When Parents Are Incarcerated Interdisciplinary Research and Interventions to Support Children

In this volume, prominent scholars from multiple disciplines examine how parental incarceration affects children and what can be done to help them. 

In the United States today, roughly 1 in 25 children has a parent behind bars. This insightful volume provides an authoritative, multidisciplinary analysis of how parental incarceration affects children and what can be done to help them. Contributors to this book bring a wide array of tools for studying the children of incarcerated adults. Sociologists and demographers apply sophisticated techniques for conducting descriptive and causal analyses, with a strong focus on social inequality. Developmental psychologists and family scientists explore how proximal processes, such as parent‑child relationships and micro‑level family interactions, may mediate or moderate the consequences of parental incarceration. Criminologists offer important insights into the consequences of parental criminality and incarceration. And practitioners who design and evaluate interventions review a variety of programs targeting parents, children, the criminal justice system, and the plight of poor children more broadly.

Given the vast implications of mass incarceration for individual children and their families, as well as the future of inequality in the United States, this book will serve as a definitive resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

Christopher Wildeman, PhD, is an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, a visiting fellow at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and a senior researcher at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen, Denmark. His interests revolve around the consequences of mass imprisonment for inequalities in family life. He is also interested in child welfare, especially as it relates to child maltreatment and the foster care system. He is the 2008 recipient of the Dorothy S. Thomas Award from the Population Association of America and the 2013 recipient of the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.

Anna R. Haskins, PhD, is an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and an affiliate of the Cornell Prison Education Program, the Center for the Study of Inequality, and the Cornell Population Center. Her interests are in the areas of educational inequality, social stratification, race and ethnicity, and the intergenerational social consequences of mass incarceration. Her current research assessing the effects of paternal incarceration on children’s educational outcomes and engagement in schooling has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Sociological Science, and Social Science Research.

Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, PhD, is the Dorothy A. O’Brien Professor of Human Ecology and a professor in the human development and family studies department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the director of the Center for Child and Family Well-Being, an investigator at the Waisman Center, and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty. Through numerous publications and outreach efforts during the past 15 years, she has brought the attention of child development and family studies communities to the issue of incarcerated parents and their children. Her research with children of incarcerated parents has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, and the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Poehlmann-Tynan has served as an advisor to Sesame Street to help develop and evaluate their Emmy-nominated initiative for young children with incarcerated parents and their families called Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration. She has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the editor of two monographs and a handbook focusing on children with incarcerated parents.