Our Story

Incarceration plays an important role in the public safety arena by holding those persons who commit crimes accountable for their actions and by taking violent offenders off of the street.

It serves not only to isolate wrongdoers from the mainstream of society, but also to enhance the quality of life in communities by providing closure for victims of crime and restoring public confidence in our legal system.

However, policymakers have long recognized that there are many unfortunate consequences to the growing number of individuals incarcerated in the United States.

Studies have examined the impact of incarceration on the nation's budget, economy, victims' rights, and cohesiveness of its communities. Yet one of the less recognized effects of the high incarceration rate is the impact that it has on the more vulnerable members of the population: the nation's children.

In 1999, approximately 2.1% of the 72 million minor children in the U.S. had a parent in prison

• Overall, 721,500 parents of children under the age of 18 were held in state and federal prisons nationwide
• From 1991 to 1999, the number of children under the age of 18 with parents in prison rose from 936,000 to 1,498,800, an increase of more than 60%
• This correlates directly with the overall growth in the number of individuals incarcerated in state and federal prisons nationwide, which rose by 62% during this period

Research suggests that the children of incarcerated parents are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems and become involved with the juvenile and criminal justice systems later in life. Consequently, this issue holds great significance for policymakers at the federal, state and local levels.

This vicious cycle must be broken in order to save the next generation of children from experiencing the same sense of anger and disenfranchisement that caused their parents to turn to criminal behavior. This outcome is of significant cost not only to these children, but to the entire community.

Incarceration of adults

• More than one in every 100 adults in America is in jail or prison
• On any given day, over 1.5 million children in this country--approximately 2% of the minor children—have a parent serving a sentence in a state or federal prison
• There is a disparate impact on families of color, with African-American children nine times more likely and Hispanic children three times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison
• Between 1995 and 2005, the number of incarcerated women in the U.S. increased by 57% compared to 34 percent for men4 (Harrison & Beck, 2006). 75 percent of incarcerated women are mothers
• Sixty-three percent of federal prisoners and 55 percent of state prisoners are parents of children under age 18
• Forty-six percent of all imprisoned parents lived with at least one of their minor children, prior to entry
• The average age of children with an incarcerated parent is eight years old; 22 percent of the children are under the age of five

How does this affect children and families left behind?

• Despite widespread statements that children with incarcerated parents are many times more likely than other children to be incarcerated as adults, there is no reliable research evidence to support this assertion
• Parental incarceration creates additional challenges for children and families often resulting in:
• Financial instability and material hardship, with financial problems the most severe for already vulnerable families and caregivers who support contact between the incarcerated parent and his or her child;
• Instability in family relationships and structure, and residential mobility;
• School behavior and performance problems; and
• Shame, social and institutional stigma
• In addition to lowering the likelihood of recidivism among incarcerated parents, there is evidence that maintaining contact with one's incarcerated parent improves a child's emotional response to the incarceration and supports parent-child attachment;

Many programs and services for children whose parents are incarcerated offer promise in meeting some aspect of children's needs, but have not been empirically validated as having either short- or long-term impacts on children's well-being.

How does this affect children and youth with respect to foster care?

• Most law enforcement agencies lack training and protocols on where to place children when a parent is arrested and incarcerated
• Ten percent of incarcerated mothers have a child in a foster home or other state care
• Eleven percent of children in foster care have a mother who is incarcerated for at least some period of time while in foster care; however, 85 percent of these children were placed in foster care prior to the mother's first period of incarceration
• The average stay in first foster care for a child with an incarcerated mother is 3.9 years
• Children of incarcerated mothers are four times more likely to be "still in" foster care than all other children. Children of incarcerated mothers are more likely to "age out" of the foster care system; less likely to reunify with their parents, get adopted, enter into subsidized guardianship, go into independent living or leave through some other means
• Reunification is 21% for children of incarcerated mothers versus 40% for all children
• Adoption is 37% for children of incarcerated mothers versus 27% for all children.