Publications providing information on children of incarcerated parents:
Child Welfare Practice With Families Affected by Parental Incarceration
Bulletins for Professionals
Child Welfare Information Gateway
January 2021
This bulletin provides an overview of the scope of the issue and highlights practices to involve parents in case planning and facilitate parent-child contact during incarceration. Resources designed to help caseworkers assist impacted families are presented throughout.
Particular Challenges Faced by Children of Incarcerated Parents
A Special Report
Universidad Católica Argentina and Church World Service (CWS)
EDSA Serie Agenda para la Equidad ISSN 1853-6204
March 2021
This special report aims to update information on a particularly vulnerable and invisible population of children and youth: children and adolescents with incarcerated parents or guardians. From now on, this group will be referred to as CIP for “children with incarcerated parents.” The Church World Service Office for Latin America and the Caribbean joins the Argentina Social Debt Observatory’s Program of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA) in carrying out this initiative.
Unlike the document published in 2019 (“Infancias y Encarcelamiento. Condiciones de vida de niñas, niños y adolescentes cuyos padres o familiares están privados de la libertad en la Argentina” ISBN 978-987-620- 381-4), this document focuses on several different groups of children. We examine the experiences of children living in households with one or more members currently incarcerated; children who have never experienced familial incarceration but live in poor households; and children who have never experienced familial incarceration and whose families are not poor. This comparative analysis allows us to identify and examine the social inequalities that children face as their vulnerabilities accumulate.
School-Aged Children of Incarcerated Parents: Information and Behavioral Interventions for Minimizing Negative Effects of a Parent’s Absence
Rena L. Harp
Eastern Kentucky University
Psychology Doctoral Specialization Projects
2021
The growing population of incarcerated individuals in the United States has resulted in 2.6 million minor aged children with at least one parent living in a correctional facility. Incarcerated parents are the beginning of a ripple effect whose unique challenges directly and indirectly impact the overall well-being of their children as well as their children’s home caregivers. With this image in mind, the benefits of empirically supported data and behavioral interventions can do the same producing a positive ripple effect starting from the inside out. To evoke this positive ripple effect, resources were compared to the literature and those most in accordance were presented on infographics. These infographics were created to provide evidence-based information and interventions for children of incarcerated parents and their families. This modality for sharing information was chosen to quickly and easily convey a large amount of data which is otherwise difficult to access, convoluted in nature, and whose validity is uncertain.
A Developmental Perspective on Children With Incarcerated Parents
Julie Poehlmann-Tynan (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and
Kristin Turney (University of California at Irvine)
Child Development Perspectives - Volume 15, Number 1, 2021, Pages 3–11
Child Development Perspectives published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Research in Child Development. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
November 17, 2020
Parental incarceration is a socially relevant topic with substantial implications for children, yet it is understudied by child development scholars. About 2.6 million U.S. children currently have a parent who is incarcerated, and by age 14, one in 14 U.S. children experiences a resident parent leaving for jail or prison. In this developmentally oriented review, we summarize research on associations between parental incarceration and child well-being, and suggest areas where developmental scientists can contribute. While most analyses of large population-based U.S., datasets have found that experiencing paternal incarceration typically has detrimental implications for child well-being, especially as children grow older, analyses of maternal incarceration have yielded less consistent findings. Longitudinal population-based developmental studies focusing on parental incarceration, especially early in life through adulthood, are urgently needed to answer basic questions, clarify mixed findings, inform policies, and develop interventions for vulnerable children.
We Are Not Collateral Consequences: Children of Incarcerated Parents
Next 100
Isabel Coronado
February 20, 2020
Criminal Justice Commentary. Children of incarcerated parents are some of the most resilient children, profoundly impacted by a justice system that hardly acknowledges us. It is time to share our voices and our experiences of the consequences of our unjust system, so that we can lead the way to meaningful reform.
Reasonable Efforts to Preserve or Reunify Families and Achieve Permanency for Children
State Statutes Current Through September 2019
Child Welfare Information Gateway
Children’s Bureau, an Office of the Administration for Children and Families
September 2019
"Reasonable efforts" refers to activities of State social services agencies that aim to provide the assistance and services needed to preserve and reunify families. The Federal title IV-E program requires States to make reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families (i) prior to the placement of a child in foster care, to prevent or eliminate the need for removing the child from the child’s home; and (ii) to make it possible for a child to safely return to the child's home.
