Janani Umamaheswar
Biographic Data
| ID | 115612 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Janani Umamaheswar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Janani |
| FAMILY NAME | Umamaheswar |
| SIGNATURE | UMAMAHESWAR J |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6785-4631 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Expanding wrongful conviction analyses
Innocence research has traditionally focused on a common set of contributing factors and the aftermath of exoneration. A result of this narrow lens is that researchers typically frame wrongful convictions as primarily involving innocent defendants and the state actors who harmed them, glossing over the roles played by the many other actors who may be involved in these cases. Further, scholars rarely analyze the timing and sequencing of the crimin…
Pretrial defendants’ perceptions of risks, needs, and protective factors during the pretrial period
“He Got More Felonies Than I Do!” Formerly Incarcerated Americans on President Trump
President Trump has long espoused “tough-on-crime” rhetoric, and many of his current policy initiatives risk exacerbating challenges faced by the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, including formerly incarcerated people. Against this backdrop, I ask: How do formerly incarcerated Americans perceive President Trump and his actions? Using 44 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated people in Florida and Virginia, I find that participants’ mixe…
Developing Evidence‐Informed Support Groups for Families of Incarcerated People
Researchers have extensively documented the financial, social, emotional, and psychological challenges that families of incarcerated people face, and there are growing calls for programs and services to help these families confront the collateral consequences of imprisonment. This article uses data from an ethnographic study exploring how family members of people in prison constructed and leveraged communities of support to help them cope with th…
Pretrial processing and the making of incipient carceral citizens
Researchers thus far have focused on how carceral citizenship—the unique form of political and social membership generated by criminal-legal contact—emerges at the point of conviction. In this article, we draw on in-depth interviews with 73 pretrial defendants to explore the making of people we call “incipient” carceral citizens: individuals with pending charges who are already “translated” as criminal in the eyes of the state and community. Rela…
Beyond “pleasant lies”
Researchers have examined how perpetrators of harm—and those close to them—grapple with moral questions related to culpability and victimhood, often by developing excuses and justifications that “neutralize” the damage inflicted. Building on this research, I use 18 in-depth interviews with family members of men incarcerated for a violent offense to explore the “fictionalizing tendencies” in their accounts of their loved ones’ harm. Drawing on sch…
Contaminated memories
In this article, we use 15 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated mothers to explore an understudied dimension of the punitive nature of system contact: its contamination of memory. Drawing on theoretical scholarship in the sociology of memory, we reveal how contact with both the criminal legal system and the child welfare system defined participants’ worst maternal memories and contaminated even their best maternal memories. In sharp con…
The Construction of Capital Among Family Members of People in Prison
Researchers have documented the harms of imprisonment on family life, but much less is known about how family members seek support to cope with the challenges of familial imprisonment. In this article, I draw on 8 months of ethnographic observations of a virtual family support group and in-depth interviews with 27 family members of people in prison to explore participants’ need for, and construction of, communities of support. Drawing on Bourdieu…
Humor, resistance, and the power of images
In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 19…
Narrative Resilience Among Formerly Incarcerated Mothers
Whereas much of the research on mothers in reentry has focused on the resistance strategies these mothers develop to combat the stigma they face, we explore how formerly incarcerated women’s narratives of motherhood reflect their resilience. Using in-depth interviews with 15 formerly incarcerated women, we describe participants’ “narrative resilience”—their focus on their strength and perseverance as they told stories of adversity. Narrative resi…
Wrongful Conviction as Racialized Cumulative Disadvantage
Despite a growing body of scholarship on wrongful convictions, research on the prison and pre-prison experiences of wrongfully-convicted men (including the racialized nature of these experiences) continues to be limited. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States to frame wrongful conviction as an experience of racialized cumulative disadvantage, defined as the accrual and perpetuation of socioecono…
The Relational Costs of Wrongful Convictions
“On the Street, the Only Person You Gotta Bow Down to Is Yourself”
