Introduction
The number of children with parents or a parent locked in prison has gradually increased over the past few decades. Currently, over five million minors across the U.S. have had a parent or parents incarcerated at some juncture in their lives. The high rates of parental incarceration have a significant impact on families and communities across the country. This essay defines parental incarceration, how it impacts the United States and how it impacts families and relationships for youth and children and young adults in society.
What is Parental Incarceration?
Parental incarceration refers to any form of custodial confinement of a guardian or parent by the criminal justice system (Wildeman et al., 2018). It however does not entail being held overnight in police cells. In such a case, incarceration would refer to confinement in prisons or jails (Turney & Goodsell, 2018). The arrest or removal of a parent or parents from a minor’s life forces them to confront significant social, emotional as well as economic impacts that could trigger specific behavioral issues, adverse school outcomes in schools as well as a severance or disruptions of the relationship that exists with the incarcerated parent (Wakefield & Wildeman, 2018). The disruption may persist even after the parent has been freed from prison (Haskins et al., 2018).
How does it Impact the United States?
In the United States, there are widespread instances of incarceration. About in one in fourteen children and young people under eighteen years old have undergone incarceration of one or both of their residential parents at a juncture in their lives (Arditti, 2016). However, such a risk of parental incarceration is not equally distributed. It is experienced in situations where there are already accumulated disadvantages such as higher poverty rates and disenfranchisement (Luk et al., 2022). Youth and children of color are more likely to experience an incarcerated parent than other youth or children (Testa & Jackson, 2021). Factors such as institutional racism have not only resulted in more parents of color being placed in prison but could have also established significant barriers to recognizing the strengths and assets of such families (Besemer et al., 2019).
The U.S. has over two million people held behind bars which make it to have some of the highest rates of incarceration. The rate is about 700 per 100,000 residents (Le et al., 2019). The relatively high rate is primarily attributed to policies that are tough on crime which include the ineffective war on drugs (Trotter et al., 2017). A significant portion of inmates across the United States have minor children with 45% of them having been living with their children before they were jailed (Jackson et al., 2021). The high incarceration rates mean that a significant percentage of children, primarily from minority and poor communities, have experienced parental incarceration (Turney, 2017). They are therefore disproportionately affected by the negative effects of parental incarceration.
Parental incarceration negatively affects communities and societies. It leads to a higher strain on the public social system since more children are forced to join the foster care system (Mears & Siennick, 2016). It leads to more resources being spent on foster care programs that could have been spent elsewhere (Copp et al., 2018). It also affects the society and the country at large by leading to less resources being spent on other areas (Kjellstrand et al., 2020). It leads to higher childhood poverty rates since children with incarcerated parents are mostly younger and residing within low-income minority families. The families are usually with parents that had limited education as well (Bradshaw et al., 2020). It contributes to higher than average childhood poverty and delinquency rates across the country.
How does it impact families and relationships for youth and children and young adults?
Having an incarcerated parent has significant impacts on young adults and children. It has profound implications for both adolescent and child development (Austin et al., 2022). The effect of parental incarceration on children is often described as an overlooked an unintended consequence of mass incarceration (Gaston, 2016). Children that have incarcerated parents deal with a higher risk of ADHD/ADD than children and youth that experienced either parental death or divorce (Gifford et al., 2019). The stress of parents going to prison may contribute to more cases of ADHD amongst children with incarcerated parents (Arditti & Johnson, 2022). Although each case is unique and every child may respond differently, studies have established that the incarceration of a parent poses numerous threats to a minor’s educational, emotional as well as economic well-being.
There are heightened concerns that parental incarceration contributes to a cycle of intergenerational criminal involvement. Children with parents that have been incarcerated are, on average, six times more likely to end up being incarcerated themselves (Kjellstrand, 2017). However, the risk factors are not always presented across all children. The behaviors are challenging to predict and understand (Testa & Jackson, 2021). Some studies have shown that minors of incarcerated paternal parents have relatively higher levels of incarceration (Turney & Lanuza, 2017). They also have earlier or more frequent arrests than the minors of incarcerated paternal parents. Although more studies are required, the difference in incarceration rates shows that the mother forms the child’s primary support system (Herreros-Fraile et al., 2023).
Minority children who have both the father and the mother incarcerated exhibit relatively higher levels of depression (Jackson et al., 2022). A significant proportion of children also exhibit heightened forms of aggression with boys who tended to be more aggressive before their parent’s incarceration being at a higher risk for a trajectory of heightened aggressive behavior (Young et al., 2020). However, in cases where the incarcerated parent was violent or abusive, there have been instances where parental incarceration has contributed to a reduction in rates of aggression (Heard-Garris et al., 2018). It is especially true of the incarcerated parent lived in the home before the incarceration and had alcohol or drug issues (Giordano et al., 2019).
