Lynne Haney will visit Cornell in March to present the 2024 Mass Incarceration Lecture, "Prisons of Debt: State Hybridity and the Criminalization of Child Support."

This talk will examine the intersection of mass incarceration and mass child support enforcement in the contemporary U.S. Based on material from my new book, Prisons of Debt, I will analyze how these state systems work together to create complex entanglements for formerly-incarcerated fathers--entanglements that form feedback loops of disadvantage and cycles of debt and punishment. Drawing on observations in child support courts across the country and interviews with 145 indebted fathers, I show how prisons of debt too often undermine familial wellbeing and relations of care and reciprocity. 

Lynne Haney is Professor of Sociology at New York University, where she also directs the Law and Society Program and the Prison Education Program Research Lab. She is the author of the award-winning books Offending Women and Inventing the Needy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program.

This talk is hosted by Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. It is co-sponsored the Department of Sociology.