Despite the well-established link between homelessness and incarceration, very little qualitative research has focused on the social processes that underlie this nexus. In this article, I draw on 19 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men who reported pre-prison housing instability, supplemented with 5 interviews with formerly-incarcerated men experiencing homelessness, to explore the gendered nature of the homelessness-incarceration nexus. I p…
“Not Anybody can be a Dad”
Despite an important and burgeoning literature correcting oversimplified portrayals of incarcerated men as “hypermasculine” and aggressive, research on men’s prison masculinities has not yet been sufficiently incorporated into prison treatment and therapy programs. In this article, we draw on in-depth interviews with 28 incarcerated men to explore the intergenerational transmission of masculinity in the family setting, highlighting how incarcerat…
Structural racism and the experience of “tightness” during the Covid-19 pandemic
Research has established the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of colour. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with 36 college students (for a total of 94 interviews), we extend the conceptual metaphor of "tightness" (derived from the sociology of punishment) to understand the experiential dimensions of structural racism in America, especially during periods of crisis. We argue that tightness intensified for Black and La…
Secondary characters in narratives of wrongful conviction
Research on wrongful convictions has focused mainly on the relationships and interactions among wrongfully-convicted persons and state actors, perpetuating an overly-simplistic understanding of the harms of wrongful conviction. In this article, I analyze narratives of wrongful conviction obtained through in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the U.S. to shift attention toward these stories’ “secondary characters”—those individuals who wer…
Innocence as burden and resource
Drawing on theoretical scholarship on adaptation and resistance in prisons, I explore the significance and function of innocence—and the acute sense of non-belonging it triggers in the prison setting—in wrongfully-convicted men's responses to imprisonment. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States, I argue that innocence functioned as a double-edged sword for the men as they adapted to their wrongful imprisonment: Inno…
Shadow and Light
Criminological research has explored the challenges that incarceration poses to romantic relationships, but less is known about partners who have abandoned efforts to sustain these relationships. In this article, I explore narratives of relationship dissolution among former partners of incarcerated (or formerly-incarcerated) men. Through inductive analyses of 603 posts across 23 threads on Virtual Support for Prisoners (VSP)—a pseudonymous online…
Suppression on top of oppression’
Penological research has extensively documented how incarcerated men’s identities are shaped by the prison setting, highlighting how these men cope with and adapt to the ‘pains of imprisonment’ through careful emotion management. Significantly less research has focused explicitly on the role of emotion in incarcerated men’s constructions of their selves. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to reveal how the pri…
When My Mother Died, I Think a Part of Me Died
Drawing on theoretical literature on the mothering discourse, I explore how incarcerated men give meaning to their relationships with their mothers. Using 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated adult men, I argue that adherence to the mothering discourse results in sons holding their mothers' maternal practices to impossibly high standards while simultaneously feeling obligated to reconcile with their mothers even when doing so is tremendously …
Dad, Wash Your Hands
Recent analyses of responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have posited that men's dismissive attitudes toward the risks of the virus reflect their attempts to conform to masculine norms that valorize bravery and strength. In this article, the authors develop an alternative account of the gender differences in attitudes toward COVID-19. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with college students and members of their households ( …
A Life-Course Perspective on Incarcerated Women’s Views on Adulthood
Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with incarcerated women, supplemented by mail correspondence with a sub-sample of these women, I explore how the participants interpret their early life-course experiences when reflecting on their transition to adulthood and, subsequently, their views on adult roles and responsibilities. The women’s narratives indicate that early experiences with trauma, along with premature entries into adult roles, result in a …
And the evolution of newspaper representations of incarcerated Muslims
Prior research has examined public attitudes towards—and media portrayals of—Muslims in the United States following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Scholars, however, have yet to examine media portrayals of incarcerated Muslims in the era following the attacks. In this article, I analyze newspaper reports published before and after the 9/11 attacks to examine whether representations of incarcerated Muslims shifted following the attac…
Gendered representations of parents behind bars
