In addition to travel time, these visits come with exceptional financial burdens. Butler must take a half day of work on Friday to make the trip, there’s the cost of a hotel for two nights, gas to drive across the entire state, and price-gouged food from the prison vending machines. To feed three people—Butler, her brother, and one of his children—during a visit, she spends at least $80 per day. Essentially, one weekend’s visit costs around $800-$1000. Butler’s expenses don’t end there; she spends around $600 annually to fly her niece who lives in Texas to Washington to visit her father, Butler’s brother, at least once a year.

In addition to the costs associated with visits, for years Butler spent hundreds of dollars a month on other prison-related expenses—sending her loved ones quarterly packages to help ensure edible food in their cells, keeping money on the prison phone accounts, and paying to send digital messages. Digital messages, essentially e-mails, cost about 20 cents each, and phone calls cost over a dollar for just 20 minutes.

And the costs don’t stop with prison commissary and communications; loved ones are often fighting appeals and paying legal bills that may start small but can quickly balloon to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“I think people just think that people are fortunate to get out of prison and then they never actually think about what it means to be free,” Butler says. “If you’ve done 10 or 20 years, are you ever fully free? I haven’t done time, but I’m not even financially free.”

But Butler notes that it’s more than just financial labor. It’s caregiving. “My dissertation really was drawn out of just the invisibilized pieces of labor, not just financial labor, but emotional labor,” she says. Butler’s research for her Ph.D. focuses on the economic, mental, and emotional pieces “of welcoming people home when the world isn’t actually ready to welcome them home.”

It’s true that working-class women of color like Butler are more likely to be caught up in the web of the carceral state. But it’s also true that the job of keeping families together falls disproportionately on women regardless of background or class position—and that applies just as much when it comes to mass incarceration as it does to anything else.

“When I got married, I was like, ‘OK, what are all the things that could happen?’ My partner could get sick and die. Oh, my God, we could get a divorce… that could happen. I never put it in a lane that my partner would go to prison. It just wasn’t on the map.”

This is how Jo Kreiter reflects on the life she had imagined for herself before her husband was incarcerated. Kreiter recalls making the difficult decision to stay with her husband through his time in prison.

“My lead in all of my thinking was, “What is best for my son?” And what was best for my son, who was seven when my partner was arrested, was a healed father. And everything I did was towards that goal.”

While her husband was away, Kreiter found herself in the position of sole breadwinner, raising their 7-year-old in what functioned, logistically, like a single parent household in which she wasn’t only responsible for her and her child’s needs, but also for those of her incarcerated husband. Though she worked as many gigs as she could, Kreiter believes that she wouldn’t have made it through that period without financial support, a privilege she owes to being born into a white, middle class family.

She describes the support she received from her inlaws, her family, and in particular her mother as lifelines. “I feel a lot of pride in my family for the way we managed the trauma.”

Though her husband has been home for more than six years now, the experience continues to reverberate. Several years ago, her son was accepted to a private high school, only to have his admission revoked before the school year started, due to his father’s record. “There is always, always the shadow of choices that I make based on my family situation. And those choices are almost daily,” Kreiter says. More recently, Kreiter and her husband reached out to an attorney so that they could update their wills. The lawyer e-mailed back saying she couldn’t work with them due to her husband’s record.

“It was about the 15th time the trauma cycle came barreling back into my body since my husband’s arrest,” Kreiter recalls of reading the lawyer’s e-mail. She describes experiences such as these as “completely retraumatizing,” moments in which she feels like a tumbleweed, like the ground has been taken away. At times like these, she says, she feels “very unwelcome in the world.”

Kreiter explores this destabilization, as well as the dehumanization of incarceration, through her art. As an aerial choreographer for her dance company, Flyaway Productions, Kreiter aims to explore the range and power of female physicality. Even before her husband’s incarceration, her work existed at the intersection of social justice and acrobatic spectacle, yet her family’s experience with the criminal justice system affected her work, as it transformed her into someone who was “inside the lens,” as she puts it.

In her 2019 performance, The Wait Room, Kreiter explored the emotional territory of visiting a loved one in prison. The set pieces included a motorized tilt-a-whirl type platform that resembled a giant clock and metal chairs. She produced this dance with Essie Justice Group, a nonprofit organization with the mission of harnessing “the collective power of women with incarcerated loved ones to end mass incarceration’s harm to women and communities.”

As a member of Essie Justice Group, Kreiter participated in the organization’s Healing to Advocacy Program, a nine-week program that brings together women and gender nonconforming people with incarcerated loved ones or who have experienced incarceration themselves.

Kreiter would advise any woman with an incarcerated loved one to join Essie Justice group. She believes that community support can help combat the isolation and shame that come with a loved one’s incarceration. Through Essie Justice, Kreiter has found a community that she describes as “unconditionally supportive,” a sisterhood she finds “very personal and very political, too.”

Kreiter’s most recent production, If I Give You My Sorrows, is another apparatus-based dance that explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated, using the bed as a metaphor. All of the show’s performances sold out, and the set involves custom-fabricated pieces that resemble beds hanging from the ceiling. Dancers in rigging fly through the air, dancing in gravity-defying relation to their beds. At times, the bars of the beds’ headboard and footboard resemble the bars of prison cages.

The accompanying musical composition, at times haunting, is by Carla Kihlstedt, Pamela Z, and Kalyn Harewood, and includes recorded voices of three activists—Betty McKay, a formerly incarcerated woman and organizer for Essie Justice Group, Lisa Strawn, an activist who spent decades of her life as a trans woman confined inside men’s prisons, and Tomiekia Johnson, a writer at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

Over the speakers, McKay details her memories from inside. “I don’t ever remember being comfortable on that bed. 27 years. It was hard, very hard every day,” she says. “It never felt like my bed.”

When Butler lived in Spokane and her brother was first incarcerated, Butler found a lifeline in the organization, The Village of Hope. Yet as she helped her now ex-husband navigate reentry, she found that certain services simply don’t exist, in particular services that provide emotional and mental health support for people who are coming home from prison and for the loved ones who are welcoming them home.

She notes that most organizations focus on basic needs first— rates of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness are higher among formerly-incarcerated people than they are among the general population—but that there is a dearth of organizations and resources focusing on the mental, emotional, and relational issues that can arise during incarceration and reentry.

The need for these services is acute; Essie Justice Group’s 2018 report “Because She’s Powerful” surveyed 2,281 women and found that 86 percent of female survey respondents noted that the strain of a loved one’s incarceration had a “significant or extreme” impact on their emotional and mental health. The figure was 94 percent if the loved one was the respondent’s partner.

As Butler sees it, “You can address those primary needs, but if you don’t address the things that people are unraveling from beneath, then all those basic needs will no longer be met.” She sees it as “a basic-needs Band-Aid,” with nobody following up to treat what’s underneath it.