The Impact of Parental Incarceration: Dean Sullivan Releases New Book
1.7 million children currently have parents in the United States prison system. 30% of them will follow in their parents’ footsteps.
Those are the astounding statistics that are discussed at length in Associate Dean Megan Sullivan’s new book, Parental Incarceration: Personal Accounts and Developmental Impact. The book, which is now available on Amazon and Routledge.com, examines the various perspective of adults who experienced parental incarceration during childhood and analyzes the impact of the experience on health, development and the risk for intergenerational crime and incarceration.
We asked Dean Sullivan to reflect on her experience of writing Parental Incarceration.
CGS: What kind of conversation do you hope this book will spark?
Sullivan: I hope this book sparks a wide and diverse dialogue about incarceration. Particularly its effects on children and families. For the most part, there are only certain people who tend to discuss incarceration – people who work in corrections, scholars and policy analysts, and incarcerated people and those who love them. I would love to see others get involved in the discussion.
Imagine if students and neighbors and policy makers and families of incarcerated men and women could come together to discuss what they knew about prisons and criminal justice. Or, better yet, what they don’t know. I think that kind of dialogue would not only be instructive, but also might take away the stigma that surrounds incarceration.
CGS: What major trends in incarceration were you able to discuss in this book?
Sullivan: Due to “three strikes” policies, minimum sentencing guidelines, and the “war on drugs” more who are involved in non-violent crimes are being locked up for longer periods of time. This means more families and communities are affected and for longer periods of time.
It also means that there has been an explosion of parents who have been incarcerated. Between 1991 and midyear 2007, parents held in state and federal prisons increased by 79% .The most rapid growth in the number of parents held in the nation’s prisons and their children occurred between 1991 and 1997. Currently, the majority of incarcerated persons are parents, and the number of minor children with an incarcerated parent has concurrently increased, peaking at an estimated 2.9 million in 2006.
The second trend we talk about is that for children, parental incarceration is not a monolithic experience. There are so many variables in families that determine how a parent’s incarceration will affect a child. For instance, did the child live with the parent before he or she was incarcerated? Was the child receiving financial support from the incarcerated parent? The parent’s gender has a large impact on how the child will be impacted, as does the child’s support network. All these variables mean we have to think carefully about how children and families are actually impacted before we suggest programs that can help them.
CGS: Since you and your co-author came from different professional backgrounds, what kind of interdisciplinary approach did you take when writing together?
Sullivan: We tend to talk about the benefits of interdisciplinary research but not the difficulty of it. Truly interdisciplinary collaboration is great and hard. My colleague has an M.D. and is much more data driven than I am, so she sometimes wanted to make definitive statements that were supported by statistics but that didn’t seem to me to represent the reality of how some people lived and felt. As a Humanities scholar I was always parsing out the data and saying “but wait a minute here we have writing by one of our contributors who says he feels this way or he experienced this event. How does that complicate the data?”
Here at the College of General Studies and the Center for Interdisciplinary Learning we try to convey to students that truly interdisciplinary work is informed by what we know and how we think across the disciplines. It’s not just that, in the case of this book, you have two scholars from different fields writing a book together. It’s bigger: it’s that you have two scholars who are bringing what they know and how they think to a problem that affects real people and communities.
Parental Incarceration: Personal Accounts and Developmental Impact is available for purchase at Routledge.com and Amazon.