About

April D. Fernandes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State University. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2015. Her areas of expertise include punishment and social control, monetary sanctions, race and ethnicity, disability, law and society, pay-to-stay policies, health disparities, deviance, and urban sociology. Her research focuses on understanding social mechanisms related to punishment, social control, and disparities across different social groups. She is actively involved in academic activities within her department and contributes to the broader scholarly community through her research and teaching.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Finance
• Criminology
• Public economics
• Gender studies
• Business
• Market economy
• Actuarial science
• Economics
• Psychology
• Geography

Selected publications

• Parental and Sibling Confinement: Exploring Their Role in Youth Mental Health

  American Journal of Criminal Justice · 2025-08-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Existing research shows detrimental mental health effects of incarceration for youth, suggesting that the lived reality of confinement results in higher levels of depression and anxiety (Fagan & Kupchik, 2011; Forrest et al., 2000). A growing body of empirical work has explored the vicarious health effects of parental and sibling incarceration (Lee & Wildeman, 2021; Haskins, 2015). However, such inquiries have generally not included system-linked youth nor other modes of confinement. Using data from the Northwest Juvenile Project (NWP), this exploratory study explores the ways that early parental and sibling confinement, including incarceration and mental health hospitalization, affects the mental health outcomes of more than 1,800 system-involved youth in Cook County, Illinois. Our findings dovetail with existing empirical results, which suggest that the impacts of incarceration and mental health hospitalization are complex, finding other contextual factors can be more influential on levels of depression and anxiety for youth. Such an investigation adds to the emerging scholarship on the complex ways early familial incarceration can impact youth as they navigate their own contact with the criminal legal system and incarceration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Civil Lawfare

  Social Problems · 2025-01-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT To offset rising mass incarceration expenses, states adopted strategies to increase revenue, including charging incarcerated individuals pay-to-stay fees, a per diem room and board charge for the cost of their incarceration. In several states, the collection of these fees is done through civil lawsuits where defendants are alleged to be unlawful consumers of state goods and resources resulting from their incarceration. We draw on the case of pay-to-stay collection in Illinois using 102 civil lawsuits, focusing particularly on the state’s attempts to collect from the most vulnerable of incarcerated individuals, those with disabilities, to develop the theoretical concept of “civil lawfare.” We argue that civil lawfare describes how the state and legal actors weaponize the strictures and procedure of civil law to leverage an assault against vulnerable, disenfranchised populations facing institutional barriers accessing legal resources. We detail the challenges faced by incarcerated individuals with disabilities in navigating this system and how legal actors wage war to facilitate perpetual indebtedness to the state. We position civil lawfare as an understudied legacy of the twentieth century wars on poverty, drugs, and crime which facilitated the decimation and destruction of predominantly Black communities through deploying racialized sentencing laws, targeted policing, and exponential incarceration rates.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to special issue on dismantling the shadow carceral state

  Theoretical Criminology · 2024-11-01 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Economies of Violence

  2024-11-21

  book-chapter

  The United States was built through economies of violence endemic to colonialism. Market exchanges dependent on physical and financial extraction without consent are our nation’s White supremacist, patriarchal legacy. As such, there is a longstanding practice in the United States of applying social labels of deviance to justify the capture of human beings and the commodification of their bodies, from Indigenous removal, chattel slavery, debt peonage, and convict leasing, to prison labor and “pay-to-stay” incarceration. In pay-to-stay programs, cities, counties, and states charge incarcerated individuals for the cost of their incarceration. This chapter draws from a novel data set of documents related to pay-to-stay programs in the state of Illinois. It delves deeply into one incarcerated individual’s case to illustrate the far-reaching consequences of pay-to-stay. The authors argue that pay-to-stay programs exemplify the ways captive bodies belonging to incarcerated individuals are especially vulnerable to forced commodification. Furthermore, they demonstrate that pay-to-stay practices are intimately tied to racialized dispossession and economies of violence.

  PublisherDOI

• Reforming the shadow carceral state

  Theoretical Criminology · 2024-11-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  This article examines the repeal of prison pay-to-stay policies in the United States. We process-trace reform efforts in Illinois drawing from novel data retrieved through multiple FOIA requests to state agencies and public records searches. Our analysis reveals how lawmakers who advocated for reforming the shadow carceral state in 2016 and 2019 through repealing prison pay-to-stay repurposed penal logics they had once used punitively in the 1980s and 1990s to enact the same policy—such as protecting taxpayers, fiscal efficiency, and rehabilitation. Our findings advance existing research by suggesting that penal logics are open to interpretation depending on the socioeconomic and historical moment. These contextual factors are also crucial to determining how lawmakers and institutions re-interpret long held penal logics when reforming the shadow carceral state. We argue the ways in which lawmakers strategically operationalize penal logics exemplifies their cultural durability as a resonant means to a political end.

