Punishment and Incarceration
Summary of Research
A key strand in my research is a focus on the lived experiences—and consequences—of punishment. In my dissertation research, I drew on in-depth interviews with incarcerated women to explore how adulthood is constructed and performed in the prison setting. I extended this line of inquiry in my next study, in which I explored the gendered nature of the homelessness-incarceration link. In another research project, I explore the challenges that imprisonment poses to men who were wrongfully convicted. Through in-depth interviews with exonerated men, I unite the literature on wrongful convictions with the rich sociological scholarship on the “pains of imprisonment.” Finally, I conducted an ethnographic study on how family members of incarcerated people constructed and sustained communities of support to help them cope with the challenges of familial incarceration.
Publications (* denotes equal authorship'; ** denotes graduate student author)
Janani Umamaheswar. 2024. “The construction of capital among family members of people in prison.”British Journal of Criminology 64(6): 1259-1274.
Arden Richards-Karamarkovich** and Janani Umamaheswar. 2023. “Narrative resilience among formerly incarcerated mothers.” Feminist Criminology 19 (1): 59-78.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2023. “The relational costs of wrongful conviction.” Critical Criminology 31: 707-723.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2023. “Secondary characters in narratives of wrongful conviction.” Crime, Media, Culture 19(3): 345-361. (Published online in October 2022.)
Janani Umamaheswar. 2023. “Innocence as burden and resource: Adaptation and resistance during wrongful imprisonment.” Theoretical Criminology 27(3): 499-516. (Published online in July 2022.)
Janani Umamaheswar and Eman Tadros. 2022. “ ‘Not anybody can be a Dad’: The intergenerational transmission of masculinity among incarcerated men.” Crime & Delinquency 68(10): 1740-1764. (Published online in September 2021.)
Janani Umamaheswar. 2022. “Wrongful conviction as racialized cumulative disadvantage.” British Journal of Criminology. Published online before print.
G. Alex Sinha and Janani Umamaheswar*. 2022. “Wrongful imprisonment and coerced moral degradation.” California Law Review Online 13: 17-31.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2021. Shadow and light: Online narratives of relationship dissolution among former partners of incarcerated men. British Journal of Criminology. Published online before print.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2021. “Suppression on top of oppression”: A symbolic interactionist perspective on the affective experience of incarceration. British Journal of Criminology 61(4): 1107-1125.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2021. “On the street, the only person you gotta bow down to is yourself”: Masculinity, homelessness, and incarceration.” Justice Quarterly. Published online before print.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2021: “When my mother died, I think a part of me died”: Maternal fusion and the relationship between incarcerated men and their mothers. Journal of Family Issues 42(2): 243-275.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2020: “Changing the channel”: Hybrid masculinity in a men’s prison. Incarceration 1(2): 1-19.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2020: “When the hell are you going to grow up?”: A life-course account of hybrid masculinities among incarcerated men. Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology 6(1): 127-151.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2018: Studying homeless and incarcerated persons: A comparative account of doing field research with hard-to-reach populations. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 19(3), Article 24.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2017. A life-course perspective on incarcerated women’s views on adulthood. Women & Criminal Justice 28(5): 351-384.
Janani Umamaheswar. 2015. “Age is just a number here”: A qualitative study of adulthood in a women’s prison. Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology 3(2): 231-256.