Why do we fight mass incarceration? Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman demonstrate how our justice policies can have horrible effects on a group that is often overlooked: children of the incarcerated. The exponential expansion of the US prison population in recent decades and its unequal impact on poor and ethnic minority communities have been widely documented. A prison population of well over 2 million, a six-fold increase since the 1970s, has left a great number of children facing the incarceration of a parent in their lifetime: these are the children of the prison boom... In this book, the authors show that children with an incarcerated parent are more likely to experience multiple difficulties including mental health and behavioural problems and homelessness; there is also a greater likelihood that they will die before they reach the age of one. Such data provide striking evidence of the disproportionality of the harm caused by parental incarceration: African Americans born around 1990 had a 1 in 4 risk of parental imprisonment by their 14th birthday, compared with one in 30 white children... To put it in further context, black children are more likely to have a parent imprisoned by their first birthday than white children are by their 14th birthday.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 00:00:01 +0000