"We Are All Collateral Damage": Understanding Nuclear Family Members' Experiences of Criminal Justice Intervention

Abstract

Historically, “offender”-focused discourses have dominated the field of criminology while overlooking those family members who become subject to justice intervention by virtue of their familial bonds. In this qualitative study, unstructured interviews were conducted with eight nuclear family members of criminalized persons in Ontario and Quebec. Participant accounts reveal that the interviewed family members self-imposed significant moral and legal responsibilities for their relatives following criminal justice intervention and simultaneously experienced negative role re-evaluation driven by feelings of guilt, failure, and self-blame. Participants’ inherent lack of control over their criminalized relatives’ behaviours and the criminal justice system’s decisions exacerbate negative impacts of criminalization on non-criminalized relatives’ self-concepts. This lack of control increases the stress of criminal justice intervention while straining family resources. When relatives are justice-involved for prolonged period, the family becomes stuck in a constant state of stress and uncertainty, which may have lasting consequences on the family if left unmanaged. Criminal justice intervention as a disruptive event then reconfigures the family in ways that often leave lasting impacts on nuclear family relationships.

This thesis engages with Boss’ (1999, 2006) theory of Ambiguous Loss to analyze participants’ experiences and demonstrate the consequences of criminalization on various nuclear family members in a Canadian context. To mitigate certain limitations of Boss’ (1999, 2006) theory, criminal justice intervention is first defined as a disruptive event that transforms family members’ known realities into threatening and uncertain environments. This thesis then explores the stress and strain that justice intervention places upon the family and applies the theory of Ambiguous Loss to understand criminalization as a source of ambiguous loss. Further, this thesis expands the scope of Boss’ (1999) theory beyond the experiences of certain populations (i.e. children of incarcerated parents) and discovers the limitations of this theory in the context of criminological research. It also opens the door for future research to apply this theory to criminalized populations.