Effects of Incarceration on a Marriage

Bruce Western’s, Punishment and Inequality in America, discusses the era of the “Prison Boom” that occurs from 1970-2003—when incarceration rates climbed almost five times higher than they had been in the twentieth century—while stating the effects and consequences that mass imprisonment created within the United States penal system. By discussing the disparities of incarceration between sex, age, race and education level, and how post-incarceration affects opportunities such as marriage and high-waged employment. Western provides an analysis of how the risk of incarceration accumulates over an individual’s lifespan.

The book explores the effect of mass incarceration on low-income areas, poverty places, and poor demographics. It explains that the high incarceration has a direct correlation to social problems of individuals that happen within these communities. It shows statistics of these poverty places having an increase in percentage of being sent to prison. I plan to use this in my research by providing the audience information on how individuals and citizens of communities

For over centuries, the only form of punishment and discouragement for humans is through the prison system. Because of this, these humans or inmates, are sentenced to spend a significant part of their life in a confined, small room. With that being said, the prison life can leave a remarkable toll on the inmates life in many different categories. The first and arguably most important comes in the form of mental health. Living in prison with have a great impact on the psychological part of your life. For example, The prison life is a very much different way of life than what us “normal” humans are accustomed to living in our society. Once that inmate takes their first step inside their new society, their whole mindset on how to live and communicate changes. The inmate’s psychological beliefs about what is right and wrong are in questioned as well as everything else they learned in the outside world. In a way, prison is a never ending mind game you are playing against yourself with no chance of wining. Other than the mental aspect of prison, family plays a very important role in an inmate’s sentence. Family can be the “make it or break it” deal for a lot of inmates. It is often said that “when a person gets sentenced to prison, the whole family serves the sentence.” Well, for many inmates that is the exact case. While that prisoner serves their time behind bars, their family is on the outside waiting in anticipation for their loved ones to be released. In a way, the families

America has the highest prevalence of jailing its citizens. Nearly 2.3 million Americans are behind bars or nearly one percent of the adult population at any given time (Campbell, Vogel, & Williams, 2015). As of 2014, African Americans make up 34% of the incarcerated population. As a result, a disproportionate amount of African American youth will experience a parent’s incarceration. Research has shown that children of incarcerated parents experience emotional problems, socioeconomic problems, and cognitive disturbances (Miller, 2007). In this paper, I will discuss the impact of mass incarceration in the African American community and its effect on African American children.

Prison culture or the “values, norms and attitudes that inmates form in terms of institutional survival” (Bartollas, 2013), can be described in one of three models. The Deprivation Model describes the inmate’s behavior as the product of the environment, more specifically the attempt to adapt to that which he is deprived of as a result of incarceration (Bartollas, 2013). An example of such would be the pseudo family unit or physical relationships that inmates form as a result of the absence of such relationships while incarcerated.

Mass incarceration has been an ongoing problem in America that became prevalent in the 1960s and still continues today. The reason this mass incarceration is such a crisis in our country is because it has been ripping apart the family and impacting all those involved. This epidemic affects those of every race, but more specifically, African Americans. Many researchers attribute this prison boom to police officers cracking down on crime, but only focusing on the inner city which is often times it is made up of a predominately black population. Because of this, America saw such a rise in the number of African American males in the system in at least some way; whether they were in prison, jail, or probation the numbers were astounding. When a father is removed from a home it impacts the family whether that is the wife, girlfriend, child or stepchild, it has proved to have some short and long term psychological affects on them. It is impossible to parent behind bars, so all the parenting is left up to the mother while the father is locked up. In addition, when a person goes to prison it leaves a mark on the inmate as well. Mass incarceration among African Americans is an ongoing problem impacting thousands of people, both directly and indirectly, and because of this, it is breaking apart the family structure and taking a psychological toll on the loved ones involved.

Over the last half-century, the United States has turned more and more frequently to the use of incarceration as a form of punishment. Sentencing policies and stricter laws requiring mandatory minimums for certain offenses, no matter the conditions of the offense, have boosted the incarceration rate in this country to staggering heights. The typical issues that affect America’s prison systems are reflected in Jennifer Gonnerman’s book, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. Elaine Bartlett’s life, along with the lives of surrounding family and friends, is forever changed by her 16 years of incarceration. Elaine Bartlett is only one of many Americans that have been wronged by the cruel and unusual punishments implemented by a society claiming to have a fair, balanced, and equal justice system. A fair and balanced justice system that convicts people who carries the right amount of drugs in weight to have a mandatory incarceration for a minimum of 15 years to life, yet those who commit murder or rape may receive a lesser sentence. There is also the issue of transitioning back into society after being incarcerated for so many years. Incarceration does not just punish the offender; the offender’s family and friends are also negatively affected by the conviction and imprisonment of a loved one. Children could be put in the system or need to be raised by other members in the family. This could lead the children to deviate down the same path as their parent who

