Despite an overrepresentation of Black women in the criminal justice system, Black women’s mental health at the precarious intersection of race, gender, and community-based correctional supervision has been underresearched. Building on weathering theory, this study conceptualized criminal justice involvement as a social inequality that negatively affects Black women’s mental health. This study investigated the relationships between recent stressors, forms of social support, and depression through moderated regression analyses with a sample of 169 Black women on probation and parole. Almost half of the women met criteria for clinical levels of depression. Distinct forms of social support served as statistically significant protective factors between stressors and depression symptoms. Our findings highlight the importance of studying the mental health of Black women under correctional surveillance and bolstering multiple forms of support to promote their well-being. The impact of criminal justice involvement and institutional racism on Black women’s mental health requires further research.

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Incarcerated mothers experience multiple forms of harm embedded within the criminal legal system, yet relatively little attention has been paid to incarcerated mothers’ experiences of slow violence, violence whose harm occurs gradually over time, often in mundane and disregarded ways. We conducted semi-structured interviews with incarcerated mothers to explore their parenting experiences while in prison and analyzed their experiences through the frame of slow violence. The findings include salient themes of environmentally hazardous prison conditions that negatively impacted their health; broken phones that disrupted communication with and parenting of their children; and unending waitlists that jeopardized their parenting rights and delayed reunification with their children. We situate these findings within the framework of slow violence to highlight the insidious and overlooked forms of harm in the prison environment which impacted aspects of incarcerated mothers’ wellbeing. We argue that understanding incarcerated mothers’ experiences within this framework draws attention to ways that state actors, as well as common theoretical framings of incarceration dynamics, perpetuate and normalize the suffering of incarcerated mothers. By reframing the harms of incarceration as acts of slow violence, new insights are gleaned for theorizing and addressing violence against incarcerated women.

While incarcerated, women may continue to experience intimate partner violence (IPV), perpetrated by partners who reside in the outside community. Power and control dynamics of abusive relationships may intensify as the abuser exploits their partners’ incarceration. The current study assessed IPV experiences of 832 incarcerated women (50% white, 76% mothers), testing a novel instrument. Results validated a two-factor structure: (a) general abuse (i.e., verbal, physical) and (b) deny or threaten to deny (i.e., leveraging the women's incarceration to intimidate or control). This study introduces a novel instrument to measure IPV while incarcerated and provides implications for research and practice.