Education Week - February 25, 2015 - 18

When Mom or Dad Is in Prison, Children Pay Heavy Toll
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
new ones may say nothing, or claim
they're just there for the lunch. The
real reason comes out after a few
meetings, says Ms. Friedman: All of
these students, like Ms. Friedman
herself, have fathers, mothers, brothers,
or cousins in and out of prison.
More than 2.7 million American
children and youths have at least
one parent in federal or state prison
(with more having parents and other
family members in local jails), and
one-third of them will reach age 18
while a parent is behind bars, according
to the National Resource Center
on Children and Families of the Incarcerated,
at Rutgers University in
Camden, N.J.
There are strong racial disparities:
Forty-five percent of children of incarcerated
parents are black, compared
with 28 percent who are white and 21
percent who are Hispanic.
Long-Term Damage
In the 2014 book Children of the
Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and
the Future of American Inequality, researchers
Sara Wakefield of Rutgers
University-Newark and Christopher
Wildeman of Yale University found
that one-quarter of black children
born in 1990 had a parent in jail or
prison by the time the child was age
14-more than double the rate for
black children born in 1978.
"Mass incarceration is so unequally
distributed across the population,
that if incarceration does have an effect
on kids' educational outcomes, it
has a disproportionate effect on poor
and minority kids, who are already at
a disadvantage," said Kristin Turney,
an assistant sociology professor at the
University of California, Irvine.
Parental incarceration can be safer
for a child, particularly when the
parent was imprisoned for domestic
violence or child abuse. But regardless
of why a parent is behind bars,
emerging research suggests it puts
children at high and often invisible
risk, as well as aggravating existing
racial and poverty gaps.
Children of incarcerated parents
have higher rates of attention deficits
than those with parents missing because
of death or divorce, and higher
rates of behavioral problems, speech
and language delays, and other developmental
delays, according to a study
published last summer in the Journal
of Health and Social Behavior that
analyzed data from a national survey
of children's health. In separate
but related studies, Ms. Turney also
found higher rates of asthma, obesity,
depression, and anxiety.
For education, the statistics are
equally dramatic: Only 1 percent to 2
percent of students with incarcerated
mothers and 13 percent to 25 percent
of students with imprisoned fathers
graduate from college, according to a
2013 report from the American Bar
Association and the White House.
Moreover, having a significant proportion
of students with incarcerated
parents in a school is associated with
lower grade point averages and rates
of college graduation, even for classmates
without incarcerated parents.
Former inmate Bruce Lisker, whose murder conviction was overturned in
2009, speaks to members of the Pain of the Prison System club at Venice
High School in Los Angeles. The club provides support for students with
family members in or out of prison.
There's been far less research on
the effects of having incarcerated
family members beyond parents, but
some recent studies suggest siblings
of those jailed also struggle with grief,
stress, and stigmatization by those
who know their sibling is imprisoned.
Searching for Reasons
It is so clear a risk factor that having
a member of the household go to
prison was considered one of the key
"adverse childhood experiences" that
California studies found contribute
to significant health, educational,
and social problems for children even
decades later.
"What is it about incarceration that
really matters, that is so damaging to
kids? We don't know," said Ms. Turney,
a 2014 scholar for the Foundation
for Child Development, for which she
is studying the long-term effects of
having a father in prison.
"Is it the economic hit that these
families take?-with divorce, the
father can at least still contribute
economically-or is it the stigma and
shame for kids?" she said.
In a study published in October in
the journal Sociology of Education,
Ms. Turney found the elementarygrade
children of incarcerated parents
were at higher risk of being held
back at the end of the year-but not
because of significantly lower test
scores or more behavior problems
than classmates.
Rather, "it was their teachers' perceptions
of the students' academic
proficiency and how well the kid was
doing," Ms. Turney said. "It does suggest
that teachers are really impor18
| EDUCATION WEEK | February 25, 2015 | www.edweek.org
tant here, and they really play an important
role in students' lives."
Ms. Friedman, of the pops club at
Venice High, raised her ex-husband's
two daughters while he was in prison.
She agreed that stress and shame can
make the loss of a parent to incarceration
more traumatic.
"The things that come up the
most with a parent inside is this
feeling that you are going to be just
like them," Ms. Friedman said, "and
there's this fear and loss and disappointment
that translates to depression
in a lot of kids."
Building Supports
Pops and the U.S. Dream Academy-an
eight-city, after-school
program supporting children and
families of incarcerated people-are
among a growing group of programs
dedicated to buffering the academic
and emotional effects of having a family
member in prison.
Evroy Marrett is the director
of the Washington branch of the
Dream Academy, located at the
Learning Center at Turner Elementary
School, said the afterschool
program tries not only to
replace the homework help and
reading support a missing parent
might provide, but also the more
nebulous "dream building" and
opinion formulation that develop
with parents' help.
"When it's not directly linked to say,
nutrition, a big part of [the damage
of parental incarceration] is not having
that guidance in the home," Mr.
Marrett said. "It's just involvement,
period."
The Dream Academy also provides
support to the student's caregiver-
often a mother, grandmother or aunt,
Mr. Marrett said.
"A lot of times, you'll see a shift in
behavior, and a lot of times you may
not know what it is," Mr. Marrett
said. "As we talk to moms or aunts,
the picture starts to come clear, that
the father has been arrested or had a
parole hearing."
For students who go into foster
care, helping parents stay involved
in their education can make a big
difference in whether those children
continue relationships with their incarcerated
parents at all.
Under the federal Adoption and
Safe Families Act, or asfa, a childwelfare
agency will seek to end
parental rights if a child has been
in foster care for 15 of the past 22
months-including when the parent
is behind bars. However, 32 states
allow exceptions if there is a "compelling
reason to believe that terminating
the parent's rights is not in
the best interests of the child"-including
if a parent has made meaningful
attempts to stay connected to
the child.
That's not an easy task for a parent
in prison. More than 40 percent
of those in federal prison are kept
at least 500 miles from home, and
61 percent of those in state prison
are incarcerated 100 or more miles
away, according to a presentation
by Philip M. Genty, a clinical professor
of professional responsibility
at Columbia Law School, which he
gave as part of a 2013 White House
symposium on children of incarcerated
parents.
"They can't go to parent-teacher
nights; they can't be there to help
with homework; they have very little
access to the children." Ms. Friedman
said.
Among the limited programs intended
to keep incarcerated parents
connected to their children, those
focused on schooling are rarest. In
the early 2000s, Florida offered some
mothers in prison opportunities
to read to their children regularly
through videoconferences, but the
program did not continue.
"There are a lot of programs for
the incarcerated, but not so many for
the collateral damage out here," Ms.
Friedman said.
Photos by Emile Wamsteker for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - February 25, 2015

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