Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) by Sara Wakefield & Christopher Wildeman

Author:Sara Wakefield & Christopher Wildeman [Wakefield, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-11-07T06:00:00+00:00

6

PARENTAL INCARCERATION AND CHILD HOMELESSNESS

IN CHAPTERS 4 and 5, we detailed the effects of paternal incarceration on childhood mental health and behavioral problems and infant mortality. Here, we describe the effects of paternal incarceration on a final indicator of extreme disadvantage, child homelessness.

Classic accounts of the homeless focus on the single white men who once were the vast majority of this population (Bahr and Caplow 1974); but starting in the early 1980s, the share of the homeless composed of African Americans and children began to grow (Hopper 2003; Lee, Tyler, and Wright 2010: 505). All sorts of statistics illustrate the magnitude of the growing child homelessness problem (and we offer them later in the chapter), but perhaps nothing is more telling than the fact that, in addition to Alex, the Muppet dealing with paternal incarceration, the children’s television show Sesame Street also introduced a new Muppet character dealing with food insecurity, a key precursor to (and also a consistent consequence of) homelessness.1

This shift from a homeless population predominantly composed of old, single, white men to one to which black children increasingly also contribute led to risks of child homelessness that would have been unthinkable before the shift: about 2 percent of American children are homeless each year (National Center on Family Homelessness 2009), with rates approaching 10 percent for African American children living in city centers (Culhane and Metraux 1999: 227–228). Furthermore, as with infant mortality, racial disparities in the risk of child homelessness are striking. According to one analysis, black children ages 0–4 in New York City were between twenty-nine and thirty-five times more likely than white children of the same age to have stayed in a shelter in the last year, a disparity so large that it outpaces nearly every other racial disparity in childhood we can think of (Culhane and Metraux 1999: 227–228).

Like homeless adults, homeless children suffer high rates of victimization (Hagan and McCarthy 1997; Lee, Tyler, and Wright 2010: 506) and exposure to infectious disease (Haddad et al. 2005), have limited access to health care (Kushel, Vittinghoff, and Haas 2001), and are at elevated risk of mortality relative to comparable housed children (Kerker et al. 2011). Furthermore, homeless children struggle to keep up with their schoolwork, are at high risk for abuse, and suffer more mental health problems than other children (Vostanis, Grattan, and Cumella 1997; Buckner 2008; Rafferty, Shinn, and Weitzman 2004). Not surprisingly, child homelessness is also linked to greater food insecurity, worse health, and more difficulty in school (National Center on Family Homelessness 2011), to name just a few of its relevant short-term effects. If the negative effects of homelessness extend into adulthood (and they almost certainly do), child homelessness could imperil well-being throughout the life course and—because of the unequal racial distribution of child homelessness—exacerbate inequality.

Despite its importance and the fact that being homeless as a child is trumped only by one or two more tragic events, such as dying or being placed in foster care because of maltreatment, knowledge about the causes of shifts in the homeless population remains limited.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.