  PublisherDOI

• Life Course Statuses of Justice-Involved Youth Transitioning to Adulthood: Differences and Change in Offending and Mental Health

  Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology · 2023-03-02 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Latina/o/x Criminology and Justice: Pedagogy, Curriculum, Representation, and Reflections. An Introduction to the Special Issue

  Journal of Criminal Justice Education · 2023-05-31 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The “Damaged” State vs. the “Willful” Nonpayer: Pay-to-Stay and the Social Construction of Damage, Harm, and Moral Responsibility in a Rent-Seeking Society

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 25 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Business

  which were implemented in the state of Illinois in 1981 through the Prisoner Reimbursement Act, The "Damaged" State vs. the "Willful" Nonpayer: Pay-to-Stay and the Social Construction of Damage, Harm, and Moral Responsibility in a Rent-Seeking Society a Pr il d. fer na ndes , Br it ta n y fr iedm a n , a nd ga Br iel a k ir k

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Control, Punishment, and Disability in the United States

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-03-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores the intersections between social control, punishment, and disability, focusing on the lived experiences of people with disabilities within these systems and institutions. In the sphere of social control in the United States, disability represents a challenge to the processes, procedures, and policies of the agents and institutions tasked with custody and control. As individuals traverse the continuum of contact, from police interactions to court adjudication to incarceration, the role of both visible and invisible disabilities is salient to the experiences within the systems of social control as well the barriers to a successful reentry. The chapter engages with the expansive literature on social control and punishment, as well as the growing scholarship on the consequences of police and legal system contact and incarceration. Such involvement with the legal system has the potential to increase inequality by limiting access to essential markers of economic and social mobility and stability, from employment and housing to health and civil participation. Building on the theoretical traditions of intersectionality, crip theory, and critical race and feminist frameworks, this chapter takes an intersectional approach, investigating these relationships through the lens of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, and gender identity to more fully understand the ways in which disability in the legal and prison systems complicates the narrative of punishment. Analyzing disability along the continuum of contact is essential to a broader understanding of the stratifying effects of these systems, and the creation and maintenance of entrenched and enduring inequalities.

  PublisherDOI

• “Like if you Get a Hotel Bill”: Consumer Logic, Pay‐to‐Stay, and the Production of Incarceration as a Public Commodity*

  Sociological Forum · 2021-05-14 · 20 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Neoliberal governance has become a defining feature of our social world, fast‐tracking the commodification of human interaction, particularly within capitalist economies. Neoliberalism’s intensification of capitalist social relations shifted social institutions such as education, healthcare, and criminal justice to resemble profit‐oriented enterprises. A preeminent consequence of this shift for the administration of criminal justice is the rapid expansion of monetary sanctions in the form of pay‐to‐stay fees. Our article contributes to scholarship on neoliberal governance and social institutions by exploring how lawmakers justify and frame the imposition and recoupment of pay‐to‐stay fees. We draw from a novel dataset compiled by the authors on pay‐to stay in the state of Illinois, which consists of state‐level pay‐to‐stay statutes, transcripts of legislative debates on the ratification of pay‐to‐stay statutes, and 102 civil complaints from 1997 to 2015 initiated on behalf of the Illinois Department of Corrections against currently and formerly incarcerated people to compel the payment of pay‐to‐stay fees. Our analysis suggests that in the era of neoliberal governance, consumerism is an institutional logic that lawmakers draw from to adopt pay‐to‐stay as a legal template in an effort to foster a producer–consumer relationship between incarcerated people and the state, thereby producing incarceration as a public commodity.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert D. Crutchfield

  7 shared

• Gabriela Kirk

  Syracuse University

  6 shared

• Brittany Friedman

  6 shared

• Suzanna Ramirez

  3 shared

• Janice Iwama

  2 shared

• Alexes Harris

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Frank Edwards

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  1 shared

• Victoria Kurdyla

  University of North Carolina at Pembroke

  1 shared

Labs

• April D. Fernandes LabPI