Fatherhood under constraint: Reconstructing masculine identity amid violence and long-term imprisonment

Incarcerated fathers embedded in prison subcultures remain understudied, particularly regarding how masculine identity is reconstructed amid threat, deprivation, and prolonged separation from children. Drawing on incarcerated fatherhood, caring masculinities, prison sociology, and ambiguous loss scholarship, this qualitative study examines how 25 reputationally influential incarcerated fathers use fatherhood to reconstruct masculine identity within a hypermasculine institutional order. The analysis centers fatherhood not simply as a family role or source of emotional loss, but as a framework through which men with prison-based credibility may rework masculine authority from toughness, retaliation, and control toward restraint, mentorship, and nonviolent influence. Reflexive thematic analysis identified five interconnected themes: inherited masculinities shaped by paternal absence and violence; premature provision and substitute authority; fatherhood as moral recalibration through shame, responsibility, generativity, and emotional regulation; credible fatherhood expressed through mentorship, mediation, and nonviolent authority; and constrained paternal repair under long-term imprisonment. Masculine identity reconstruction was neither uniform nor complete. For some men, fatherhood supported changes in how authority and responsibility were understood and enacted, while for others it remained primarily an aspirational identity project constrained by estrangement, grief, and incarceration. Findings illuminate how fatherhood can provide a moral framework for reinterpreting masculine authority while demonstrating the institutional and relational limits of paternal identity reconstruction under long-term confinement.