Laws in all States, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands require that child welfare agencies make reasonable efforts to provide services that will help families remedy the conditions that brought the child and family into the child welfare system.
How Incarcerated Parents Are Losing Their Children Forever
By Eli Hager and Anna Flagg
The Marshall Project in Partnership with The Washington Post
December 2, 2018
Attachment in Young Children with Incarcerated Fathers
Development and Psychopathology 29 (2017), p 389–404
Copyright Cambridge University Press 2017
Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, Cynthia Burnson, Hilary Runion, and Lynsay A. Weymouth
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The present study examined young children’s attachment behaviors during paternal incarceration and reported on initial validity of a new measure used to rate children’s attachment-related behaviors and emotions during visits in a corrections setting. Seventy-seven children, age 2 to 6 years, and their jailed fathers and current caregivers participated in the home visit portion of the study, whereas 28 of these children participated in the jail visit. The results indicated that 27% of children witnessed the father’s crime and 22% of children witnessed the father’s arrest, with most children who witnessed these events exhibiting extreme distress; children who witnessed these events were more likely to have insecure attachments to their caregivers. Consistent with attachment theory and research, caregivers who exhibited more sensitivity and responsivity during interactions with children and those who provided more stimulating, responsive, learning-oriented home environments had children who were more likely to have secure attachments (measured with the Attachment Q-Sort). We also found preliminary evidence for the validity of our new measure, the Jail Prison Observation Checklist, in that children’s attachment-related behaviors and emotions during the jail visit correlated with their attachment security observed in the home. Our observations indicate that, in certain contexts, non-contact visits with incarcerated parents can be stressful for children and that children’s caregivers may play a significant role during these visits.
Parents Behind Bars: What Happens to Their Children?
Child Trends (childtrends.org)
David Murphey and P. Mae Cooper
October 2015
This report uses the National Survey of Children’s Health to examine both the prevalence of parental incarceration and child outcomes associated with it.
Children and Families of the Incarcerated Fact Sheet
National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated
Rutgers University - Camden
2014
Facts include children of incarcerated parents demographics, arrest, caregivers, impacts, parents in prison and child-welfare.
Children in Foster Care with Parents in Federal Prison
A Toolkit for Child Welfare Agencies, Federal Prisons, and Residential Reentry Centers
A Product of the Federal Interagency Working Group for Children of Incarcerated Parents
January 2013
Though there is clearly overlap between the prison system and the child welfare system, it is often difficult for prison officials to know how to help incarcerated parents stay in touch with their children in foster care and work towards reunification. Similarly, it is difficult for child welfare agencies to know how to engage parents in prison. The purpose of this toolkit is to help facilitate communication and cooperation between child welfare agencies and federal prisons so that parents can stay engaged in their children’s lives.
The Federal Interagency Working Group for Children of Incarcerated Parents includes representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Domestic Policy Council.
Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report
Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children
Lauren E. Glaze and Laura M. Maruschak
BJS Statistician
August 2009, Revised 3/30/2010
The findings in this report are based on the latest data collected through personal interviews with prisoners participating in the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SISFCF), which is comprised of two separate surveys. One survey is conducted in state adult correctional facilities and the other is conducted in federal correctional facilities.
SCR-20 Children of Incarcerated Parents Bill of Rights
Bill Text
Filed with Secretary of State September 01, 2009
Children of Incarcerated Parents: An Action Plan for Federal Policymakers
Jessica Nickel, Crystal Garland, and Leah Kane
Justice Center, Council of State Governments
October 2009
The growth in the number of men and women incarcerated in the United States over the past twenty years has affected an extraordinary number of children and families. The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center has developed an action plan to raise awareness about the needs of children of incarcerated parents, and inform policies and practices to better address them. The action plan reviews both federal and state barriers to identifying and serving children of incarcerated parents, and offers policy recommendations for the U.S. Congress and the Administration to encourage policy changes that help improve the outcomes for children.
Children and Families with Incarcerated Parents: Exploring Development in the Field and Opportunities for Growth
A Report Prepared for the Annie E. Casey Foundation
Stacey M. Bouchet, Ph.D.
January 2008
This report provides a summary of the Foundation’s findings, which result, primarily, from bringing together a group of leading researchers, practitioners, advocates, policymakers and funders to discuss the issues and opportunities. The report also offers a summary of the Foundation’s recent investments in this area and synthesizes what we have learned into potential opportunities for the field at large.