Interviewing incarcerated parents, their children, and caregivers, Patricia Allard and Judith Greene discovered the alarming, and often down-played, facts concerning the negative impact parental incarceration plays on families. The rush to lock-up offenders usually ignores the devastating effect incarceration has on children.
In Children on the Outside: Voicing the Pain and Human Costs of Parental Incarceration Allard and Greene claim that since 1991 there was an eighty percent increase in in the number of children with an incarcerated parent. More than twenty-five percent of the children were four years old, or younger. Sadly, more than thirty-three percent of the children will grow into adulthood while their parent continues to be incarcerated.
Allard and Greene report that when a child has an incarcerated parent, that child is three times more likely than the general population to be associated with delinquent or antisocial behavior. The child is twice as likely to develop serious mental health problems, and has a greater chance of having problems in school, or in the area of employment.
Using data obtained from the Bureau of Justice Statistics the report concludes that racial disparity in the criminal justice system has a particularly negative impact on African-American children with an incarcerated parent. According to the BJS, an African-American child is over seven times more likely to have an incarcerated parent than a white child, and that only one in twenty-five white children who were born in 1990 had a parent behind bars,but one in four African-American children did.
To read the full report Click here to go to website
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