ABSTRACT
How should we judge an American practice that produces a new generation of devastated and shattered children every year? What judgment is reserved for this national practice that turns on children as they enter an adulthood that will be haunted, and too often is a repetition of the very lives governing authorities impotently and hypocritically cajole against? This is the current United States policy of incarcerating mothers for nonviolent crimes and ignoring the traumatic impact on their children. We could label the practice a moral crime. Most prisons do not even request information about a woman’s children when she is sent through classification. The children are mostly invisible to the penal system. They gain social significance only if they are arrested in later life.