There are over one hundred twenty correctional facilities within America continuously growing over time. Within these facilities, more than two million prisoners are kept for committing various crimes during their lifetime. Out of the many people detained in these prisons, African Americans make up a significant portion of this population. Specifically, African American males contribute to its high number of inhabitants. From this information, it can be inferred that many families are left without providers and support. With this in mind, many poor neighborhoods and African American families lacking one or more providers struggle to maintain stability with jobs, financial dependency and

Over the past forty years the increased of mass incarceration within the Federal Bureau of Prisons has increased more than 700 percent since the 1970’s, between the different type of ethnicity. Billions of dollars have spent to house offenders and to maintain their everyday life from rehabilitation programs, academic education, vocational training, substance abuse programs and medical care. The cost of incarceration climbs according to the level of security based on violent and non-violent crimes. Fewer staff is required in minimum and medium-security prisons that house low-level offenders. Incarceration is likely to serves as one indicator of other co-occurring risks and vulnerabilities that makes families particularly fragile. Mass incarceration is likely to increase if awareness is not implicated to reduce the rate of imprisonment and broken families to take back their communities and reclaim their hope for the future.

address is that of the effects of parental incarceration on children and families of the

African-Americans are more likely than others to have social histories that include poverty, exposure to neighborhood violence, and exposure to crime-prone role models. For example, African-American children with no prior admissions to the juvenile justice system were six times more likely to be incarcerated in a public facility than white children with the same background that were charged with the same offense. A major study sponsored by the Department of Justice in the early 1980s noted that juvenile justice system processing appears to be counterproductive, placing minority children at a disproportionately greater risk of subsequent incarceration (Deadly Statistics: A Survey of Crime and Punishment, 2000). This writer?s grandmother retired after more than thirty years as a welfare social worker for Los Angeles County. She has stated on more than occasion that the government is the main reason that most black men are in jail awaiting the death penalty today. In the sixties and early seventies, she says that women on welfare were not allowed to have men in the home, even the father of the children. These fatherless generations of men seem more prone to crime,

Since mandatory sentencing began in the mid-1980s, the United States prison system has seen a dramatic upswing in incarceration rates (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008, p. 1). “The United States’ increasingly punitive sentencing philosophy has resulted in an overreliance on incarceration, resulting in an incarcerated population that has soared from approximately 340,000 in the early 1970s to nearly 2.3 million today” (Raeder, 2012). “Parents held in the nation’s prisons—52% of state inmates and 63% of federal inmates—reported having an estimated 1,706,600 minor children, accounting for 2.3% of the U.S. resident population under age 18” (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008, p. 1).

In many countries, the female prison population has increased dramatically over the last years. This has generated widespread awareness in our society, leading people to question why the percentage multiplied exponentially. In the past, female offenders have not only been compared to their male counterparts, but to society’s view of the role of women; this role categorized them as housewives and mothers. But how did these housewives and mothers go from the home to the prisons? In most countries, women represent a minority of the prison population: normally between 2% and 8%. There are now more than 600,000 women behind bars and more than one million on probation and parole, (Bastick and Townhead 2008) most of these women are sentenced to prison for non-violent crimes. Many of these women in prison struggle with substance abuse, mental illness, and histories of physical and sexual abuse. According to the researchers Bastick and Townhead, all over the world women in prison suffer from intersecting

Assessing the consequences of our country’s soaring imprison rates has less to do with the question of guilt versus innocence than it does with the question of who among us truly deserves to go to prison and face the restrictive and sometimes brutally repressive conditions found there. We are adding more than one thousand prisoners to our prison and jail systems every single week. The number of women in prisons and jails has reached a sad new milestone. As women become entangled with the war on drugs, the number in prison has increased if not double the rate of incarceration for men. The impact of their incarceration devastates thousands of children, who lose their primary caregiver when Mom goes to prison.

One change in a family system experiencing incarceration that affects grandparents is the difficulty maintaining family ties with the incarcerated individual. Travis, McBride, and Solomon, (2005) state that factors such as the presence of security guards, the time it takes to visit inmates, difficulty of coordinating visits, and geographic location of the prison all hinder the ability for family members to maintain ties with the incarcerated family member (Travis, McBride, & Solomon, 2005). These particular challenges in visitation are difficult for family members, such as grandparents, to