Tasseli McKay

Tasseli McKay is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. For ten years, she worked on the Multi-site Family Study of Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering, a mixed-method longitudinal study of two thousand families affected by incarceration, which culminated in her first book: Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (University of California Press, 2019) with Megan Comfort, Christine Lindquist, and Anupa Bir. Her most recent book, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power: The Case for Reparations for Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2022), contends that the steep direct costs of mass-scale imprisonment are far overshadowed by its hidden costs and harms, many of which have been kept out of sight by women’s labor. Her current research focuses on the complicated relationship between the most common forms of violence—those that occur within families—and the government forces that we deploy in the name of public safety.