...Paternal incarceration creates a temporary single-parenting system, in which the mother acts as sole guardian, but imprisonment tends to produce far worse effects on children than do other causes of parent-child separation (Lowenstein, 1986). Separation due to death or similar causes disrupt the family, yet these happen to provide a “focal concern around which the remaining members can rally and mitigate the impact of their loss”; quite to the contrary, separation due to imprisonment rarely elicits any such response because of the stigma with which it is associated (Fritsch & Burkhead, 1981, p. 84). Typically, a child faced with the social stigma of paternal incarceration will often also encounter embarrassment and shame, which may in turn further inhibit the ability of the child to adequately adjust to the anxieties resulting from the separation through incarceration (Hannon et al., 1984; Lowenstein, 1986). The deleterious effects on child behavior, of course, are that prolonged periods of shame and embarrassment may promote depression or behavior typical of withdrawal, such as an unwillingness to engage in social interactions. Unlike other causes for paternal separation, paternal absence due to imprisonment is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, which takes on different meaning depending on the manner in which the particular cause for the incarceration is perceived—either as being “normatively approved” or as “bearing a stigma” (Lowenstein, 1984). While there is a correlation...
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...Silent Battle: The Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children and Families By: Jessica Stamper The loss of a parent has an overwhelming impact on a child. When a parent dies or there is a divorce, there are endless opportunities to discuss the loss, but what happens when the absence is due to incarceration? Incarceration is not met with the same understanding and sympathy death and divorce are, making it harder to cope, creating additional and often more severe emotional and psychological effects on children. The topic is often considered taboo and this inability to communicate creates more anxiety for the child. They often feel alone, leaving them to suffer in silence. The loss of parents to prison can cause depression and trauma to a child. It compounds the existing environmental stress, such as the violent neighborhoods, poverty and a poor school system. The trend for the incarcerated differs with race, age, gender and economic status. In the same way, the effects on children range from emotional, behavioral and economic aspects. When a parent goes to prison, leaving behind their children, it creates devastating and often lasting effects on the family, as a whole. Equally affected, are the parent or guardian left to care for the children. It is a growing epidemic and with the constant rise of prison population, so does the numbers of families left to suffer the consequences. This paper investigates the effect of incarceration of a parent can have on a family...
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...The United States of America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. America holds 5% of the world’s population, yet it houses 25% of the world’s prisoners (Walmsley 2013). The approximate amount of spending on our nations prisoners is 74 billion dollars, annually (Silver 2014). With the cost of rising incarceration in the U.S. and climbing recidivism rates, it is more apparent than ever that the American Prison Industrial Complex (“PIC”) is in great need of reform (Wagner 2014). The PIC enforces a recidivism cycle in which more than 50% of prisoners return to prison less than 3 years after release, thus being referred to by the PEW Research Center as “The Revolving Door of America’s Prisons” (2011). Not only is this cycle inflicting...
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...InterContinental University Abstract The justice system’s solution to dealing with offenders is incarceration. Alternatives to this, as a first response, are a better choice. Keeping families together and securing the welfare of children should be a priority. The outcomes of this new course will strengthen society and make a better life for all. Family First: Reforming the Justice System Three-fourths of one million parents are incarcerated. It is no surprise that the results of this are a damaged family structure, dysfunctional youth, and a perpetual cycle of more incarceration within the family. Something must be done to reduce the effects of parental incarceration to save the family and save the youth. To diminish the effects of having loved ones incarcerated, government agencies need to assist families by initiating mediation and rehabilitation programs as alternatives to incarceration, encouraging the justice system and community groups to assist with counseling families, and establishing policies to improve public relations between civil workers and the public. Mandating rehabilitation for offenders, as an alternative to incarceration, not only keeps families intact, it also saves taxpayers money. In a Journal Record Legislative Report (Carter, n.d.), Oklahoma Representative Wallace Collins said “We can pay now or we can pay later.” The cost of incarceration per inmate is more than three times higher than treatment programs per person. These programs also...
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...In the United States of America, crime has become more prevalent, in which often results in imprisonment. According to political scientists Amy Lerman and Vesla Weaver, “The American incarceration rate quadrupled between 1970 and 2010” (Goldstein). This essentially affects African Americans, as according to Leila Morsey, “For every 100,000 black men, more than 2,700 are imprisoned” (Morsy). While incarceration affects African Americans, it also as equally important, if not more with parents. The mass incarceration of parents impacts the influence on the children of those being detained. According to prevention researchers Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Johnson, the number of parents with children in prison had doubled, “Approximately 600,000 children had a parent in state...