One of the most common effects of parental incarceration seems to fall under the domain of anti-social behavior (Finkeldey et al., 2020). Antisocial behavior refers to refers to any kind of behaviors that are against social norms. These may include persistent dishonesty and criminal acts (Kautz, 2017). Exposure to numerous adverse childhood experiences like parental incarceration may expose children to the risk of severe depression and multiple other issues that would persist into childhood (Smith & Young, 2017). These issues may include suicide attempts, STDs as well as substance abuse. Anti-social behavior that results from parental incarceration could end up limiting a minor’s resilience in the face of other adverse experiences (Andersen, 2018). It could thereafter compound the impact of exposure to other issues.
Parental incarceration negatively affects educational attainment. It is strongly linked with externalizing behavioral issues (Siennick, 2016). However, some studies showed that some of the children observed are capable of developing resilience as well as deal with instances of externalizing behavioral problems before experiencing adverse educational outcomes (Arteaga, 2018). Most of the studies have however shown that children that have incarcerated guardians are relatively more likely to be truant and get expelled or suspended from school. Most of the children that have incarcerated parents have to deal with restricted or fewer economic resources. Studies have found that the family unit’s income was twenty-two percent lower during the incarceration period and fifteen percent lower after the incarcerated parent’s re-entry (Nichols et al., 2016). The incarceration of mothers is often linked with higher economic detriment, particularly when the father does not reside within the family. Such economic losses could be exacerbated if the child lives with caregivers that are already responsible for other groups of dependents. Children that have incarcerated parents are systematically faced with a variety of disadvantages that include monetary hardship (Sykes & Pettit, 2019). They were also less likely to have stable housing or reside within a two-parent home.
In case the parent is a relatively strong support within the child’s life, interruptions within the child-parent relationship would contribute to or enhance most of the risk factors or issues that have already been discussed (Zhang & Flynn, 2020). There are cases where the minor could benefit from the removal of a parent that was a source of upheaval and instability in the child’s life (Young & Jefferson Smith, 2019). Attempts to facilitate renewed contact between the child and the incarcerated child should take into consideration the quality of the relationship that the child enjoyed before the incarceration happened (Hiolski et al., 2019). Any structured visits while the incarcerated parent is still in jail or prison do not seem to do much to develop a relationship if there was none before the incarceration happened (Muftić & Smith, 2018).
Stigma, trauma, as well as strain are commonly suggested as some of the mechanisms through which parental incarceration would harm young children’s wellbeing (Boch & Ford, 2018). However, an alternative explanation of this is that children with incarcerated parents have been subjected to significant disadvantaged even before their parents were incarcerated (Shlafer et al., 2019). In most case, before incarceration, the children have already been exposed to significant hardships at higher than average rates than their peers (Wakefield & Apel, 2018). It means that the link between parental incarceration and the wellbeing of children could also stem from such experiences (Thomson et al., 2020).
Paternal incarceration impacts the wellbeing of children differently from how maternal incarceration affects them (Stergas, 2020). Maternal incarceration is more consequential because her incarceration could bring more family instability than a father’s (Niño & Cai, 2020). Parental incarceration could cause significant disruptions in the child’s attachment relationships due to the forced separation that is enforced (Turney, 2017). The most critical predictor of how well a child would adjust to the sudden separation is the quality of the subsequent parent-child relationship (Lanuza & Turney, 2020). A good quality parent-child relationship is supposed to serve as a buffering or protective factor in helping minors to cope with the temporary parental loss. However, most parents that end up in prison are significantly limited in their parenting abilities. It therefore means that the expected protective barrier becomes unavailable to children (Muentner et al., 2022).
Conclusion
The high rates of parental incarceration have a significant impact on families and communities across the country. The arrest or removal of a parent or parents from a child’s life forces the child to confront significant social, emotional as well as economic consequences that could trigger behavioral issues, poor school outcomes in schools as well as a severance or disruption of the relationship with the incarcerated parent. The high incarceration rates mean that a significant percentage of children, primarily from minority and poor communities, have experienced parental incarceration. The stress of parents going to prison may contribute to more cases of ADHD amongst children with incarcerated parents. A significant proportion of children also exhibit heightened forms of aggression with boys who tended to be more aggressive before their parent’s incarceration being at a higher risk for a trajectory of heightened aggressive behavior.
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