Research
Research Agenda
My research is primarily concerned with how race, class, and gender intersect in the context of the criminal legal system to reproduce economic, social, and environmental inequality. My first ongoing stream of work examines the care giving experiences of women with incarcerated adult children, highlighting the labor and resource extraction of already marginalized women. My second stream of work asks how incarceration and the climate crisis co-constitute one another, especially as it relates to penal labor, climate catastrophes, and the siting of prisons.
Selected Projects
Abstract
While literature on mass incarceration has focused primarily on incarcerated men, their children, and their romantic partners, this article builds on a smaller body of work that highlights the harms to mothers under the constraints of the neoliberal carceral state. In this study, I examine how mothers with incarcerated adult children have been conscripted to perform extractive caring labor. Drawing on data from 21 in-depth interviews, I find that mothers often travel long and costly distances, drain their savings, and work multiple jobs to ensure the survival of their incarcerated children. I argue that the cumulative impact of financialized policies and time-draining bureaucracy results in the extraction of precious time and money from working-class Black and Latine women on the outside. I introduce the term carceral care economy to conceptualize the neoliberal commodification of incarceration and the labor imperative it creates for mothers with children who are imprisoned.
Citation: Delerme, R. (2025). “It’s Heartbreaking. It’s Expensive. It’s Hard”: How the Carceral Care Economy Harms Black and Latine Mothers. Gender & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432251331534
With Brittany Friedman in The Conversation, we show how Trump uses tried and true methods to expand and normalize mass surveillance of people of color, immigrants, and political organizers.
Image from CDCR X account
My dissertation will examine the role of the climate crisis in California prisons. Do climate disasters provide the State with unique opportunities to gender work in ways that make otherwise masculinized work palatable to incarcerated women? How might climate labor transform the nature of prisons?