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...Community Corrections or Incarceration Are community corrections a better solution than incarceration? Michelle Brooks ITT Technical Institute Community Corrections or Incarceration Abstract In this research paper will read about different subjects and topics that pertain to incarceration and community corrections. The incarceration rate is going up in the United States while at the same time community corrections is slowly fading away because of limited support from the local communities and government officials within each state. In this research I hope to find out those community corrections has more to offer than incarceration. In conclusion incarceration is not the right way but community corrections will be. Community Corrections or Incarceration Table of Contents Abstract Introduction Background on Community Corrections Background on Incarceration Effectives of Community Corrections Effectives of Incarceration Programs dealing with Community Corrections Programs while Incarcerated Theory Interview with Mr. Sharron Wilson Result Reference Page Community Corrections or Incarceration Introduction Community Corrections is a better solution than incarceration because it offers many different alternative programs for several different types of offenders. Incarceration also offers similar programs...
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...term became associated with the release of prisoners based on prisoners giving their... more than 1 million nonviolent individual for drug related crime the biggest concerns is that millions of these incarcerated individual are parents. The majority of these parents are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses invovling illegal drugs there is a likelyhood that they will become estangled from their familes for long term sentencings. There are two factors contributing to the spiraling conviction and imprisonment especially at the federal court level. Prosecutors are holding these cases through plea bargaining and conspiracy laws but the most signficant factor fueling to this growth are the mandatory minimum sentencing. This report points to the implications of criminal sanction policies on families of felony offenders. Most important, it will highlight the social, health, and economic characteristics of families and children visiting an imprisoned family member and how these risk factors are connections with incarceration. Methods: To conduct these study researchers used “a semi-structured interview to administer family members visiting an incarcerated parent at the local jail in mid-Atlantic state”. The populations targeted were parents and caregivers who shared minor children with inmates were targeted for the study between the hours of 8:00 am to 11: am. A descriptive and comparative quantitative analyses was...
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...problems when one, or possibly both, parents are in prison. The issue of incarcerated parents, particularly mothers, is spreading with the increase of incarcerated women. While the parents clearly did something wrong if they are in prison, the children of these individuals should not be punished for their parents wrongdoings. These are a few of the points that I would remind people about in the beginning of a speech. The first point that I would bring up is just how many children are affected by a parent’s imprisonment. According to a 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 42 percent of mothers and 17 percent of fathers in state prison were living in single parent homes in the month before their arrest. It was also reported that 77 percent of mothers and 26 percent of fathers who lived with their children prior to their arrest provided the majority of daily care for their children and more than half of imprisoned parents provided primary financial support. (ncsl) In the United States, 1-in-28 children have a parent in jail or prison, which equates to about 2.7 million minor children (pewresearch). This means that when these parents were arrested, their children’s lives were completely shaken up because...
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...African-American Males, Incarceration and Structural African-American Males, Incarceration and Structural Inequality Incarceration in the United States is one of the main forms of punishment or as many would like to state forms of rehabilitation. With that being the case, the United States, while being considered one of the most powerful and influential countries in the world boasts the highest “rehabilitation” rate in the world. The staggering part remains that not only do we have the highest prison population but our incarceration rate continues to grow as our creativity or desire to solve this problem continues to stagnate. One of the major issues when researching incarceration rates is the obvious elevated rate of young African-American males that are sentenced. While the percentage of African-American incarcerated males is extremely high the length of their sentences are shockingly elevated compared to the majority of population in the United States. “One in every nine African-American males aged 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009, compared to one in twenty-seven Latino males and one in sixty white males in the same age group, according to the Sentencing Project”. ("State of Young America," 2009, para. 11) The question currently being dealt with in the United States is how do we accommodate all of these prisoners? Our countries answer has been quite simple, to build more prisons or as some would sugarcoat it, “rehabilitation facilities”. The correct question...
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...An attachment perspective on incarcerated parents and their children Cassidy, J., Poehlmann, J., & Shaver, P. (2010). An attachment perspective on incarcerated parents and their children. Attachment & Human Development, 12(4), 285-288. Children of incarcerated parents are considered an at-risk population. It is recorded that more than 3 million children are critically affected by having a parent who is incarcerated. The article finds that children are damaged by the interruption this incarceration plays in attachment relationships between the parent and child. The loss the child faces once a parent becomes incarcerated affects the security of the parent-child attachment therefore causing future risk factors. The attachment relationship theory is that mothers/parents who are accessible and receptive to their infant's needs found a sense of security in their children. The child knows that the caregiver is trustworthy, which generates a protected foundation for the child to then explore and discover. This article finds that failure to form secure attachments early in life can have a negative impact on behavior in later childhood and throughout the life. The children are burdened with risk factors in addition to attachment issues. Incarcerated parents seem to be causing several negative situations as the child develops. These risk factors include: * Poverty * Low class living arrangements/neighborhoods * Parental psychopathology/mental health issues * Drug...
