The blue light of the screen is actually a pale violet when the battery hits 11 percent, or maybe that’s just the way my eyes are processing the glare after being stuck in that elevator for 21 minutes earlier today. There is a specific kind of silence that happens when you are suspended between floors, a mechanical holding of breath that mimics the way a household stops breathing when the breadwinner doesn’t come home. My thumb hovers over the ‘send’ button on the money transfer app. It’s $81 this time. Not including the $11 convenience fee that feels like a mockery of the word. At the kitchen table, the school supply list for my youngest looks like a list of demands from a foreign government. Glue sticks, 41-count packs of crayons, specific binders that cost more than a gallon of milk. I am doing the arithmetic that politicians skip when they stand behind mahogany podiums to talk about criminal justice reform. They talk about ‘units’ and ‘offenders’ and ‘recidivism rates,’ but they never talk about the cost of a phone call on a Tuesday night when a child just wants to know if their dad liked their drawing of a dinosaur.

The Hidden Costs of Incarceration

I’m a grief counselor by trade, which means I spend 31 hours a week listening to people describe the holes left behind by the departed. But incarceration isn’t a departure; it’s a presence. It is a loud, hungry ghost that sits at the dinner table and demands to be fed. We treat it as an individual event, a singular person removed from a singular plot of Earth, but for the people left behind, it is a budget crisis that never ends. When the elevator stopped today, I felt that familiar tightness in my chest-the feeling of being trapped in a system that doesn’t care about your schedule. I had a client waiting, a woman whose husband has been gone for 11 years, and she’s still paying off the debt from his initial trial. She’s stuck in her own elevator, and the emergency button just rings and rings without an answer. I think I’m losing my patience with the word ‘reform.’ Reform sounds like a new coat of paint on a house that’s actually sinking into the mud. We need to talk about the mud. We need to talk about how the state disables a person’s ability to earn, and then expects the mother, the grandmother, or the sister to fill the 100-percent-wide gap with 51-percent-size wages.

The Contradiction of “Closure”

Sometimes I find myself staring at the wall in my office, wondering if I’m actually helping or just providing a softer chair for people to sit in while they drown. It’s a contradiction I live with every day. I tell people to find ‘closure’ while the utility company is threatening to shut off their lights because they spent their last $51 on commissary so their loved one wouldn’t have to eat grey mash for another week. I once made the mistake-a genuine, stupid mistake-of telling a client that money shouldn’t dictate her peace of mind. She looked at me with such a profound level of pity that I wanted to disappear into the floorboards. She was right to judge me. Peace of mind is a luxury item, like those 101-count Egyptian cotton sheets people buy when they have nothing else to worry about. My office smells like lavender oil and stale coffee, a combination that usually suggests calm, but today it just feels like a mask. I’m tired of masks. I’m tired of the way we pretend that a family can lose half its income and 100 percent of its child-care support and somehow ‘thrive’ if they just work hard enough.

The Math of Incarceration’s Ripple Effect

The math is unforgiving. If you take 1 person out of a household, you don’t just lose their income. You gain a whole new set of expenses. You gain the $21 phone bills. You gain the $101 monthly travel cost for visits that often get canceled at the last minute because of a lockdown. You gain the emotional labor of explaining to a 5-year-old why they can’t hug their father for more than 11 seconds. The ledger is always in the red. And the people who write the policy papers, the ones who talk about ‘re-entry programs,’ they never seem to account for the fact that the family is the one doing the actual re-entry work. They are the ones providing the housing, the food, the clothing, and the emotional stability for someone who has been treated like a number for a decade. It’s a slow leak in the household stability that turns into a flood over time. I’ve seen 11 different families in the last month who are all one broken radiator or one missed shift away from total collapse. They aren’t ‘at risk.’ They are already in the water, treading as fast as they can while the state holds their heads down.

[The ledger is where the love is tested by the reality of the rent.]

