One in 28 US kids has a parent in prison: study

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Click here for the full story.

The US's exceptionally high rate of incarceration is causing
economic damage not only to the people behind bars but to their
children and taxpayers as a whole, a new study finds.

The study
(PDF) from the Pew Research Center's Economic Mobility Project,
released Tuesday, reports that the US prison population has more than
quadrupled since 1980, from 500,000 to 2.3 million, making the US's
incarceration rate the highest in the world, beating former champions
like Russia and South Africa.

This means more than one in 100 Americans is in prison, and the cost
of prisons to states now exceeds $50 billion per year, or one in every
15 state dollars spent -- a figure the study describes as "staggering."

According to the authors, one in every 28 children in the US has a
parent behind bars -- up from one in 125 just 25 years ago. This is
significant, the study argues, because children of incarcerated parents
are much likelier to struggle in life.

A family with an incarcerated parent on average earns 22 percent
less the year after the incarceration than it did the year before, the
study finds. And children with parents in prison are significantly
likelier to be expelled from school than others; 23 percent of students
with jailed parents are expelled, compared to 4 percent for the general
population.

"Both education and parental income are strong indicators of
children’s future economic mobility," the survey notes. "With millions
of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is
important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration
on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children."

In all, 2.7 million US children have parents behind bars, and
"two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for
non-violent offenses," the study notes.

Not surprisingly, the statistics show large disparities when broken
down by race. Among black children, fully one in nine, or 11.4 percent,
have a parent in jail. For Hispanics, the number is one in 28, and for
white children it's one in 57.

The study also finds that the US now has a prison population larger
than the 35 largest European countries combined. The incarceration rate
in the US is five times that of Great Britain -- 753 inmates per
100,000 people, compared to 151 inmates in the UK. Even the British
incarceration rate is high compared to some countries: 96 in France and
88 in Germany, for example.

The cost of such a high incarceration rate hasn't been lost on
lawmakers in this era of budget deficits. Over the past few years,
numerous states have released prisoners early to reduce incarceration
costs. California granted early release to some 1,500 inmates this year, and the state hopes to reduce its prison population by a total of 6,500.

But those early releases have proven controversial, both for political and public safety reasons. The New York Times reported earlier this year:

In February, lawmakers in Oregon temporarily suspended a
program they had expanded last year to let prisoners, for good
behavior, shorten their sentences (and to save $6 million) after an
anticrime group aired radio advertisements portraying the outcomes in
alarming tones. “A woman’s asleep in her own apartment,” a narrator
said. “Suddenly, she’s attacked by a registered sex offender and
convicted burglar.”

In Illinois, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, a Democrat, described as “a big
mistake” an early release program that sent some convicts who had
committed violent crimes home from prison in a matter of weeks. Of more
than 1,700 prisoners released over three months, more than 50 were soon
accused of new violations.

An early release program in Colorado meant to save $19 million has
scaled back its ambitions by $14 million after officials found far
fewer prisoners than anticipated to be wise release risks. In more than
five months, only 264 prisoners were released, though the program was
designed to shrink the prison population by 2,600 over two years.

With concern growing about the cost -- both economic and social --
of incarceration, lawmakers have turned an eye to sentencing reform.
But prospects for wholesale changes to sentencing in the US are dim,
primarily because of the difficulty of selling "weaker" criminal
punishments to a skeptical public.

This year, the Obama administration backed sentencing reform
for crack cocaine, reducing the disparity between crack sentences and
powder cocaine sentences on the basis that they discriminated along
racial lines. But, as law professor Andrea Lyon noted at the Huffington Post,
even that reform allowed for large disparities in sentences. "What was
a 100 to 1 disparity is now 'only' an 18 to 1 disparity," she writes.

In Missouri, an innovative new law
gives judges access to information about incarceration costs before
they decide on punishment, as well as access to information on
recidivism rates for various crimes. Lawmakers hope it will result in a
more consistent application of the law.

Marijuana law reform could also have an impact, by simply reducing
the number of crimes for which people can be jailed. Last year alone,
there were more than 858,000 arrests
in the United States for marijuana. That's down from a peak of 872,000
in 2007, but still near record highs. More than half of all drug
arrests involved marijuana.