Children and Families Affected by Reentry

The Issue

The growth in the number of men and women incarcerated in the United States over the past 20 years has affected an extraordinary number of children and families. The number of minor children with a parent incarcerated in state or federal prison rose by more than 500,000 from 1991 to 1999.¹ In 1999, an estimated 721,500 state and federal prisoners were parents to nearly 1.5 million minor children.² Subsequent research has indicated that more than 7 million children may have a parent in prison or jail, or under parole or probation supervision.³

On both the state and local level, corrections agencies (responsible for overseeing people sentenced to jail, prison, or community supervision) and human services agencies (responsible for protecting and serving children and families) have a shared interest in this trend. Yet few corrections and human services agencies have effectively collaborated to serve incarcerated parents and their families on a systemwide basis. In fact, these two systems often find themselves working at cross purposes, even when they concentrate their services and resources on the same families and communities.

The Response

The Council of State Governments Justice Center is developing three resources for policymakers and practitioners interested in supporting families of people in prisons or jails and facilitating successful prisoner reentry.

• Technical Assistance: A handful of “learning site” jurisdictions have received preliminary technical assistance from the Justice Center to help their corrections and human services officials collectively implement selected recommendations of the Report of the Re-Entry Policy Council. Agencies in each of the participating jurisdictions continue to be engaged in collaborative initiatives designed to provide more effective, integrated, and efficient services to reentering adults and their families.
• Case Studies: To ensure that other jurisdictions can benefit from the experiences of the learning sites, the Justice Center project staff will document, publish, and widely disseminate a report that will include case studies from these sites. The report will highlight challenges and lessons for the field.
• Online Collaboration Tool: The center’s staff also is creating an interactive, Web-based tool that will enable members of any corrections-human services partnership to assess their collaborative efforts in the area of reentry. This tool allows reentry partners to examine their efforts in seven different domains: goals of the initiative, target population, assessment and planning, collaborative supports, funding, outcomes and evaluation, and public strategies.

Contact:
Shawn Rogers
Policy Consultant
Council of State Governments Justice Center
srogers@csg.org
tel: (212) 482-2320
fax: (212) 482-2344

¹ Christopher J. Mumola, Incarcerated Parents and Their Children, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 182335 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Justice, 2000).
² Ibid.
³ ----------, 1996 Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, 1997 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2001 Annual Survey of Jails, and 2001 National Prisoners Statistics Program (presented at the National Center for Children and Families, Washington, D.C., October 31, 2002).