Children with Incarcerated Mothers

This Brief focuses on children with incarcerated mothers, a growing and vulnerable population. It presents five empirical studies, along with an introduction and summary chapter. The five empirical chapters examine new qualitative and quantitative data on:

• Typical occurrences when pregnant women give birth during incarceration in contrast with the benefits of a prison doula program for mothers and newborns.
• A mother’s criminal justice involvement for substance abuse crimes and its effects on children’s protective services involvement and foster care placement.
• How children cope with separation from their mothers because of their incarceration and how that separation continues to affect children's lives following family reunification.
• Differences in recidivism trajectories between mothers and nonmothers during the 10 years following release from incarceration.
• Alternatives to incarceration for women in residential drug treatment and how community supervision mandates can affect, contribute to, or extend mother-child separation.

The final chapter integrates the information from the empirical studies and summarizes implications for policy and practice.

Children with Incarcerated Mothers is an essential resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.