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...Parental Absence. There are many reasons as to why a parent can be absent from the home (e.g. incarceration, immigration, divorce, etc.). Regardless of the reason, they all have effects on the rearing of adolescents and can cause negative perceptions of family functioning (Rodriguez et al., 2009). Past research has linked higher rates of delinquency (Huebner & Gustafson, 2007; Uggen, Wakefield & Western, 2005) and incarceration (Harper & Mclanahan, 2004) to parental absence. Barrett et al. (2010) echoed those outcomes amongst the data collected from eight cohorts of 100,000 juvenile records from a South Carolina juvenile justice database where 69% of the adolescents came from families without the presence of a biological father. Harper &...
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...institutions which label people into social categories such as the educational system and the formal labor market. The three articles discussed below explore the different faces of inequality in society. These articles are Incarceration and Stratification (2010), The Mark of Criminal Record (2003) and The Black-White Test Score Gap (2004). The overarching theme that will be pointed out below is inequality face by black people in the United States. These articles show inequalities face by black people in three different landscapes: incarceration cells, employment, and education. This paper included the role of media in the proliferation of racial inequality between white and black people. Lastly, this paper also presented the missing gaps on literature and how should we address the problem of racial inequality. Summary Inequality is present in incarceration cells. Wakefield and Uggen (2010) claimed that incarceration became a powerful “engine of social inequality that plays a massive and racialized part in the contemporary stratification system” (Wakefield and Uggen, 2010, p. 388). The study conducted by Wakefield and Uggen (2010) covers the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into prison. The authors then proceed by giving the implications of incarceration in different aspects of their lives such as education, labor market, health, family and civic life. The method used by the author is through graphs and statistics from different institutions. They looked at the percentage...
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...Introduction The United States of America’s national anthem the “Star Spangled Banner” and the “Pledge of Allegiance” state that the United States is “land of the free” with “liberty and justice for all.” Yet, the United States houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates even though it only houses five percent of the world’s population (Martensen, 2012). Additionally the fundamental concept of the United States Criminal Justice System is that an individual is “innocent” until proven guilty. This makes one question whether, people in the United States are really held to this standard, or are certain people more prone to crime in the land of opportunity and freedom? Our society is built around the societal norms of the dominant white group and racial and ethnic inequalities are intertwined in every aspect of our society causing minority groups to struggle against a society built around white privilege. Prevalence Minorities in comparison to their population in the United States are incriminated at a higher rate than Whites. Spohn (2000) stated that “a majority of the studies reviewed…found that African Americans and Hispanics were more likely than Whites to be sentenced to prison, even after taking crime seriousness and prior criminal records into account” (as cited in Hartney & Vuong, 2009, p.10). In 2010, racially the United States population identified as being comprised of 196.8 million Whites who identified as White alone (69.1%), 38.9 million Blacks or African Americans...
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...about 5% of the world’s population but about 25% of world’s incarcerated people. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over the last few decades, that number has skyrocketed, increasing over 400%. Somewhere along the way, we started to think that being tough on crime meant being tough on criminals. But that’s not the same thing! Incarceration is but only one piece of a much larger crime reduction picture and it’s an expensive one! It costs far beyond just dollars; the cost is to prisoners, to families and children on levels of mental health, finance, behavioral problems, and to whole social groups - in particular the african american community. Yet we struggle to address these costs, these consequences. Is it perhaps because we have this habit of thinking of prisoners as something very external to society???? after all there are literal walls between them and society walls capped with razor wire and watched over by people with guns but we have to stop. So how large of a problem is mass imprisonment really? well clearly a really large one And although many believe that mass incarceration would reduce if we focus more on reform proposals that focus exclusively on drug and other nonviolent crimes the prison population forecaster website shows that even if every person in state or federal prison for a drug offense were released today, mass incarceration would persist. so let’s address it from another angle. Violent Crimes Studies have shown Long prison...
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...Introduction The prison system in America has been a constant issue of mass-incarceration, a lack of rehabilitation, and a rate of reentry that far exceeds that of any other nation, yet this problem’s escalation has done little to bring it to the platform of reformation. The prison system has cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, and a majority of these citizens are completely unaware of the needlessness of the costs with which they are burdened. With 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S., Americans cannot afford to continue to turn a blind eye to the economic issues presented by the current prison system (Council of Economic Advisors 3). Due to prison growth, an increasing incarceration rate, and a lack of rehabilitation and...
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