| This ethnographic study examines the repercussions of criminal justice contact on families of offenders in Japan. From January 2014 to August 2015, I observed and interviewed fifty individuals, whose kin came into conflict with the law for violent, property, sex, and drug-related offenses. Through a feminist lens, I looked at the families' life experiences including their perceptions of the courtesy stigma, the feelings of ambivalence toward the criminal justice system as well as the offender, and the gendered and unequal distribution of offender support activities. In the end, I conclude that families of offenders, women in particular, often step in to fill the voids left by criminal justice institutions and social services to provide offenders all-inclusive care.;This study pushes boundaries of feminist criminology by showing how women can be affected by the male-dominated world of crime and criminal justice, other than as victims and offenders. Due to cultural notions of femininity and women's subordinate status in the family, female relatives of offenders are often pressured to work as a proxy for agents of control, aiding the very system that incapacitates, disenfranchises, and marginalizes their kin. This perspective opens a new direction for thinking about the consequences of criminal justice contact on the family, questioning the fundamental efficacy and ethicality of the criminal justice system. |
