ISSN: 2151-0806
there was a lot more active research and publication on this topic. On the other hand, the reality of the effects of mass incarceration since 1968 started to kick in and many of the children born started following in the footsteps as their incarcerated parents. As the “war on crime” became much more publicized by the media and politicians in the 1980s and 1990s, the public was bombarded with much more graphic images of crime, especially youth crime in the form of gangs and other random violence. As the “war on crime” expanded to include a “war on drugs” and a “get tough” approach to all crime in general, including the Three-Strikes laws, society was inculcated on a daily basis with fears of mass crime waves and near-future anarchy and gang control (witness Escape From New York and L.A., for example). A number of the books and articles written from the 1990s to the present offered society a much better look into the effects of mass incarceration on children. These books and articles included Roger Shaw’s Prisoners’ Children (1992), John Hagan’s “The Poverty of a Classless Criminology” (1992), Katherine Gabel and Denise Johnston’s Children of Incarcerated Parents (1995), John Hagan and Ronit Dinovitzer’s “Collateral Consequences of Imprisonment for Children, Communities, and Prisoners,” (1999), Cynthia Seymour and Creasie Finney Hairston’s Children with Parents in Prison (2001), Gwyneth Boswell and Peter Wedge’s Imprisoned Fathers and Their Children (2002), Jeremy Travis and Michelle Waul’s Prisoners Once Removed: The Impact of Incarceration and Reentry on Children, Families, and Communities (2003), and Nell Bernstein’s All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated (2005). Shaw’s book was a compilation of works on parental incarceration and its negative effects. It took a comprehensive view on the various dimensions in which children are harmed. It also included some foreign cases to show that parental incarceration can be damaging anywhere and that there are alternatives out there to improve things (Shaw, 1992). Hagan’s article was a presidential address to the American Society of Criminology in 1991. He declared that many socio-economic factors play a role in creating a revolving door of intergenerational incarceration. He called on other scholars to look more closely at the underlying causes of incarceration and to develop a theory of class reproduction of prisoners, essentially an intergeneration prison-industrial complex (Hagan, 1992) Gabel and Johnston presented a collection of very informative writings that included a lot of very good data on parental incarceration. They examined separately and together incarcerated fathers and mothers. They looked at public policies and current programs to assist families of the incarcerated. They reviewed the foster care and child visitation prison policies. And, they made a lot of very good recommendations on how to help the children and imprisoned parents (Gabel & Johnston, 1995). Hagan and Dinovitzer’s article presented a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the effects of parental incarceration on children. They reviewed a number of plausible theoretical interpretations, including strain theory, the socialization view, stigmatization, and the selection perspective. They emphasized that a complex layer of environmental factors influence the downward spiral towards incarceration and recidivism and the overall negative effects on the families of the incarcerated, especially the children (Hagan & Dinovitzer, 1999).
Peace Studies Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 3, July 2013
Page 171