unlike Benito, who was fortunate in the family support he retained throughout his wrongful imprisonment, Samuel did not receive much assistance while he was incarcerated, which made the expectations he faced upon his release even more trying. Echoing Benjamin’s sense of resentment, Samuel discussed the strain he felt in his efforts to sustain relationships with family members who had distanced themselves from him when he was incarcerated, but who now felt entitled to his financial support.

Samuel: That drive a wedge with people, especially when a guy that’s spent his time—his life—in there and then somebody gave up on them, expect him to spend his money on them? Come on, that don’t work like that.

Author: Is that what happened when you were released?

Samuel: No, when I was released everybody wanted something, everybody’s looking at me like, “Okay, we doing this,” and then people spent my money before I even got it, you know what I mean?

(Samuel)

Finally, Alexander shared that missing the birth and early childhood years of his first child was the hardest part of his wrongful imprisonment, and when the topic of his financial compensation arose later in the interview, he emphatically stated that the money he received could not restore the long-term harm that he and his family had sustained as a result of his wrongful conviction.

Them 16 years out of my life they took from me, that little bit of money would never make up for that. I had to be in prison while my first daughter was born. I missed out on that and just stuff I had to see and go through, through prison. That money can’t make up for that. Them memories is going to stick with me for the rest of my life; that money is going to come and go. Them memories of what I went through, that’s forever. Whatever you put my daughter through, that's forever.‬

(Alexander)

Whereas prior research has justifiably drawn attention to the impact of exonerees’ psychological traumas on their familial relationships, these findings underscore how familial relationships that unraveled during participants’ wrongful imprisonment terms were difficult to reestablish because of how the consequences of wrongful convictions “rippled” (in Benito’s words) through the men’s families during and after their period of imprisonment.

Conclusion

In this article, I explored the relational costs of wrongful convictions on family life before, during, and after participants’ period of wrongful imprisonment. I specifically employed a “long-term perspective” to highlight how the harms to exonerees’ familial relationships accrued and evolved over time (Condry and Minson, 2022: 549). This framework reveals how the relational costs of wrongful convictions emerged in three stages. Initially, the moment of wrongful conviction harmed family life primarily because of the trauma that participants and their family members collectively endured. Over time, however, the relational costs of wrongful convictions shifted as the wrongful imprisonment sentences wore on and many men (especially those lacking socioeconomic privilege) experienced diminished familial support. Men who retained some familial support nevertheless had to confront changes in family structures and compositions, which sharpened the isolation they experienced as they confronted the injustice of wrongful imprisonment. Finally, these costs accumulated further and shifted once again when participants were released from prison as the men struggled to reconnect with family members who had not supported them while they were wrongfully imprisoned and/or from whom they felt completely disconnected after years in prison.

This article builds on existing research in several ways. Most importantly, a focus on how familial harms that accompany wrongful convictions shift and accrue moves us away from a “static” analysis of these harms and toward a more dynamic understanding of how wrongful convictions amplify pre-existing family challenges (and create new ones) even as families collectively share in the trauma of wrongfully-convicted men’s experiences. Similarly, exploring participants’ attitudes toward (and interaction with) their families, and illuminating how they and their families endured the strain of wrongful conviction and imprisonment draws attention to how familial harm is as much a social process as it is rooted in individual exonerees’ psychological traumas (Grounds, 2004; Haimson, 2021; Scott, 2009). Finally, the sociological analysis I have presented here highlights how the familial harms associated with wrongful convictions cannot be disentangled from broader racial and class-based inequities that are amplified by wrongful convictions (Umamaheswar, 2022). This article thus builds on existing research that has documented variation in exonerees’ family lives (Westervelt and Cook, 2012) by connecting these variations to exonerees’ pre- and post-prison social locations.

Taken together, the findings I have described support scholars’ calls for holistic reentry support for exonerees that focuses on their material, psychological, and social needs (Burnett, 2017; Westervelt and Cook, 2012). Importantly, many men who felt abandoned by their family members during their wrongful imprisonment were still trying to sustain their relationships with these relatives when they were released, despite their pessimism about ever being able to restore the relationships fully. As Westervelt and Cook (2012) demonstrated, reconciliation can in fact be possible for exonerees under these circumstances. Elsewhere, I have advocated for restorative justice programs that can aid exonerees in their recovery not just from wrongful convictions, but also from pre-prison traumas that were magnified by their wrongful imprisonment experiences (Umamaheswar, 2022). Restorative justice programs that support exonerees’ efforts to reestablish their familial ties (perhaps even from “the bottom up” [Haimson, 2021: 26]) following wrongful conviction and imprisonment would thus be particularly valuable.

Above all, the findings I have discussed point to the need to explore the symbiotic harms of wrongful imprisonment more fully (Condry and Minson, 2021). I focused on exonerees’ perceptions of their family members’ response to their wrongful imprisonment, but more research is needed on the decisions that may motivate family members to distance themselves from (or remain supportive of) their loved ones during periods of wrongful imprisonment. Future research should thus continue to build on the relatively-limited scholarship on family members’ attitudes toward wrongful imprisonment (Jenkins, 2013, 2014). Additionally, the majority of the participants in my sample had experienced long periods of wrongful imprisonment. Although this feature of the sample facilitated my exploration of familial disruption over time, it is important that future research examines how even short periods of wrongful imprisonment may impact familial relationships. Finally, given my focus on the significance of innocence in men’s prisons, I limited my sample in this study to men. Prior research, however, has demonstrated the importance of familial ties among incarcerated women (Enos, 2001), and an exploration of the impact of wrongful convictions on women’s familial relationships is thus particularly urgent.