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Damage to Family Relationships as a Collateral Consequence of Parental Incarceration

INTRODUCTION The most obvious and perhaps most serious collateral consequence of incarceration is family separation. Imprisonment undermines families and has a detrimental impact upon children, caretakers, and the communities in which they live. Unlike other collateral consequences, family separation has an irreversible impact upon both parents and children. The time apart is lost forever, because a childhood can never be recovered. This Essay will review the available statistical information about incarcerated parents and their children and discuss the detrimental effects of parental incarceration upon families. The Essay will conclude with some reflections about why the adverse consequences of incarceration for prisoners' families remain largely unaddressed. I. DATA ON PARENTAL INCARCERATION By now, the statistics on parental incarceration are well known. The statistics were thoroughly documented in 2000 in a report produced by the United States Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics. (1) This report provides a wealth of information. The majority of prisoners are parents of minor children. (2) Among state prisoners, almost half of the fathers and two-thirds of the mothers lived with their children prior to incarceration. (3) Among federal prisoners, the corresponding figures were fifty-five percent of fathers and eighty-four percent of mothers. (4) Approximately eighty percent of the mothers who lived with their children prior to incarceration were single parents. (5) The number of children with at least one incarcerated parent increased in the past decade, from 936,000 in 1991 to 1.5 million in 1999. (6) The number of children with an incarcerated mother almost doubled during that period, increasing from 64,000 to 126,000. (7) The average age of children with an incarcerated parent was eight years old. Almost sixty percent of the children were less than ten years old. (8) The impact of incarceration has fallen disproportionately upon families of color. One out of every fourteen African-American children nationwide, seven percent, had at least one parent in prison in 1999. (9) The corresponding figure for all children was two percent. (10) In New York State, approximately eighty-one percent of the prisoners are African-American or Latino. (11) The extent of parental incarceration is therefore apparent. Equally obvious are the factors that have the greatest impact upon incarcerated parents and their families--time and distance. The increasing severity of sentencing laws ensures that incarcerated parents, and their children, will be separated for a significant portion of the children's lives. The mean length of time to be served for incarcerated fathers is almost seven years in the state systems and nine years in the federal system. (12) For mothers, the averages are four years in state prisons and five and one-half years in federal prisons. (13) Among those mothers, sixty-two percent in state prisons and seventy-four percent in federal prisons will serve two or more years. (14) In New York State, approximately eighty-two percent of women and eighty-nine percent of men will serve at least two years. (15) The extent of physical separation is equally pronounced: sixty-two percent of incarcerated parents in state prison and eighty-two percent in federal prison are incarcerated more than one hundred miles from their homes. (16) The situation is especially acute in the federal system where more than forty percent of incarcerated parents are imprisoned at least 500 miles from their homes. (17) For women, the distance from families is often a function of the limited number of available prisons. (18) For example, within the federal system, there are only six prisons in the entire United States: one each in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Texas, and West Virginia. (19) The distance separating incarcerated parents from their children severely limits their contact with each other. …