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End Children’s Trauma, Harm By Prioritizing Them When Parents Arrested, in Court
Originally posted in the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE).
CJCJ Communications and Policy Analyst Renee Menart discusses the collateral consequences of incarceration on children and family members in an Op-Ed published by the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE).
From the article:
Children with an incarcerated parent are particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of such a painful and traumatic experience. At a young age, 2.7 million children across the U.S. are forced to navigate the experience of a parent’s incarceration, conservative estimates show. That number expands to more than 5 million when we consider not only the children with a parent currently in prison, but also those whose parent was incarcerated in the past.
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Any time a parent or caregiver comes into contact with the justice system, the needs of their children must be considered and prioritized. Whether families are separated for years due to a prison sentence, often hundreds of miles from home, or for a few days in jail, exposure to the justice system at all points can have lasting implications for children.
At one of the earliest points of justice system contact — an arrest — the presence of a child is often overlooked at the scene. Parents are frequently arrested and even handcuffed in front of their child, and many law enforcement agencies do not have protocols on how to interact with children under such shocking circumstances. Children who have witnessed the arrest of a household member are far likelier to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms than children who did not witness an arrest.
Read the full article on the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (JJIE) »
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