When she was a child, 22-year-old Ifetayo Harvey's father was sentenced to prison for cocaine trafficking.
"My dad went to prison when I was 4 years old, and he was released when I was 12," Harvey says.
Harvey is one of millions of young people who grew up with a parent in prison. A recent study from the National Academy of Sciences examined the growth of incarceration in the United States, and among the topics was the effect on kids and families when a parent goes to prison.
Like many children with incarcerated parents, Harvey has suffered for her father's crime.
...[Jeremy Travis, one of the authors of the National Academy of Sciences report] says the numbers of kids with an incarcerated parent is "staggering." He says in the 1970s there were about 350,000 minors with a parent in prison; now, it's well over 2 million.
"That simply tracks [with] the fact that we're putting more people in prison," he says. "And the consequences of that are pretty profound, we think, although they're not as well documented as they should be."
What we do know, he says, is that there are higher rates of homelessness among families when the father is in prison, poor developmental outcomes for the children in those families, and that there's greater family instability in those families.
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/08/320071553/when-a-parent-goes-to-prison-a-child-also-pays-a-price
Comments (0)