By Joyce A. Arditti

Parental Incarceration and the Family brings a family perspective to our understanding of what it means to have so many of our nation’s parents in prison. Drawing from the field’s most recent research and the author’s own fieldwork, Joyce Arditti offers an in-depth look at how incarceration affects entire families: offender parents, children, and care-givers. Through the use of exemplars, anecdotes, and reflections, Joyce Arditti puts a human face on the mass of humanity behind bars, as well as those family members who are affected by a parent’s imprisonment. In focusing on offenders as parents, a radically different social policy agenda emerges—one that calls for real reform and that responds to the collective vulnerabilities of the incarcerated and their kin.

New York: New York University Press, 2012. 258p.

By Jeremy Travis; Elizabeth M. Cincotta and Amy L. Solomon

With incarceration rates in America at record high levels, the criminal justice system now touches the lives of millions of children each year. The imprisonment of nearly three-quarters of a million parents disrupts parent-child relationships, alters the networks of familial support, and places new burdens on governmental services such as schools, foster care, adoption agencies, and youth-serving organizations. Few studies have explored the impact of parental incarceration on young children or identified the needs that arise from such circumstances. Little attention has focused on how communities, social service agencies, health care providers, and the criminal justice system can work collaboratively to better meet the needs of the families left behind. This policy brief is intended to help focus attention on these hidden costs of our criminal justice policies.

Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2005. 12p.

By Jennifer Rosenberg

Maternal imprisonment has particular aspects and creates special challenges for families, policy makers and prison authorities alike, including the question of babies and young children being in prison with their mothers. However, any parental imprisonment impacts on the children. Some of these impacts may be the same, or similar, irrespective of whether the imprisoned parent is the mother or the father. Others may be completely different. Since QUNO’s previous research and publications have focussed primarily on the effect of maternal imprisonment, this paper, drawing on secondary sources, seeks to build on and complement these by identifying the similarities and differences in relation to the effect of paternal imprisonment on children.

Geneva, SWIT: Quaker United Nations Office, 2009. 50p.

By Laurel Townhead

Women are a small minority of the prison population, but a minority that is growing at a disproportionate rate, their needs, and indeed their rights, are frequently not fulfilled by prison regimes that are designed predominantly for male prisoners. Imprisonment impacts on women differently than on men. The following are some of the key areas of concern: a) Problems with accommodation b) Inappropriate staffing c) Lack of family contact d) Lack of education and work programmes e) Lack of proper healthcare f) High proportion of women prisoners with a history of mental, physical or sexual abuse g) The adverse impact of imprisonment of mothers on their children h) Disproportionate representation of indigenous women and foreign women1 It is clear from the brief list above that the needs of women prisoners are often overlooked by penal institutions, by governmental policy makers, and by the international community and that consideration needs to be given to every aspect of women’s prison regimes as well as to the reasons for the increasing female prison population to ensure that their rights, as defined in international law, are met.

Geneva, SWIT: Quaker United Nations Office, 2006. 21p.

By Rachel Taylor

The long-standing Quaker involvement in criminal justice and human rights issues at the national, regional and international levels has led to increasing concern about the under-considered and growing problem of women in prison and the situation of babies and children of imprisoned mothers. In particular, there is a need to give attention to the situation of women and girls (female juveniles under 18 years of age) in pre-trial detention and imprisonment following trial, including in probation hostels or similar facilities in which they are required to reside whether instead of prison or in the transition back to the community, and the babies and children of imprisoned women, both those in prison with their mothers and those outside the institution. The purpose of doing this is to identify the key issues which arise for such women and girls, and their children, and to gather information and ideas on ways in which these issues have, or could be, addressed better.

Geneva, SWIT: Quaker United Nations Office, 2004. 99p.

By Jean Tomkin

The legal rights of children under international law have been developing since 1919, with both regional and global treaties safeguarding their interests. Yet many of these rights, enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other texts, are put at risk when a parent is imprisoned…. At the core of decisions relating to children, including children affected by the actual or potential imprisonment of a parent, is a determination of their best interests. This principle, which requires that the best interests of the child is a primary consideration, has been interpreted widely by States. This paper sets out to analyse the approach of courts in a variety of jurisdictions.

