The Relational Costs of Wrongful Convictions

Despite a surge of interest in wrongful convictions, scholarship on the social processes through which the experience of wrongful conviction harms family life over time remains limited. In this article, I explore the shifting and accumulating “relational costs of wrongful convictions,” defined as the harms that men’s familial relationships incurred over three points in time: The moment of wrongful conviction, the period of wrongful imprisonment, and the post-prison period. Through in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men, I find that the relational costs of wrongful convictions accrued and changed over the course of participants’ wrongful conviction journeys. Although the moment of wrongful conviction represented a collective trauma that participants shared with their families, familial support waned over time (especially among men lacking socioeconomic privilege), sharpening the harms of wrongful imprisonment. Following their release, participants’ hostility toward relatives and their sense of social displacement impeded their ability to rebuild the few familial ties that were still available to them. These findings facilitate an understanding of familial disruption as a fluid social process, rather than the product of exonerees’ psychological traumas.