The purpose of this paper is to show that the family of convicted criminal has financial, social and psycho-emotional difficulties. The main goal of the deprivation of liberty of a person convicted of committing a crime is to punish the perpetrator. However, the criminal's family is also punished, in the sense that family members have a numerous hardship. At present, in the era of mass incarceration, a significant number of families feel the harmful consequences of the imprisonment of one of their members. There is almost no information in the Russian scientific literature about the processes that arise in families after the arrest of a criminal. So this article pays considerable attention to the analysis of the results of international research. The paper shows that since each family is different from the others, the consequences of imprisonment experienced by them are different. On the one hand, the removal of a delinquent from the family structure, which has a destructive effect on family members, can have a positive effect. On the other hand, the detention of a family member is a complete disaster, in which everything changes, changes dramatically. Family members of prisoners experience deep forms of discrimination that exacerbate already existing forms, such as ethnic, economic and gender discrimination and inequality. It should be noted that all members of the prisoner’s family suffer from the consequences: parents, brothers and sisters, but wives and children have the hardest time. That’s why the emphasis in this article is on the designation of the consequences experienced by women – official and unofficial marriage partners of men, who committed crime. All the family cares and burdens that a man used to carry out now are shifted to a woman: she becomes both the sole earner and a single parent. Women are forced to overcome financial, socio-psychological difficulties, condemnation of the inner circle, bureaucratic obstacles, shortcomings of the judicial and penitentiary systems.