Citation

Giordano PC, Copp JE. Criminol. Public Policy 2015; 14(1): 157-168.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, American Society of Criminology, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/1745-9133.12118

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

As scholars and practitioners alike have drawn attention to negative effects of incarceration, researchers have increasingly considered that one of the most important collateral consequences may be the impact on the wellbeing of children. Most research on the effects of parental incarceration has focused on the father's incarceration, which is a reasonable emphasis given the much higher rates of male incarceration. Yet every jurisdiction includes a number of women incarcerated in local and state facilities, and as Turney and Wildeman (2015, this issue) note, this number has been increasing (Guerino, Harrison, and Sabol, 2011). They further underscore that similar to male incarceration, this phenomenon has become a bigger issue in the lives of poor and minority children who already face significant challenges (Wildeman, 2009). A compelling reason to focus research attention on maternal incarceration in particular is that although research clearly has established that father involvement is an important basis of variation across a range of child wellbeing outcomes (e.g., Carlson, 2006; Dyer, Day, and Harper, 2013), mothers remain "close in" if not the primary caregivers for a majority of U.S. children. Thus, it is important to determine not only whether there are aggregate effects of maternal incarceration on children, as Wildeman and Turney (2014) have explored in other recent analyses, but also how the effects can vary, as in Turney and Wildeman's current (2015) study.

Language: en