Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

每年有数十万美国人被释放出监狱。本文基于2010年中期在有关育儿，伴侣和监禁的多地点家庭研究的背景下进行的访谈，探讨了囚犯重返生活的压力与贫困和家庭生活之间的相互作用，以及这些因素如何结合在一起。劳损条件是重新进入的个人及其亲密伙伴和共同父母伴侣之间要积极参与法律制度。我们将分析的重点放在为人父母和伴侣关系上的问题，紧张关系和控制上的挣扎，包括父母之间的暴力，因为这些问题，紧张和冲突通常会导致呼吁或采取行动，明确允许假释当局，法院，儿童抚养执行或保护儿童行为服务。我们确定了此类要求或津贴背后的确切情况和动机，并解释了这些情况与前囚犯及其伴侣通常持有国家强制性手段的愤世嫉俗的关系如何。通过将我们的实证研究结果与关于新自由主义下的惩罚在贫困治理中的作用的学术研究相互影响，我们研究了前囚犯家庭所面临的压力以及他们用来应对这些问题的策略如何与更广泛的政治经济安排有关。