Scholars have devoted significant attention to the issue of incarcerated parents, and a separate body of research has examined the representation of crime and offenders in the media. In this study, I contribute to research on incarcerated parents and on media portrayals of offenders by examining the role of gender in US newspaper representations of incarcerated parents over the past three decades. The findings suggest that the difficulties of par…
Immigrant Group Differences in Job Satisfaction
Dad, Wash Your Hands
Recent analyses of responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have posited that men's dismissive attitudes toward the risks of the virus reflect their attempts to conform to masculine norms that valorize bravery and strength. In this article, the authors develop an alternative account of the gender differences in attitudes toward COVID-19. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with college students and members of their households ( …
Shadow and Light
Criminological research has explored the challenges that incarceration poses to romantic relationships, but less is known about partners who have abandoned efforts to sustain these relationships. In this article, I explore narratives of relationship dissolution among former partners of incarcerated (or formerly-incarcerated) men. Through inductive analyses of 603 posts across 23 threads on Virtual Support for Prisoners (VSP)—a pseudonymous online…
Gendered representations of parents behind bars
Scholars have devoted significant attention to the issue of incarcerated parents, and a separate body of research has examined the representation of crime and offenders in the media. In this study, I contribute to research on incarcerated parents and on media portrayals of offenders by examining the role of gender in US newspaper representations of incarcerated parents over the past three decades. The findings suggest that the difficulties of par…
The Construction of Capital Among Family Members of People in Prison
Researchers have documented the harms of imprisonment on family life, but much less is known about how family members seek support to cope with the challenges of familial imprisonment. In this article, I draw on 8 months of ethnographic observations of a virtual family support group and in-depth interviews with 27 family members of people in prison to explore participants’ need for, and construction of, communities of support. Drawing on Bourdieu…
Innocence as burden and resource
Drawing on theoretical scholarship on adaptation and resistance in prisons, I explore the significance and function of innocence—and the acute sense of non-belonging it triggers in the prison setting—in wrongfully-convicted men's responses to imprisonment. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States, I argue that innocence functioned as a double-edged sword for the men as they adapted to their wrongful imprisonment: Inno…
Suppression on top of oppression’
Penological research has extensively documented how incarcerated men’s identities are shaped by the prison setting, highlighting how these men cope with and adapt to the ‘pains of imprisonment’ through careful emotion management. Significantly less research has focused explicitly on the role of emotion in incarcerated men’s constructions of their selves. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to reveal how the pri…
Immigrant Group Differences in Job Satisfaction
Humor, resistance, and the power of images
In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 19…
Wrongful Conviction as Racialized Cumulative Disadvantage
Despite a growing body of scholarship on wrongful convictions, research on the prison and pre-prison experiences of wrongfully-convicted men (including the racialized nature of these experiences) continues to be limited. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States to frame wrongful conviction as an experience of racialized cumulative disadvantage, defined as the accrual and perpetuation of socioecono…
When My Mother Died, I Think a Part of Me Died
Drawing on theoretical literature on the mothering discourse, I explore how incarcerated men give meaning to their relationships with their mothers. Using 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated adult men, I argue that adherence to the mothering discourse results in sons holding their mothers' maternal practices to impossibly high standards while simultaneously feeling obligated to reconcile with their mothers even when doing so is tremendously …
And the evolution of newspaper representations of incarcerated Muslims
Prior research has examined public attitudes towards—and media portrayals of—Muslims in the United States following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Scholars, however, have yet to examine media portrayals of incarcerated Muslims in the era following the attacks. In this article, I analyze newspaper reports published before and after the 9/11 attacks to examine whether representations of incarcerated Muslims shifted following the attac…
Immigrant Group Differences in Job Satisfaction
Gendered representations of parents behind bars
Scholars have devoted significant attention to the issue of incarcerated parents, and a separate body of research has examined the representation of crime and offenders in the media. In this study, I contribute to research on incarcerated parents and on media portrayals of offenders by examining the role of gender in US newspaper representations of incarcerated parents over the past three decades. The findings suggest that the difficulties of par…
