The interview included a discussion around the impacts of incarceration on Elizabeth’s family. She recounts how officers entered her home without a warrant. Elizabeth shares how local police racially profiled and followed her children for several years.

The interviewee discussed how the carceral system and income impact their vision of health. Folks in their community need health care, but a lack of money prevents them from receiving care. Health to the participant comprises a variety of components. Although health care providers do not discriminate against formerly incarcerated individuals due to their association with the legal system, formerly incarcerated individuals experience economic discrimination. The interview also touched on prejudices that take place. People who have been incarcerated experience stigma associated with their incarceration. This stigma also impacts communities intergenerationally. The impacts of the carceral system impact generations of families in the communities. They concluded by discussing the impact of policing in the community and made parallels between incarceration and slavery. Mass incarceration includes policing. These aggressive policing conditions normalize the community to police discrimination and impact relationships between different people in the community. This policing changes how people interact with their geography. They navigated their community and life in order to avoid policing.

In this interview, the interviewee discusses her contact with the criminal justice system as a young adult who had an incarcerated parent and worked at a public defender’s office, to now as a full-time lawyer and volunteer with Prisoner Visitation and Support. She often visited her father in prison and believes it is important for people experiencing incarceration to have outside connections. She also shares how difficult it is for family members to visit their loved ones in prison right now, compared to her familial visits in the 1980s. The conversations that occur when she visits include politics, concerns about life after release, and personal troubles within the prison. While it is challenging to keep certain thoughts to oneself, she states that the role of a prison visitor is to listen and be supportive rather than transforming people’s principles. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, prison visitors have had little to no communication with people they once regularly visited.