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Abstract
This dissertation, Invisible Wounds and Sibling Dynamics: A Narrative Study Investigating the Influence of Juvenile Incarceration on Black Family Life, explores how juvenile incarceration reshapes emotional life, sibling relationships, and family dynamics by centering the experiences of non-incarcerated Black siblings. While prior research has extensively examined the effects of incarceration on youth and their parents, this study turns attention to siblings—who often occupy the longest and most developmentally significant familial roles—yet remain largely overlooked in research, practice, and policy. Drawing on narrative life history interviews with 40 Black individuals across the United States whose siblings were incarcerated as youth, this study examines how incarceration reconfigures family roles, alters perceptions of justice and state legitimacy, and influences long-term identity and behavioral outcomes. It traces how siblings’ emotional responses, caregiving responsibilities, and relational bonds are shaped by their proximity to carceral institutions and the systemic pressures that follow. The first paper, Sibling Bonds and Carceral Disruption: A Narrative Study on the Impact of Juvenile Incarceration in Black Families, identifies three types of sibling relationships that emerge in response to incarceration: enduring, forged, and damaged. These bonds reflect how incarceration can both deepen emotional ties through solidarity and loyalty, or fracture them through silence, guilt, and abandonment. This paper highlights siblinghood as a crucial relational space where the effects of state punishment are absorbed, negotiated, and remembered. The second paper, Trapped in a Bubble: The Unintended Consequences of Parental Protection in Families Impacted by Incarceration, examines how parental strategies intended to preserve family stability—such as emotional redirection, overprotection, and role enforcement—often produce unintended harm to non-incarcerated siblings. Five themes emerged across participants’ narratives: diverted attention, psychological splitting, parentification, emotional isolation, and role ambiguity. These findings suggest that caregiving under conditions of carceral stress can complicate developmental processes and suppress emotional expression. The third paper, The Radicalizing Effect of Mistreatment: How Sibling Incarceration Shapes Life Trajectories, analyzes how siblings’ exposure to legal and institutional harm—through arrests, courtroom proceedings, and prison visits—catalyzes long-term shifts in worldview and decision-making. Participants described moments of disillusionment and betrayal that spurred both withdrawal from institutions and commitment to justice-related careers. This paper theorizes these shifts as part of a broader process of meaning-making in response to systemic mistreatment. Together, these three papers demonstrate that juvenile incarceration functions not as a discrete event, but as an enduring, relational disruption that alters the emotional, developmental, and institutional trajectories of siblings left behind. The dissertation contributes to social work by expanding family systems and ecological models to account for sibling experiences; to criminology by reframing legal cynicism, system avoidance, and institutional disengagement as relationally grounded responses; and to sociology by extending theories of secondary prisonization, social bonds, labeling, and strain to include the role of siblings. Ultimately, this work argues for greater recognition of siblings as central actors in the aftermath of incarceration and as key informants in understanding the multigenerational effects of carceral harm.