Abstract
It is difficult to say precisely how many children actually experience having a parent in prison. The explanation is simply that this is typically not registered in any official statistic and I have so far failed to find a country that releases yearly updates or any kind of regular official estimate of the number of prisoners’ children. This is one indication that these children and their problems have, as a rule, been outside of the authorities’ and, for many years, the media’s spotlight.1
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Notes
Gill Pugh, Sentenced Families: Signs of Change for Children with a Parent in Prison (Ipswich: Ormiston Children and Families Trust, 2004), 15.
Hoffmann, Byrd and Kightlinger “Prison Programs and Services for Incarcerated Parents and Their Underage Children: Results From a National Survey of Correctional Facilities”, in The Prison Journal , 90(4), 2010, 397.
See Joseph Murray et al. Effects of Parental Imprisonment on Child Antisocial Behaviour and Mental Health: A Systematic Review (Oslo: Campbell Collaboration, 2009), 9.
Rodriguez, N., Smith, H., and Zatz, M. S. (2009), “Youth is Enmeshed in a Highly Dysfunctional Family System: Exploring the Relationship Among Dysfunctional Families, Parental Incarceration, and Juvenile Court Decision Making”, Criminology 47, no. 1, (2009), 181.
See surveys referred to in Sandra Enos, Mothering from the Inside: Parenting in a Women’s Prison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 3.
The Council of Crime Prevention, Fængsledes børn — en udsat gruppe [Prisoners’ Children — A Vulnerable Group], (Copenhagen, February 2005, 8.
Minke (2010); Rikke Olsen, Invisible Consequences of Punishment: Parental Imprisonment and Child Outcomes , Ph.D. thesis, Aarhus University, 2013.
Jilliam J. Turanovic, Nancy Rodriguez and Travis C. Pratt, “The Collateral Consequences of Incarceration Revisited: A Qualitative Analysis of the Effects on Caregivers of Children of Incarecrated Parents”, Criminology 50, no. 4 (2012), 914.
Statistics Denmark, Børns Familier [Children’s Families] 2008, 193.
Wildeman, C., “Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage”, Demography 46, no. 2 (2009), 266.
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© 2014 Peter Scharff Smith
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Smith, P.S. (2014). Children of Imprisoned Parents in Numbers. In: When the Innocent are Punished. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414298_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137414298_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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