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Monday, April 25, 2016

What Happens To Kids When Parents Get Locked Up?

So much for the successes of PRWORA and ASFA.

In the fight for justice reform, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has published the following report on the impact of welfare reform and criminal justice on child poverty of the last 24 years.

It is not good.

What is not mentioned in this report is the rate of incarceration of parents who cannot afford child support.

When a parent cannot afford to pay child support, they go to jail, even though jail is not the same as prison, it is still incarceration.

What other thing this report does not mention is that, through the promotion of the privatization of prisons, many are stripped of their right to vote in most states, as they have been convicted as a felon.

So where do many children go when a parent is incarcerated?

Foster care and adoption.  Yes, that is correct.  Children of the incarcerated are placed in an economic environment of poverty, leaving many children no choice but to approach the child welfare system, voluntarily, of course, to be reported as child abuse and neglect, for "failure to provide for the necessary needs of the child".

Poverty is the crime of child abuse.

The other kids, if lucky, will live with the one parent, a relative or on the streets.

In some situations, parental rights are terminated.

Guess who pays for child poverty?  You do.
As the U.S. prison population surged during the past several decades, so too did the number of children and families experiencing the consequences of having a loved one incarcerated. 
From 1980 to 2000, the number of kids with a father in prison or jail rose by 500 percent. 
Now more than 5 million children have had a parent incarcerated at some point in their lives, including 503,000 in California, 477,000 in Texas and 312,000 in Florida.
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