ABSTRACT
Recent estimates from the US Department of Justice indicate that 2.3 per cent of all children below 18 years in the United States have an incarcerated parent. Of the 114,852 women in prison, 61.7 per cent are parents of minor children (Glaze and Maruschak 2009). The number of incarcerated mothers more than doubled between l991 and 2007, far faster than the increase for incarcerated fathers. There is relatively little public awareness of the extent and seriousness of this problem, as societal attention has been limited. Although the effects for children may be profoundly negative, without public acknowledgement of the situation, it is unlikely they will receive needed intervention. It is estimated that 10 million children in the US have had a parent or sibling who has been incarcerated (The Sentencing Project 2007). There is no requirement that frontline organisations serving vulnerable children – public schools, child welfare, and health care – inquire about or account for parental incarceration and its effects on children. The Child Welfare League of America (2004) surveyed the 50 states in the US and learned that most could not even provide basic demographic information about the children of incarcerated parents. In a famous class action case on behalf of women offenders (Glover v. Johnson 75 F 3d, 264), the state welfare department denied its responsibility for children of incarcerated mothers unless the court ordered them to do so, and failed to acknowledge that the parent had any right to participate in decision-making, even though custody may have been only temporarily transferred. Beckerman
(1994) found that welfare workers did not maintain contact with incarcerated mothers of children in foster care even when decisions had to be made about custody and related matters. Unfortunately, this had not changed a decade later (Moses 2006). Thus, when a woman returns home from prison, family reunification is often fraught with so much difficulty that family break-up occurs and recidivism results.