Geneva, SWIT: Quaker United Nations Office, 2009. 58p.

By Oliver Robertson

This paper draws together many of the examples of good policy and practice that were made at the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s Day of General Discussion (DGD) 2011, on the topic ‘Children of Incarcerated Parents’

The paper will begin with an introduction and some general principles to consider at all times, then look at some issues that occur at various points (data collection, future research and what to tell the children about their parent’s situation) before focusing in detail on each stage of the criminal justice process, from arrest to release and reintegration. Each section will begin with a general principle to help frame the issue, with more specific recommendations and examples of potential good practice made throughout the paper. The recommendations, good practice and issues are not meant to be exhaustive, but to highlight what emerged from the Day of General Discussion.

Geneva, SWIT: Quaker United Nations Office, 2012. 84p.

Edited by Adele D. Jones and Agnieszka E. Wainaina-Woźna

Estimates are that 125,000 children have a parent in prison in England and Wales. Indeed, on the international stage, over half of all prisoners worldwide are thought to have children under the age of 18 yet the impact of a parent’s incarceration on a child is rarely taken into account. COPING increases understanding of how the imprisonment of a parent really affects children. Working in different countries, with different social and cultural traditions, different incarceration levels and different policies and interventions, our research has produced evidence that can inform policy and programmes to better support and protect children from the effects of parental imprisonment right across Europe.”

Huddersfield, UK: University of Huddersfield, 2013. 670p.

By Amir Whitaker and Daniel J. Losen

Students of color in this country far too often face barriers to receiving quality public education – from unequal resources in schools, to overly punitive discipline administered more often to children of color. As the nation’s oldest and largest nonpartisan civil rights organization, for more than a century, the NAACP has worked to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all persons and to eliminate racebased discrimination. Equal access to public education and eliminating the severe racial inequities that continue to plague our education system is at the core of our mission. This new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies brings new light to the practice of corporal punishment in schools. When an educator strikes a student in school, it can have a devastating impact on the child’s opportunity to learn in a safe, healthy, and welcoming environment. This is dangerous for all students, but corporal punishment is administered disproportionately to students of color in our nation’s public schools

Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Rights Center and Los Angeles: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, 2019. 41p.

By Ying Shi and Maria Zhu

Well-documented racial disparities in rates of exclusionary discipline may arise from differences in hard-to-observe student behavior or bias, in which treatment for the same behavior varies by student race or ethnicity. We provide evidence for the presence of bias using statewide administrative data that contain rich details on individual disciplinary infractions. Two complementary empirical strategies identify bias in suspension outcomes. The first uses within-incident variation in disciplinary outcomes across White and under-represented minority students. The second employs individual fixed effects to examine how consequences vary for students across incidents based on the race of the other student involved in the incident. Both approaches find that Black students are suspended for longer than Hispanic or White students, while there is no evidence of Hispanic-White disparities. The similarity of findings across approaches and the ability of individual fixed effect models to account for unobserved characteristics common across disciplinary incidents provide support that remaining racial disparities are likely not driven by behavior.

Bonn, Germany: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics, 2021. 38p.

By DLA Piper

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Overnight, prisons became a key public health concern for governments. Prisons – particularly overcrowded facilities and those with poor sanitation, hygiene and ventilation – are known to act as a source of infection, amplification and spread of infectious diseases. Urgent action was required to limit the transmission of COVID-19 to prisoners, staff and the broader community. Recognizing the challenge and potential serious health risks, governments globally took swift action to decongest their prison systems through releasing prisoners and limiting new admissions. This report analyses the approach to decongesting prison systems adopted by governments in 53 jurisdictions across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North and Central America. The results of those 53 jurisdictional analyses have been summarized into key findings set out in Part 2 of this report and in an infographic at Annexure A.

London: DLA Piper, 2020. 52p.

