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Effects of Incarceration

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Incarceration can have multiple profound effects on a person. While the goal of incarceration is to rehabilitate the person to follow laws, the result is often isolation and loss of valuable resources that a person needs to maintain a positive role outside the prison system. Many people are affected by the incarceration of a person, from the family, to the community and employers, to society in general. Here is a brief look at some of those affected by a person's incarceration. 1. Children * The worst effects of incarceration can be found in the children of those who are in jail. The children can develop feelings of anger and abandonment. These feelings can be directed to other children, law enforcement or to the other parent. …show more content…

84). Typically, a child faced with the social stigma of paternal incarceration will often also encounter embarrassment and shame, which may in turn further inhibit the ability of the child to adequately adjust to the anxieties resulting from the separation through incarceration (Hannon et al., 1984; Lowenstein, 1986). The deleterious effects on child behavior, of course, are that prolonged periods of shame and embarrassment may promote depression or behavior typical of withdrawal, such as an unwillingness to engage in social interactions. Unlike other causes for paternal separation, paternal absence due to imprisonment is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, which takes on different meaning depending on the manner in which the particular cause for the incarceration is perceived—either as being “normatively approved” or as “bearing a stigma” (Lowenstein, 1984). While there is a correlation between paternal incarceration and subsequent child behavioral, emotional, and psychological problems, these concerns may not necessarily be the sole result of the separation, per se: maladaptive behavior could have existed at the time of incarceration because of faulty parenting structures. Gabel (1992) has

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