Incarceration & Reentry

Over the past 25 years our knowledge and understanding of women's lives have increased dramatically. The new information has impacted and improved services for women in the fields of health, education, employment, mental health, substance abuse, and trauma treatment.

For imprisoned mothers, one of the greatest punishments incarceration carries with it is separation from their children. As one mother put it, "I can do time alone OK. But its not knowing what's happening to my son that hurts most". As this quote suggests, when parents are incarcerated, "what's happening" to their children is a great concern. It is a concern for us as well.

This review updates the previous literature on what we know about inmate needs and the programs designed to address those needs. A more neutral terminology than inmate "deficits" or "needs" is used by referring to the different domains as "skill sets." A skill implies mastery and competence rather than a personal liability.

By virtue of their developmental stage, it is the adolescents of incarcerated parents who have the potential to have the greatest impact on society at large, and in this paper, we focus on the most powerful problem that they can exhibit, antisocial behavior.

Reentry may be thought of as a community-level process when it occurs in high concentrations. The concepts of social capital and collective efficacy have been used to explain the production and maintenance of disadvantage and its consequences.

by Sandra J. Clark, Martha R. Burt, Margaret M. Schulte and Karen Maguire of the Urban Institute for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation, October, 1996.