Stephanie was eight years old when her heroin-addicted father was sent to prison for armed robbery. When she attempted to give her dad a hug during her first visit to the prison where he was being held, an armed guard immediately chastised her, snatching him away to another room, where she was only able to speak to him by phone through a glass window. In a video released by the Children of Incarcerated Parents Initiative, she says she never questioned why her father was serving time, explaining that, “all I knew is that my father didn’t care about me because he needed drugs.” Today, Stephanie sees her father, who’s been out of prison for several years, occasionally. Still, she admits tearfully, “Even to this day, I don’t know my father.”
Shared Sentence, a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), estimates that over five million children, or 7 percent of all children nationwide, have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point during their childhood. The number of American kids with an imprisoned father has increased substantially over the years—by 500 percent between 1980 and 2000. While the overwhelming majority (92 percent) of parents behind bars are fathers, more mothers are serving time, too. The number of children with mothers in prison more than doubled between 1991 and 2007.
Not all families are equally likely to experience parental incarceration. The report shows that the percentage of children with an incarcerated parent varies widely by state, ranging from only 3 percent in New Jersey to as high as 13 percent in Kentucky. And children from minority communities are more likely to lose a parent to incarceration. African American children are over seven times as likely and Latino children are two times as likely to have a parent behind bars as their white peers. Kids with incarcerated parents also tend to be younger than age 10, and most live with their single moms in communities with high poverty rates. They face an elevated risk of experiencing homelessness as well, with family income dropping by an average of 22 percent when dad goes to jail.
[For more of this story, written by Alysse ElHage, got o http://family-studies.org/the-...ncarcerated-parents/]
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