For the Love of Men by Liz Plank

Author:Liz Plank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Furthermore, the men who end up lining the walls of our prisons are men whom we see as perpetrators, but we forget that the vast, vast majority of them were often victims to begin with.

Masculinity professor, author and community organizer Jackson Katz sees the issue of incarceration and idealized masculinity as completely intertwined. “The prisons of the United States are absolutely filled with chronological adult men who are really little boys under the shell they’ve created. In part they’ve created this armor in defense against trauma and abuse they’ve experienced in their childhoods,” he told me. “Boys who have been abused, neglected and traumatized are ten times more likely to become abusive of others, not just girls and women but other men.” And as Katz noted, the trauma-to-prison pipeline is not just passed down to boys. “Girls who have been abused are much more likely to become self-abusive and put themselves in situations of further vulnerability.” Prison becomes another site of violence for men where instead of being healed they are put through further trauma, and then thrown back into the world to be retraumatized.

But while fathering is made more difficult by the industrial prison complex, becoming a dad can help them escape it. Datchi’s research found that present fathering has been shown to have a protective impact on men, decreasing their rates of recidivism. Men who maintain close links with their children while incarcerated are less likely to end up behind bars and more likely to have a job when they get out. Viewing fatherhood as a key role connected to ideal definitions of manhood was also correlated with a reduction in criminal activity. So in other words, idealized masculinity reinforces men’s rationalization of criminal activity, while positive masculinity can help them interrupt it.

Masculinity is a powerful vehicle that motivates behavior for men, too, and if it’s redefined in a positive way and framed as responsibility for others rather than domination of others the impacts can be tremendous.

Although being a dad can help men survive and potentially escape incarceration, the effects of their time spent locked up are passed on to their children and often become intergenerational. One researcher, Anna Haskins of Columbia University, decided to study the educational impacts of it on the children. She examined detailed data from five thousand children born between 1998 and 2000 and isolated the kinds of factors that could impact education advancement, like socioeconomic status and parental behaviors. What she found was heartbreaking: sons of incarcerated fathers were more likely to have educational delays and end up in special education by the time they were 9 years old. The data also showed that having an incarcerated father has the same impact as missing several months of school on children. Although the children weren’t delayed cognitively, it was their emotional and behavioral skills that were lacking in the sons of incarcerated fathers, things like attention, focus and the ability to control emotions. Interestingly, she found no sizable effect on daughters.

In addition to teaching

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