And the evolution of newspaper representations of incarcerated Muslims
Prior research has examined public attitudes towards—and media portrayals of—Muslims in the United States following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Scholars, however, have yet to examine media portrayals of incarcerated Muslims in the era following the attacks. In this article, I analyze newspaper reports published before and after the 9/11 attacks to examine whether representations of incarcerated Muslims shifted following the attac…
A Life-Course Perspective on Incarcerated Women’s Views on Adulthood
Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with incarcerated women, supplemented by mail correspondence with a sub-sample of these women, I explore how the participants interpret their early life-course experiences when reflecting on their transition to adulthood and, subsequently, their views on adult roles and responsibilities. The women’s narratives indicate that early experiences with trauma, along with premature entries into adult roles, result in a …
Dad, Wash Your Hands
Recent analyses of responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have posited that men's dismissive attitudes toward the risks of the virus reflect their attempts to conform to masculine norms that valorize bravery and strength. In this article, the authors develop an alternative account of the gender differences in attitudes toward COVID-19. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with college students and members of their households ( …
Suppression on top of oppression’
Penological research has extensively documented how incarcerated men’s identities are shaped by the prison setting, highlighting how these men cope with and adapt to the ‘pains of imprisonment’ through careful emotion management. Significantly less research has focused explicitly on the role of emotion in incarcerated men’s constructions of their selves. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to reveal how the pri…
When My Mother Died, I Think a Part of Me Died
Drawing on theoretical literature on the mothering discourse, I explore how incarcerated men give meaning to their relationships with their mothers. Using 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated adult men, I argue that adherence to the mothering discourse results in sons holding their mothers' maternal practices to impossibly high standards while simultaneously feeling obligated to reconcile with their mothers even when doing so is tremendously …
“On the Street, the Only Person You Gotta Bow Down to Is Yourself”
Despite the well-established link between homelessness and incarceration, very little qualitative research has focused on the social processes that underlie this nexus. In this article, I draw on 19 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men who reported pre-prison housing instability, supplemented with 5 interviews with formerly-incarcerated men experiencing homelessness, to explore the gendered nature of the homelessness-incarceration nexus. I p…
“Not Anybody can be a Dad”
Despite an important and burgeoning literature correcting oversimplified portrayals of incarcerated men as “hypermasculine” and aggressive, research on men’s prison masculinities has not yet been sufficiently incorporated into prison treatment and therapy programs. In this article, we draw on in-depth interviews with 28 incarcerated men to explore the intergenerational transmission of masculinity in the family setting, highlighting how incarcerat…
Structural racism and the experience of “tightness” during the Covid-19 pandemic
Research has established the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of colour. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with 36 college students (for a total of 94 interviews), we extend the conceptual metaphor of "tightness" (derived from the sociology of punishment) to understand the experiential dimensions of structural racism in America, especially during periods of crisis. We argue that tightness intensified for Black and La…
Secondary characters in narratives of wrongful conviction
Research on wrongful convictions has focused mainly on the relationships and interactions among wrongfully-convicted persons and state actors, perpetuating an overly-simplistic understanding of the harms of wrongful conviction. In this article, I analyze narratives of wrongful conviction obtained through in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the U.S. to shift attention toward these stories’ “secondary characters”—those individuals who wer…
Innocence as burden and resource
Drawing on theoretical scholarship on adaptation and resistance in prisons, I explore the significance and function of innocence—and the acute sense of non-belonging it triggers in the prison setting—in wrongfully-convicted men's responses to imprisonment. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States, I argue that innocence functioned as a double-edged sword for the men as they adapted to their wrongful imprisonment: Inno…
Shadow and Light
