Book review: Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality

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In the introduction to Children of the Prison Boom, the authors make the purpose of the book absolutely clear. It is not just about the impact of adult imprisonment on children but it is also about ‘how mass imprisonment has transformed racial inequality among children, with implications for the future of inequality in America’ (p. 2). Practitioners will be well aware of the impact of imprisonment on both the parent and the child in immediate, human and social terms but what this book quickly highlights is the societal level problem and implications for the future. In a nutshell:

The United States today incarcerates a larger share of its population than at any point in its history, and more than any other country. This shift has had a vast impact on American children because prison and jail inmates are parents to an estimated 2.5 million minor children, a huge increase from the 500,000 children with incarcerated parents in 1980. (p. 4)

These figures mean that 3 per cent of American children have a parent, usually the father who is incarcerated. In a critical sense, however, the issue which the authors skilfully grapple with is the differentiation according to race and class. Drawing on research published in 2008 they argue that the 11.42 per cent of black children having a parent in prison, as opposed to 1.75 per cent of white children, is likely now to be a significant under-representation given the continuing trends in the use of incarceration since then.

In Chapter 3 the authors consider the impact of imprisonment on individual children and families, and practitioners will be interested to see how they skilfully debate the potential good that may come from some (mainly violent) fathers being separated from their families through incarceration. However, as Wakefield and Wildman reflect, the prison boom in the United States reflects the increased use of longer periods of imprisonment for less serious offenders – a pattern we have observed within the English and Welsh criminal justice system since the early 1990s and particularly in relation to female offenders. Children of the prison boom are more likely to be disadvantaged before the parent is locked up but does imprisonment make the lives of children worse? The middle chapters of the book take on this key question and consider mental health, behavioural problems, infant mortality and child homelessness. There are no surprises here (other than that maternal incarceration did not seem to have a significant impact on homelessness) and the authors bring a welcome and robust evidenced-based approach to their conclusions:

These results thus have a number of implications for how we think about the American systems of imprisonment, stratification, and marginalisation. Perhaps most importantly, the results indicate that paternal and maternal incarceration lead to parallel paths of marginalisation for children. (p. 129)

What exactly does this mean? Well, according to the authors’ best estimates, something like one in four black 24 year-olds today had a parent imprisoned at some point in her or his childhood. Even more staggering is ‘for the same generation of children whose fathers dropped out of high school, about one in two had a father imprisoned at some point…’ (p. 151).

The authors persuasively identify the detrimental impact across a racially divided society where the vast majority of inmate fathers, far from being highly disturbed or dangerous individuals, are fathers worn down by crushing poverty and a lifetime of disadvantage – with their children likely to be at elevated risk throughout their adolescence and adulthood in no small part because of the incarceration of a parent. The authors conclude by identifying a number of criminal justice reforms focused on prevention, diversion and decarceration which, ironically in the world of austerity, may gain some support amongst the elite but their argument for universal provision that supports all families and children will, I suspect, fall on the sterile soil of regressive neoliberal thinking.

Children of the Prison Boom is a book worth persevering with despite its dense concentration on reporting or developing the evidence based on rigorous quantitative (and qualitative) research. As the authors themselves comment, there is little known about the problems and implications of the prison boon. Recently, Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative wrote:

The collateral consequences of mass incarceration have been equally profound. We ban poor women and, inevitably their children from receiving food stamps and public housing if they have prior drug convictions. We have created a new caste system that forces thousands of people into homelessness, bans them from living with their families and in their communities and renders them virtually unemployable. Some states permanently strip people with criminal convictions of their right to vote; as a result, in several Southern states disenfranchisement among African American men has reached levels unseen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Stevenson, 2014:16)

In this criminal justice jurisdiction, we have similarly experienced a prison boom that has seen the prison population double between 1993 and now. We have also seen the Americanization of our sentencing framework and prison system and the substantial privatization of the probation service. The prison boom applies as much to us here in the UK – I would therefore recommend that you try and find the time to read Children of the Prison Boom and if you are not disabled by society’s incapacity to tackle social, economic and racial inequality, you might also get hold of a copy of Just Mercy.