Overview

An unrelenting prison boom, marked by stark racial disparities, pulled a disproportionate number of young black men into prison in the last forty years. In Children of the Prison Boom, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman draw upon broadly representative survey data and interviews to describe the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration on a generation of vulnerable children tied to these men. In so doing, they show that the effects of mass imprisonment may be even greater on the children left behind than on the men who were locked up.Parental imprisonment has been transformed from an event affecting only the unluckiest of children-those with parents seriously involved in crime-to one that is remarkably common, especially for black children. This book documents how, even for children at high risk of problems, paternal incarceration makes a bad situation worse, increasing mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness. Pushing against prevailing understandings of and research on the consequences of mass incarceration for inequality among adult men, these harms to children translate into large-scale increases in racial inequalities. Parental imprisonment has become a distinctively American way of perpetuating intergenerational inequality-one that should be placed alongside a decaying public education system and concentrated disadvantage in urban centers as a factor that disproportionately touches, and disadvantages, poor black children. More troubling, even if incarceration rates were reduced dramatically in the near future, the long-term harms of our national experiment in the mass incarceration of marginalized men are yet to be fully revealed. Optimism about current reductions in the imprisonment rate and the resilience of children must therefore be set against the backdrop of the children of the prison boom-a lost generation now coming of age.

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9780190624590

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Reviews

A burgeoning research program studies the effects of the American prison boom by examining the social and economic life of men and women after incarceration. In their important book, Wakefield and Wildeman go a step further, studying how children are affected when a parent is sent to prison. Through careful analyses, the authors document the profound effects of mass incarceration on the lived experience of child poverty in America. Bruce Western, Harvard University Wakefield and Wildeman examine the deleterious consequences of high rates of incarceration for one of the most powerless and vulnerable groups in society - children. They make a strong case that parental incarceration has not only short-term negative effects, but also long-term consequences in solidifying and extending social inequalities among children. This book is a must read for scholars and policymakers interested in how high rates incarceration in the U. S. have affected children, especially those who are black and poor. John H. Laub, University of Maryland, College Park Wakefield and Wildeman provide a masterful and chilling account of how three decades of mass incarceration have lowered the life chances of America's most vulnerable children. In so doing, they show that the criminal justice system now plays a vital role along with schools, neighborhoods, and families - in the maintenance of childhood inequality. Much has been written about the consequences of mass incarceration for low skilled men, the labor market, and racial inequality among adults in the U.S. The collateral consequences for children have, until now, been less well-documented. Drawing on rigorous empirical analysis, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman make great strides in filling this gap by documenting changes in the proportion of children with an incarcerated parent, the cumulative risks of experiencing a parental incarceration, as well as how these factors vary by race and social class. They paint a rich portrait of the contemporary and long-term consequences, good and bad, of parental incarceration and uncover a fundamental source of inequality in the United States. Steven Raphael, University of California, Berkeley This is the book's key, powerful contribution: there is ample evidence that parental imprisonment compromises children's life chances, but the sheer scale and unequal impact ...[A]n original contribution to criminology... CHOICE This is an important book. It does a remarkable service for academics, policy makers, and practitioners by powerfully identifying in three data sets the casual effects of the incarceration of fathers and children. American Journal of Sociology

Author Information

Sara Wakefield is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. Christopher Wildeman is Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University

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