Reading The Scholar and Feminist Online issue “Women, Prisons and Change,” (S&F Online Issue 5.3, Summer 2007), left us moved and thrilled: moved because the images and text on women were thought-provoking and smart; thrilled because an interdisciplinary feminist journal was addressing the issue of incarceration and analyzing the race, class and gender bias embedded within the “prison industrial complex.” We knew the time was right to further address the ways in which incarceration unravels entire communities, the way it dismantles and fragments families, and, specifically, the ways in which it devastates the lives of children.
Despite the over two million children whose parents are incarcerated on any given day, the majority of people who are not directly affected by this issue remain unaware of this significant challenge to children’s well-being. The invisibility itself is damaging, but visibility that comes without safety and understanding can be even worse. In this issue, children and young people share stories of losing friends and being accused of any wrongdoing in their communities once they reveal their parent’s circumstances; they share about the support and encouragement received from some nonjudgmental adults and, conversely, about the alienation caused by nosey, assuming ones.
As many of the contributions reveal, our prison system is designed in a way that ignores the presence of children in the lives of prisoners. When a parent is sent to jail, a child is often left isolated and vulnerable even though the punishment was intended solely for the adult. While society relies on the institution of the family to provide the care and nurturing that children require, we incarcerate parents with little regard to the impact of this decision on their children. As our contributors show, the lack of thoughtful policies regarding children of incarcerated parents compounds the trauma and stigma that children face when a parent is incarcerated.
From the vantage point of recidivism rates our prison system seems to be set up as a revolving door. However, the children of incarcerated parents are not all doomed to fail. This volume does not shy away from the true nature of this complicated issue: some children are flourishing, hidden on college campuses, among fellowship recipients, traveling around the world, making a positive difference in diverse ways; others are locked up in juvenile facilities or in foster care; most are somewhere in between. Our policy and practice approaches must address children’s diverse needs in a way that is strengths-based and full of hope; they do a disservice if they focus only on children’s potential to march into the prison cells they inherit from their parents.
In addition, this issue serves as a reminder that the children of incarcerated parents must also not be viewed as isolated entities, orphans without parents or strong connections. They are part of families, and communities, large and small. As practitioners, policy makers, and community members, we must take a holistic approach to promote the well-being of children by working to improve all of the component parts of a child’s world, including their incarcerated parents, no matter how ‘deserving’ we may deem them to be. If children’s well-being is understood to be tied to their relationships with their parents, we must not only promote contact, but rather remake our systems in a way that promotes these attachments, instead of letting them fall by the wayside as the flotsam and jetsam of ‘criminal justice.’
As many before us have pointed out, the true measure of democracy and society is the level of support provided to the most vulnerable among us. It is our hope that this journal issue will contribute to the transformation of our ‘criminal justice system’ and the way we respond to those within it so that children can grow and thrive, including being supported in maintaining and strengthening their relationships with their parents during and after the period of incarceration. We are particularly pleased that this issue is a mix of academic analysis, best practices, and reflection. We hope “Children of Incarcerated Parents” helps readers to learn about children’s needs without exploiting their predicaments. We view this edition as a way to start a conversation, and let others continue to strategize and implement ways to help the more than two million children whose parents are currently incarcerated in the United States. We hope it helps to raise awareness about the complexities of this issue and contributes towards a better understanding of the experiences of children and parents, as well as what can help them, and thus create a healthier society. Finally, we thank Gisela Fosado and Janet Jakobsen, the Editors of The Scholar & Feminist Online, for agreeing with us, and for giving us this forum in which to bring this issue to light.
