Collateral labor: Male partner reentry and women’s economic lives

Abstract

Reentry scholarship frequently assumes that a partner’s return stabilizes households and eases the burdens women absorbed during incarceration, yet the economic consequences of reentry for female partners remain empirically understudied. We conceptualize reentry as an economic reconfiguration that may operate as reprieve, disruption, or both and argue that behavioral and perceptual indicators must be examined together to distinguish between them. Using data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering and drawing on secondary prisonization and income packaging frameworks, we compare women whose partners returned during a 9-month follow-up period to those whose partners remained incarcerated. Results indicate that partner reentry is associated with lower formal labor market participation and income packages that are more characteristic of unearned and interpersonal sources. Yet women with reentering partners also report lower perceived financial hardship, indicating short-term perceptual reprieve. This divergence demonstrates that economic well-being cannot be fully captured by employment measures alone. Our findings extend secondary prisonization framework into the post-release period and underscore that reentry is a relational process that reconfigures women’s economic lives in ways that may carry longer term costs even when short-term hardship is reduced.