Motherhood and Incarceration: Changing Trends of Carceral Inequality

• In Event: Exploring Recent Trends in Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Prior scholarship acknowledges the collateral consequences for individuals who have been incarcerated, in particular for formerly incarcerated parents and children of incarcerated parents. This paper investigates the compositional shift of state prisons in the United States from six cross-sectional surveys collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and uses regression and decomposition analysis to show how the aging of the incarcerated population contributes to the proliferation of incarcerated parents over time. Using descriptive, regression, and decomposition analyses, I show that in addition to the increase in incarcerated women, incarcerated parents have significantly grown over the last four decades, some of which can be explained by the aging of the overall incarcerated population. This trend is especially true for incarcerated mothers, in particular for Black mothers, than any other incarcerated group. Overall, this paper extends literature that has tracked the changes in the incarcerated population and black feminist scholars who have shown the qualitative experiences of incarceration for mothers by showing that not only are a larger portion of the incarcerated population parents but there are also key differences by sex and race that may exacerbate generational inequality.

Author

• Chloe Craig, University of Texas at Austin