By Penal Reform International

As the COVID-19 pandemic affects more people in an ever increasing list of countries, PRI has published a briefing note, Coronavirus: Healthcare and human rights of people in prison. With the fast-evolving situation, there is legitimate concern at a further spread of the virus to places of detention. The difficulties in containing a large outbreak in detention facilities are clear. People in prison and the personnel who work with them are in close proximity and in many cases in overcrowded, cramped conditions with little fresh air. People in detention also have common demographic characteristics with generally poorer health than the rest of the population, often with underlying health conditions. Hygiene standards are often below that found in the community and sometimes security or infrastructural factors reduce opportunities to wash hands or access to hand sanitizer – the key prevention measures recommended by the World Health Organization.

Our briefing outlines the key measures that criminal justice systems, including prisons and courts, have taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 – and the impact of these in light of the UN Nelson Mandela Rules and other key standards. Action needs to be taken now and immediately, given the risk people in prison are exposed to, including prison staff. Such action should be guided by international standards and the values of: Do no harm, equality, transparency, humanity.

London: Penal Reform International, 2020. 13p

By Kelly Lyn Mitchell, Julia Laskorunsky, Natalie Bielenberg, Lucy Chin and Madison Wadsworth

In response to the global pandemic in 2020, states and the federal government began to make non-routine releases from prison in order to reduce prison populations to allow for social distancing in prison facilities. This report is aimed at describing where such prison releases occurred, the legal mechanisms used to achieve these releases, and the factors within jurisdictions that made non-routine prison releases more or less likely to occur. We write this report, not to examine the national response to the pandemic, but to better understand when and how extraordinary measures may be used to effect prison release, and to determine whether there are lessons from this experience that can be applied to reducing the effects of mass incarceration. All but three Democratic-led jurisdictions (21 of 24) made COVID-related prison releases while only about half of Republic-led jurisdictions (14 of 27) did so (Table 4). » Nearly all of the jurisdictions (7 of 8) with the largest COVID-related releases—those greater than 10% of the 2019 prison population—were indeterminate in structure.

Minneapolis: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, University of Minnesota Law School. 2022. 86p.

By Andrew Wiegand, Jesse Sussell, Erin Jacobs Valentine and Brit Henderson

The Reintegration of Ex-Offenders (RExO) project began in 2005 as a joint initiative of the Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and several other federal agencies. RExO aimed to capitalize on the strengths of faith-based and community organizations (FBCOs) and their ability to serve prisoners seeking to reenter their communities following the completion of their sentences. In June 2009, ETA contracted with Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) and its subcontractors MDRC and NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct an impact evaluation of 24 RExO grantees.

The programs funded under RExO primarily provided three main types of services: mentoring, which most often took the form of group mentoring, but also included one-on-one mentoring and other activities; employment services, including work readiness training, job training, job placement, job clubs, transitional employment, and post-placement follow-up; and case management and supportive services.

This report summarizes the impacts of the RExO program on offender outcomes in four areas: service receipt, labor market success, recidivism, and other outcomes. Using a random assignment (RA) design, the evaluation created two essentially equivalent groups: a program group that was eligible to enroll in RExO and a control group that was prevented from enrolling in RExO but could enroll in other services.

Oakland, CA: Social Policy Research Associates, 2015. 163p

By Joseph Broadus, Sara Muller-Ravett, Arielle Sherman and Cindy Redcross

This report presents results from a fidelity assessment and implementation analysis of five Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) replication programs in New York, California, and Oklahoma. Between 2004 and 2010, MDRC conducted a rigorous random assignment evaluation of the original CEO program as part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The evaluation found that CEO was effective at reducing recidivism rates — the rates at which participants committed new crimes or were reincarcerated — among important subgroups of its participant population. Based in part on these findings, the CEO program was selected by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in 2011 to be part of its Social Innovation Fund and receive funding and technical assistance to expand and replicate the model in various locations across the United States. The findings presented in this report focus on the implementation of CEO’s core elements at the replication sites and provide a description of participants’ experience with the program. One additional goal of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of which aspects of the CEO model may have contributed to the reductions in recidivism found in the initial evaluation of the New York City program.

New York: MDRC, 2016. 114p.

