This article explores how we might best understand the effects of imprisonment on families and why this is important to a full understanding of prison as a form of punishment. The effects on families have broadly been understood within previous literature in one of two ways: either as ‘collateral consequences’, or as a form of secondary punishment extended to the family member. We suggest that the first of these descriptions is at best insufficient and at worst subordinating and marginalizing, while the second is inaccurate when family members have not committed an offence. We offer instead the concept of ‘symbiotic harms’ which we define as negative effects that flow both ways through the interdependencies of intimate associations such as kin relationships. The characteristics of these harms can be more fully described by a term which encompasses their relational, mutual, non-linear, agentic, and heterogeneous properties.

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This article draws upon research with children whose mothers were imprisoned in England and Wales, to investigate the impacts of maternal imprisonment on dependent children. The research directly engaged with children, in accordance with Article 12 of the UNCRC 1989, and is set within an examination of the differentiated treatment in the family and criminal courts of England and Wales of children facing state initiated separation from a parent. The article explores children’s ‘confounding grief’ and contends that this grief originates from social processes, experienced as a consequence of maternal imprisonment. ‘Secondary prisonization’ is characterized by changes in home and caregiver and the regulation of the mother and child relationship. ‘Secondary stigmatization’ occurs when children are stigmatized by virtue of their relationship with their mother. These harms to children call into question the state’s fulfilment of its duty to protect children under Article 2 of the UNCRC 1989.

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