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69 Fed. Probation 31 (2005)
Families and Children of Offenders Who Return Home

handle is hein.journals/fedpro69 and id is 33 raw text is: June 2005 31 Jeremy Travis President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice AS THE NATION debates the wisdom of a fourfold increase in our incarceration rate over the past generation, one fact is dear. Prisons separate prisoners from their families. Every individual sent to prison leaves behind a net- work of family relationships. Prisoners are the children, parents, siblings, and kin to untold numbers of relatives who are each affected dif- ferently by a family member's arrest, incarcera- tion, and ultimate homecoming. Little is known about imprisonment's impact on these family networks. Descrip- tive data about the children of incarcerated parents only begin to tell the story. During the 1990s, as the nation's prison population increased by half, the number of children who had a parent in prison also increased by half-from 1 million to 1.5 million. By the end of 2002, 1 in 45 minor children had a parent in prison (Mumola 2004).' These chil- dren represent 2 percent of all minor children in America, and a sobering 7 percent of all African-American children (Mumola 2000). With little if any public debate, we have extended prison's reach to include hundreds of thousands of young people who were not the prime target of the criminal justice poli- cies that put their parents behind bars. In the simplest human terms, prison places an indescribable burden on the relationships between these parents and their children. Incarcerated fathers and mothers must learn to cope with the loss of normal contact with their children, infrequent visits in inhospitable surroundings, and lost opportunities to con- tribute to their children's development. Their children must come to terms with the reality of an absent parent, the stigma of parental imprisonment, and an altered support system that may include grandparents, foster care, or a new adult in the home. In addition, in those communities where incarceration rates are high, the experience of having a mother or father in prison is now quite common- place, with untold consequences for foster care systems, multigenerational households, social services delivery, community norms, child- hood development, and parenting patterns. Imprisonment profoundly affects families in another, less tangible way. When young men and women are sent to prison, they are removed from the traditional rhythms of dat- ing, courtship, marriage, and family forma- tion. Because far more men than women are sent to prison each year, our criminal justice policies have created a gender imbalance (Braman 2002), a disparity in the number of available single men and women in many communities. In neighborhoods where incar- ceration and reentry have hit hardest, the gen- der imbalance is particularly striking. Young women complain about the shortage of men who are suitable marriage prospects because so many of the young men cycle in and out of the criminal justice system. The results are an increase in female-headed households and narrowed roles for fathers in the lives of their children and men in the lives of women and families in general. As more young men grow up with fewer stable attachments to girl- friends, spouses, and intimate partners, the masculine identity is redefined. The family is often depicted as the bedrock of American society. Over the years, we have witnessed wave after wave of social policy initiatives designed to strengthen, reunite, or simply create families. Liberals and conservatives have accused each other of espousing poli- cies that undermine family values. In recent years, policyrnakers, foundation officers, and opinion leaders have also decried the absence of fathers from the lives of their children. These concerns have translated into a variety of programs, governmental initiatives, and foundation strategies that constitute a father- hood movement. Given the iconic stature of the family in our vision of American life and the widespread consensus that the absence of father figures harms future generations, our national experiment with mass incarceration seems, at the very least, incongruent with the rhetoric behind prevailing social policies. At worst, the imprisonment of millions of individuals and the disruption of their family relationships has significantly undermined the role that families could play in promoting our social well-being. The institution of fam- ily plays a particularly important role in the crime policy arena. Families are an integral part of the mechanisms of informal social control that constrain antisocial behavior. The quality of family life (e.g., the presence of supportive parent-child relationships) is significant in predicting criminal delin- quency (Loeber and Farrington 1998, 2001). Thus, if families suffer adverse effects from our incarceration policies, we would expect these harmful effects to be felt in the next generation, as children grow up at greater risk of engaging in delinquent and crimi- nal behavior. The institution of marriage is * This article is Chapter Six of But They All Come Back Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry, by Jeremy Travis (Washington DC: The Urban Institute Press, 2005). Reprinted with permission.

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