Children with Incarcerated Mothers : Separation, Loss, and Reunification

This Brief focuses on children with incarcerated mothers, a growing and vulnerable population. It presents five empirical studies, along with an introduction and summary chapter. The five empirical chapters examine new qualitative and quantitative data on:

• Typical occurrences when pregnant women give birth during incarceration in contrast with the benefits of a prison doula program for mothers and newborns.
A mother’s criminal justice involvement for substance abuse crimes and its effects on children’s protective services involvement and foster care placement.
• How children cope with separation from their mothers because of their incarceration and how that separation continues to affect children's lives following family reunification.
• Differences in recidivism trajectories between mothers and nonmothers during the 10 years following release from incarceration.
• Alternatives to incarceration for women in residential drug treatment and how community supervision mandates can affect, contribute to, or extend mother-child separation.

The final chapter integrates the information from the empirical studies and summarizes implications for policy and practice.

Children with Incarcerated Mothers is an essential resource for policy makers and related professionals, graduate students, and researchers in child and school psychology, family studies, public health, social work, law/criminal justice, and sociology.

Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, Ph.D., is the Dorothy A. O’Brien Professor of Human Ecology and a Professor in the Human Development and Family Studies department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty and the Center for Healthy Minds and a licensed psychologist. Through numerous publications and outreach efforts during the past 20 years, she has brought the attention of child development and family studies communities to the issue of children with incarcerated parents. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Mind and Life Institute. Dr. Poehlmann-Tynan has served as an adviser to Sesame Street to help develop and evaluate their Emmy-nominated initiative for young children with incarcerated parents called Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration. She is on the board of the International Coalition on Children with Incarcerated Parents and is working with the national organization Zero to Three on outreach projects designed to help very young children who are separated from a parent. She has published more than 75 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the editor of two monographs, a book, a handbook focusing on children with incarcerated parents, which is in its second edition, and multiple policy briefs.

Danielle H. Dallaire, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at The College of William & Mary. She earned a doctorate in developmental psychology from Temple University. She investigates the multifaceted risk of parental incarceration and its effects on young children’s social and emotional development. She is also the founder of the William & Mary Healthy Beginnings Project, a program that works with women incarcerated in local jails to provide nutritional education and support during pregnancy. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Anthem Foundation, and the March of Dimes.