When University of Miami doctoral student Oshea Johnson visited a Miami-Dade County probation office as part of a sociology study led by one of his faculty mentors, he made a keen observation: nearly all the people who accompanied parolees to the facility were women.
From girlfriends and wives to mothers and grandmothers, they were women from all walks of life, who, over the past few years, had been supporting male loved ones both during and after their imprisonment, Johnson would learn.
And that gave him an idea.
He already knew that incarceration has a detrimental impact on the health of inmates, triggering and even exacerbating chronic and noncommunicable diseases as well as mental disorders. But what effect, he wondered, does it have on the health of inmates’ support networks on the outside.