By Erin Jacobs Valentine, Louisa Treskon and Cindy Redcross

Despite an increasing emphasis on reentry services for individuals leaving prison, recidivism rates remain high, and policymakers are searching for ways to help parolees make more successful transitions from prison. One strategy is to incorporate interventions into the parole supervision process. This paper presents findings from the Changing Attitudes and Motivation in Parolees (CHAMPS) study, which examined the implementation of a pilot of one parole-based intervention, known as the Next Generation of Parole Supervision (NG).

NG is intended to improve parolee outcomes by enhancing parole officers’ knowledge and the strategies they use during their regular supervision meetings with parolees. Building on existing literature about best practices in parole supervision, the NG curriculum focuses on desistance — a process through which individuals who have been involved in crime change their self-perceived identity and cease participating in crime — and helps parole officers to use parolee-centered conversations to identify and reinforce a parolee’s strengths and to identify potential stabilizing and destabilizing influences in the individual’s life..

New York: MDRC, 2018. 45p.

By Quentin Liger and Mirja Guhteil

This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the LIBE Committee, provides an analysis of the distinctive features of racism, xenophobia and racial discrimination in the EU and selected EU Member States. It further examines various forms of racism, xenophobia and racial discrimination,their target groups and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study assesses anti-racism policies and legislation to determine effectiveness of the national and EU legislation and measures envisaged in the EU Anti-racism Action Plan on eradicatation of racism, xenophobia and racial discrimination. The study identifies gaps that need to be filled and provides recommendations on how to create engagement at all levels to achieve meaningful change and equality.

Brussels: European Parliament, 2022. 248p.

By Charles Gordon

“This gate hath of long time been a gaol, or prison, for felons and trespassers, as appareth by records in the reign of King John, and of other kings; amongst the which I find one testifying that, in the year 1218, the third year of King Henry III, the king written to the sheriffs of London, commanding them to repair the old gate of Newgate for the safe keeping of his prisoners,….”

London. Fisher Unwin.1902. 186 pages.

By Charles Gordon

“This gate hath of long time been a gaol, or prison, for felons and trespassers, as appareth by records in the reign of King John, and of other kings; amongst the which I find one testifying that, in the year 1218, the third year of King Henry III, the king written to the sheriffs of London, commanding them to repair the old gate of Newgate for the safe keeping of his prisoners,….”

London. Fisher Unwin.1902. 186 pages.

By Kevin R. Reitz, Edward E. Rhine, Allegra Lukac, and Melanie Griffith

“Indeterminacy” is the product of uncertainty, after a judge has pronounced a prison sentence, about later official decisions that will influence the actual time served by the defendant. The uncertainty extends over many future decisions, such as good-time awards or forfeitures by prison officials and release or release-denial decisions by parole boards. To the extent these later decision patterns are unpredictable, the judge’s sentence is “indeterminate” on the day of sentencing. When prison sentences are highly indeterminate, many months or years of time-to-be-served can be unforeseeable in individual cases. The mechanics of indeterminacy in prison sentencing vary enormously from state to state, and are not well understood. In many states, time-served policy is largely administered at the “back end” of the sentencing system. If prison policy is aimed toward retribution or public safety, it is back-end officials who ultimately choose how best to achieve those goals. This raises critical questions of whether they are well-positioned to be stewards of the public interest, and whether their procedures are adequate to the task. Such questions are especially urgent in a nation with high incarceration rates. In most American jurisdictions, however, back-end decisionmaking about prison-sentence length has low visibility and is unglamorous. Very few people pay serious attention to its workings. From a systemic perspective, indeterminacy can be seen as the field of play in which back-end officials with time-served discretion exercise their powers. The larger the field—the greater the degree of indeterminacy—the greater the whole-system impact of back-end decisions. Indeterminacy builds up cumulative effects over hundreds and thousands of cases. In systems with high degrees of indeterminacy, a substantial amount of control over prison population size is located at the back end of the system. In many states, back-end officials have more to say about prison numbers than sentencing courts. Yet few people are aware of this.

Minneapolis, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, University of Minnesota, 2022. 145p.