The Generational Tax

I remember reading a study-or maybe I just dreamt it, my brain gets fuzzy when I’m stressed-that said the average family spent over $10,001 on legal fees and court costs in the first year alone. That’s a year of college. That’s a down payment on a house that would have stayed in the family for 41 years. Instead, it goes into the pockets of lawyers and the coffers of the county. I get angry, and then I feel guilty for being angry because I’m supposed to be the ‘stable’ one. The counselor. The one with the lavender oil. But when I was in that elevator, I realized that I’m just as susceptible to the panic of being stuck. I started checking my watch every 1 minute, as if the ticking would somehow force the doors open. It’s the same way my clients check their bank accounts. They look at the numbers, hoping they’ve changed since the last time they checked 11 minutes ago. There is a specific kind of desperation in hoping for a miracle that you know isn’t coming. We’ve built a society that relies on the unpaid, unrecognized labor of women to keep the wreckage of the prison system from spilling out into the streets. We are the glue, but even glue has a breaking point when it’s stretched over 101 miles of distance.

There’s this one woman I see, her name is Sarah. She’s 41, and she works three jobs. She’s the personification of the family economy that the reform speeches leave out. She told me that she doesn’t mind the work; she minds the ‘nothingness’ of it. She works so she can send money that disappears into a hole. She works so she can pay for a lawyer who hasn’t called her back in 81 days. She is the backbone of a system that is actively trying to break her. And yet, she keeps going. Why? Because the alternative is letting someone she loves vanish. That’s the leverage the state has. They know we won’t let our brothers or sons or partners rot. They know the family will pay the $11 fee. They know we will sacrifice the 31-day supply of groceries to make sure there’s money on the phone account. It’s a ransom, really. A slow-motion kidnapping where the victim is still in the room but costs $201 a month to keep connected to the world. Sarah once told me she felt like she was in a cage too, just one with windows and a mailbox.

Rethinking the Math: A Generational Tax

I’m starting to see that the only way out is to change the math. We have to stop looking at incarceration as an isolated incident and start looking at it as a generational tax. It is a tax on the children who don’t get the new shoes. It is a tax on the elderly mothers who go back to work at age 71 to pay for a son’s appeal. It is a tax on the future. And yet, there are moments of defiance. I see families finding ways to create their own economies, to build something out of the scraps they’ve been left. There is a resilience in the kitchen-table arithmetic that is almost holy. When people find ways to generate income despite the barriers, it’s a form of protest. It’s a way of saying that the system doesn’t own their survival. For many, finding legitimate avenues for income generation-like exploring second chance employment options-becomes a lifeline that isn’t just about the money, but about the reclamation of agency. It’s about being more than just a source of revenue for a private phone company or a commissary vendor. It’s about proving that the household can still be a place of production, not just a site of extraction.

The Unacknowledged Architects

I keep thinking about the elevator. When the doors finally opened, there wasn’t a hero. It was just a technician who pressed a button and walked away without saying a word. No one apologized for the 21 minutes of my life that were gone. No one asked if I was okay. That’s the system in a nutshell. It traps you, holds you in a state of suspended animation, and then when it finally lets you go, it expects you to just carry on as if the air wasn’t thin and your heart wasn’t racing. My clients are expected to be ‘normal’ again, to ‘re-integrate,’ as if they haven’t been breathing recycled air for 11 years. As if their families haven’t been paying for the privilege of waiting. I went back to my office and blew out the lavender candle. I didn’t want the smell of fake peace. I wanted the smell of real, messy, expensive life. I wanted to tell Sarah that it’s okay to be tired of the math.

[The weight of the system is carried in the wallets of the innocent.]

Justice in the Ledger

We need a different conversation. Not one about ‘justice’ in the abstract, but about justice in the ledger. How do we stop the leak? How do we ensure that a single mistake by 1 person doesn’t result in the poverty of 11 others? I don’t have the answers, and as a counselor, I’m supposed to admit that sometimes. I’m admitting it now. I don’t know how Sarah is going to pay for those 41-cent-per-minute phone calls and the rent this month. I don’t know how I’m going to help her find peace when the world is demanding she find another $101. But I do know that the family economy is the most powerful, and the most ignored, force in this country. It is the only thing keeping the whole house of cards from falling over. We are the architects of a survival that we never asked to build. And maybe, just maybe, if we stop pretending that the state is the only actor in this play, we can start to see the families for who they are: the primary investors in a system that has given them nothing but a bill and a broken elevator.