2. Incarcerated Parents’ Explanations of Criminal Justice to Their Children: Structural Inequality and Individual Autonomy

• In Event: 1123 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 6: Roundtable on Crime, Law, and Deviance

Abstract

In the age of mass incarceration, over five million children have experienced parental incarceration. Children with incarcerated parents are more likely to experience criminal justice system contact, educational difficulties, behavioral problems, and health concerns, among other challenges. Using in-depth interview data from a pilot intervention study on enhanced contact between incarcerated parents and their children (ages 3-12), I examine how incarcerated parents understand and teach their children about their incarceration. I find that, in interviews with researchers, the vast majority of parents understand and attribute their incarceration and criminal justice involvement to be the result of structural inequalities, such as poverty, racism, and neighborhood violence. However, most parents report explaining their incarceration to their children as a series of their own individual decisions and choices. Parents try to teach their children to learn from their individual actions and mistakes, not to attribute their parents’ absence to the justice system. Yet despite downplaying the structural inequalities and even sometimes reassuring their children on the fairness of the justice system, several parents report that their children voice fear of the criminal justice system and acknowledge their legal precarity. Despite attempts to distance their children’s identities from the justice system, parents continue to expose their children to secondary prisonization and thus create conflict in their teachings that incarceration is the result of individual choice rather that structural inequality.

Author

• Sarah Jensen, University of Wisconsin-Madison