This past summer, The Atlantic’s Sarah Yager wrote about the rising popularity of prison nurseries as a means of saving costs, enhancing morale, and reducing recidivism among the ever-growing female inmate population. Such nurseries are, however, still fairly rare, and generally reserved for the women who give birth when they’re already behind bars and have babies 18 months or younger. Once the babies grow past that age, they’re sent out into the world to join the 3 million children in the United States who currently have a parent in custody—a population that, for policymakers, “can fade into the background.”
These children do indeed fall off the public radar, as do the 2 million or so additional U.S. children who’ve previously had a parent in prison, according to a recent Child Trends report. All in all, the report’s researchers, David Murphey and P. Mae Cooper, analyzed the National Survey of Children’s Health to conclude that more than 5 million kids—or one in 14 U.S. children—have at one time or another experienced parental incarceration. And that number, they argue, “is almost certainly an underestimate,” in part because that statistic only applies to residential parents—not parents who’ve never lived with their children. Unsurprisingly, parental incarceration is most prevalent among black, poor, and rural children.
[For more of this story, written by Alia Wong, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...ds-education/414720/]
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