Criminological research has explored the challenges that incarceration poses to romantic relationships, but less is known about partners who have abandoned efforts to sustain these relationships. In this article, I explore narratives of relationship dissolution among former partners of incarcerated (or formerly-incarcerated) men. Through inductive analyses of 603 posts across 23 threads on Virtual Support for Prisoners (VSP)—a pseudonymous online…
Narrative Resilience Among Formerly Incarcerated Mothers
Whereas much of the research on mothers in reentry has focused on the resistance strategies these mothers develop to combat the stigma they face, we explore how formerly incarcerated women’s narratives of motherhood reflect their resilience. Using in-depth interviews with 15 formerly incarcerated women, we describe participants’ “narrative resilience”—their focus on their strength and perseverance as they told stories of adversity. Narrative resi…
Wrongful Conviction as Racialized Cumulative Disadvantage
Despite a growing body of scholarship on wrongful convictions, research on the prison and pre-prison experiences of wrongfully-convicted men (including the racialized nature of these experiences) continues to be limited. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States to frame wrongful conviction as an experience of racialized cumulative disadvantage, defined as the accrual and perpetuation of socioecono…
The Relational Costs of Wrongful Convictions
Beyond “pleasant lies”
Researchers have examined how perpetrators of harm—and those close to them—grapple with moral questions related to culpability and victimhood, often by developing excuses and justifications that “neutralize” the damage inflicted. Building on this research, I use 18 in-depth interviews with family members of men incarcerated for a violent offense to explore the “fictionalizing tendencies” in their accounts of their loved ones’ harm. Drawing on sch…
Contaminated memories
In this article, we use 15 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated mothers to explore an understudied dimension of the punitive nature of system contact: its contamination of memory. Drawing on theoretical scholarship in the sociology of memory, we reveal how contact with both the criminal legal system and the child welfare system defined participants’ worst maternal memories and contaminated even their best maternal memories. In sharp con…
The Construction of Capital Among Family Members of People in Prison
Researchers have documented the harms of imprisonment on family life, but much less is known about how family members seek support to cope with the challenges of familial imprisonment. In this article, I draw on 8 months of ethnographic observations of a virtual family support group and in-depth interviews with 27 family members of people in prison to explore participants’ need for, and construction of, communities of support. Drawing on Bourdieu…
Humor, resistance, and the power of images
In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 19…
Developing Evidence‐Informed Support Groups for Families of Incarcerated People
Researchers have extensively documented the financial, social, emotional, and psychological challenges that families of incarcerated people face, and there are growing calls for programs and services to help these families confront the collateral consequences of imprisonment. This article uses data from an ethnographic study exploring how family members of people in prison constructed and leveraged communities of support to help them cope with th…
Pretrial processing and the making of incipient carceral citizens
Researchers thus far have focused on how carceral citizenship—the unique form of political and social membership generated by criminal-legal contact—emerges at the point of conviction. In this article, we draw on in-depth interviews with 73 pretrial defendants to explore the making of people we call “incipient” carceral citizens: individuals with pending charges who are already “translated” as criminal in the eyes of the state and community. Rela…
Expanding wrongful conviction analyses
Innocence research has traditionally focused on a common set of contributing factors and the aftermath of exoneration. A result of this narrow lens is that researchers typically frame wrongful convictions as primarily involving innocent defendants and the state actors who harmed them, glossing over the roles played by the many other actors who may be involved in these cases. Further, scholars rarely analyze the timing and sequencing of the crimin…
Pretrial defendants’ perceptions of risks, needs, and protective factors during the pretrial period
“He Got More Felonies Than I Do!” Formerly Incarcerated Americans on President Trump
President Trump has long espoused “tough-on-crime” rhetoric, and many of his current policy initiatives risk exacerbating challenges faced by the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, including formerly incarcerated people. Against this backdrop, I ask: How do formerly incarcerated Americans perceive President Trump and his actions? Using 44 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated people in Florida and Virginia, I find that participants’ mixe…
Psychology (21 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (18 works) · Criminology (17 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Prison (11 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (10 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Imprisonment (7 works)