View Research by Author - J. Mark Eddy

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For the nearly 2 million children in the United States whose parents are in prison, caretaking necessary for optimal development is disrupted. These vulnerable youth—a population that has shot up 80 percent in the last 20 years—are more likely to experience learning difficulties, poor health, and substance abuse, and eventually be incarcerated themselves. Addressing the needs of children with imprisoned parents is urgent from corrections, child welfare, health care, and education perspectives. Children of Incarcerated Parents integrates a diverse literature, pulling together rigorous scholarship from criminology, sociology, law, psychiatry, social work, nursing, psychology, human development, and family studies. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers will find in this volume here new directions for research and policies that will improve these children's life chances.

The From Prisons to Home Conference, held on January 30-31, 2002 at the National Institutes of Health, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the conference was to bring together the research, policy, and practice communities to share promising strategies, identify research needs, and inform federal program and policy development for children and families affected by the incarceration of a parent. Eleven papers were commissioned by leading experts to survey the state of knowledge on the dynamics of incarceration and reentry as seen from the perspectives of child, parent and community. This paper focuses on the consequences of parental incarceration on child development, foster care and custody prior to, during and following incarceration.

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