Mass incarceration and children’s outcomes: Criminal justice policy is education policy

Leila Morsy, Richard Rothstein

Research output: Book/ReportCommissioned report

Abstract

As many as one in ten African American students has an incarcerated parent. One in four has a parent who is or has been incarcerated. The discriminatory incarceration of African American parents is an important cause of their children’s lowered performance, especially in schools where the trauma of parental incarceration is concentrated. In this report, we review studies from many disciplines showing that parental incarceration leads to an array of cognitive and noncognitive outcomes known to affect children’s performance in school, and we conclude that our criminal justice system makes an important contribution to the racial achievement gap.

Educators have paid too little heed to this criminal justice crisis. Criminal justice reform should be a policy priority for educators who are committed to improving the achievement of African American children. While reform of federal policy may seem implausible in a Trump administration, educators can seize opportunities for such advocacy at state and local levels because many more parents are incarcerated in state than in federal prisons. In 2014, over 700,000 prisoners nationwide were serving sentences of a year or longer for nonviolent crimes. Over 600,000 of these were in state, not federal, prisons.

Research in criminal justice, health, sociology, epidemiology, and economics demonstrates that when parents are incarcerated, children do worse across cognitive and noncognitive outcome measures.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationWashington, DC
PublisherEconomic Policy Institute
Number of pages24
Publication statusPublished - 15 Dec 2016

Keywords

  • African American students
  • African American incarceration
  • parental incarceration
  • student outcomes
  • criminal justice reform

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