Parental Incarceration: Punishment for the Innocent

It’s no secret that the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any Western democracy. In fact, if Louisiana were its own country, it would have the second highest incarceration rate of any nation, second only to El Salvador (Widra, 2024). While this is certainly a result of decades of legislation, judicial rulings, and public sentiment that have created a culture of mass incarceration, there is a very harmful byproduct of mass incarceration that is often overlooked. A 2021 report by The Sentencing Project revealed that around half of the people imprisoned in the United States are parents to minor children. This “parental incarceration” has widespread negative effects on children. The effects range from psychological and behavioral issues to economic instability and a higher propensity to commit crime (Martin, 2017). The children of incarcerated parents have no culpability, yet they are the ones who often face the harshest outcomes.

Behavioral and Psychological Impact

Children face extreme emotional stress when their parents are incarcerated. In a way, this stress is similar to losing a parent to death (Pal, 2023). However, incarceration brings a host of uncertainty, shame, stigma, and other complicated emotions. It’s common for children to feel angry or guilty, sometimes even blaming themselves for their parents’ incarceration. These feelings can be amplified by depression and anxiety (Scommenga, 2014). In some children, there are even signs of post-traumatic stress, especially if the child witnessed the arrest that was particularly troubling (Gualtieri et al., 2020). The trauma and distress that comes from this experience can be long-lasting and deeply rooted in a child’s psyche. This can affect the way they perceive the world around them and interact with the people in their daily lives.

Due to all these emotional stressors, these children often require lots of emotional support. The issues associated with stigma and fear of judgment make these children hesitant to get help. Moreover, these children can struggle to express themselves, so they tend to lie or create stories to explain their parent’s absence. This prohibits them from exploring the deeper issues that are affecting their behavior and mental state.

This stigma, however, is not solely self-inflicted. Teachers, parents, and members of the community may view these children differently after learning of their parental situation. Other parents may not want the child of an incarcerated individual to play with, hang out with, or otherwise associate with their child. This only furthers the isolation that these children face.

Economic Impact

Another key issue that these children face is diminished economic prosperity (Pal, 2023). In many cases, the loss of a parent’s income is enough to destabilize an entire family. Add legal costs, jail visits, and commissary to the equation, and diminished resources become even thinner. This economic impact can have rippling effects throughout a child’s entire life. Without economic means children may perform poorly in school, have lower self-esteem, or turn to illegal ways of making money. The effects, however, can be much more far-reaching than this. These children often come from low-income backgrounds, which means that they already have a lower rate of going to university. The effects of parental incarceration compound on this and make it increasingly less likely that these children will go to university, which perpetuates the cycle of poverty that will invariably affect the generation that follows.

Educational Impact

Parental incarceration has been consistently linked to many academic issues in children. Among the most common is poor educational outcomes (Taggart & McAloon, 2025). Children of incarcerated parents often struggle to hit the same educational standards as their peers. They also have higher levels of truancy, lower classroom engagement, and lower school readiness. These issues can stem from the economic stress, the psychological stress, or disrupted caregiving (Taggart & McAloon, 2025). These three issues are typically intertwined. When a child’s parent is arrested, the other parent often must take on a job or extra work to preserve the family’s finances. This means that the present parent spends less time in the home, which can both diminish the level of caregiving they can provide and increase stress in the children as they must take on more responsibilities in the home (Taggart & McAloon, 2025). All of this combined means that these children focus less on school and have fewer resources to do well in school.

Higher Propensity to Commit Crime

Another incredibly troubling effect of parental incarceration is that children of these incarcerated adults are much more likely to end up in the criminal justice system than children without an incarcerated parent. One study found that rates of delinquency in girls go up significantly if their mother is incarcerated (Weyland, 2021). However, delinquent behavior is not just a characteristic of these children when they are juveniles. This delinquent behavior has been shown to carry over into mid-adulthood. The relationship is so strong that children of inmates are twice as likely to exhibit antisocial behaviors, compared to children without incarcerated parents (Murray et al., 2012). This is after controlling other risk factors. Research even suggests that they are more likely to commit acts of violence on their intimate partners later in life (Lee & Lou, 2023). This suggests that children of incarcerated individuals have a higher likelihood of committing crime, which only propagates a cycle of incarceration and poverty.

Conclusion

A UC Irvine study suggests that parental incarceration can be more harmful for a child than divorce or the death of a parent. Given all the impacts on these children, it’s not hard to see why this might be. In some cases, it seems that incarceration is more painful for the children of the incarcerated rather than the incarcerated individual themself. We must then ask ourselves if this is true justice. While incarceration has many negative effects for the incarcerated individual, those effects are often justified by arguing that if the offender didn’t want the punishment, they shouldn't have committed the crime. However, this same argument cannot be made for the children of incarcerated individuals. These children did nothing wrong and committed no crime, yet they are subjected to many or all the same effects as their incarcerated parents. This cannot be the highest form of justice that we can construct in this country. Surely, there must be other alternatives that punish the offender while preserving the outcomes of their children. When most of our prison population is nonviolent offenders, we cannot ignore that there are alternative options to incarceration; and the harmful effects on children of incarcerated people present a compelling argument for considering these alternatives.