Overview

"Over seven percent of all children in the United States--more than 5 million children--have experienced a parental incarceration, and an estimated 2.7 million children currently have a parent who is incarcerated. An additional 5 million children under age 18 live with at least one parent who is unauthorized to be in the United States and faces deportation. Children and other dependents suffer the collateral consequences of ""preventive justice"" measures increasingly used by liberal democratic countries to combat a broad range of suspected crime and anti-state activities. But what does the state owe to the innocent dependents of accused caregivers?In Born Innocent, Michael J. Sullivan explores the impact of vicarious punishment on children, with a particular focus on children in socioeconomically disadvantaged and racialized communities that are disproportionately subject to family separation based on their identity, allegiances, and immigration status. Sullivan advocates a turn from retribution to rehabilitation for convicted offenders, with a view towards helping them to become more effective caregivers who can continue to support their dependents during their sentence. Born Innocent goes beyond the children's rights literature on the collateral consequences of punishment to consider how ""punishment drift"" creates problems for both retributive and utilitarian theories of punishment. He draws on care ethics theory to widen our understanding of the range of collateral victims of punishment as well as possible rehabilitative and restorative measures. Sullivan also considers the limits of this approach, especially where it pertains to offenders who victimize their families, and those who resist rehabilitation and persist in anti-state actions that harm others. Original and compelling, Born Innocent provides one of the first unified treatments of state-sponsored family separation and its impact on disadvantaged citizens and immigrants."

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9780197671238

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Reviews

Born Innocent offers readers a comprehensive treatment of family separation, vicarious punishment, and other diverse practices that exploit and abuse the children of parents states seek to punish. Sullivan carefully draws together evidence from philosophies of punishment, policies of the carceral and social welfare state, indigenous erasure, and immigration enforcement. What emerges is a deeply persuasive normative case against allowing states to use children as a tool in their massive and expanding punitive arsenal. * Elizabeth F. Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University * Born Innocent takes a deeply held belief, that wrongdoers—and only wrongdoers—should be punished for their misdeeds, and skillfully demonstrates that states persistently violate this principle by imposing punishments that harm the innocent dependents of wrongdoers. Sullivan's masterful blend of political theory and policy analysis across multiple policy spaces, including immigration, terrorism, and criminal justice, convincingly demonstrates the urgency with which states must rethink their ways of punishing to better protect innocent dependents from the long-term harm of family separation that too often travels with contemporary forms of punishment. * Patti Tamara Lenard, Associate Professor of Ethics, University of Ottawa *

Born Innocent offers readers a comprehensive treatment of family separation, vicarious punishment, and other diverse practices that exploit and abuse the children of parents states seek to punish. Sullivan carefully draws together evidence from philosophies of punishment, policies of the carceral and social welfare state, indigenous erasure, and immigration enforcement. What emerges is a deeply persuasive normative case against allowing states to use children as a tool in their massive and expanding punitive arsenal. * Elizabeth F. Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University * Born Innocent takes a deeply held belief, that wrongdoers-and only wrongdoers-should be punished for their misdeeds, and skillfully demonstrates that states persistently violate this principle by imposing punishments that harm the innocent dependents of wrongdoers. Sullivan's masterful blend of political theory and policy analysis across multiple policy spaces, including immigration, terrorism, and criminal justice, convincingly demonstrates the urgency with which states must rethink their ways of punishing to better protect innocent dependents from the long-term harm of family separation that too often travels with contemporary forms of punishment. * Patti Tamara Lenard, Associate Professor of Ethics, University of Ottawa *

Author Information

Michael J. Sullivan is Associate Professor of International Studies and Global Affairs at St. Mary's University. His research interests include citizenship, immigration, children's rights, civil-military relations, criminal justice, and race, ethnicity, and politics. He is the author of Earned Citizenship and numerous published articles in journals including International Migration; Politics, Groups, and Identities; Journal of Borderlands Studies; and Social Politics, among others.

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