children of the incarcerated

i talked about this same thing this past week in class. remember the topic was the war on drugs. this is an article about a new book - All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated

Criminologist Stephen Richards says, “A successful corrections system doesn’t grow. If they were correcting anybody, they’d shrink.”

By Richards’ standards, the US penal system is a massive failure. Our prisons hold a record 2.1 million men and women. That’s twice as many inmates as the prison population of the entire continent of Africa, which is three times the size of the US — and a five-fold increase from the number of inmates in US prisons 30 years ago. The US incarceration rate of 724 per 100,000 is 25% higher than that of any other nation. And the total number of people incarcerated grew 1.9% last year, bringing to 2.4 million the number of children who now have a mother or father behind bars.

... the endless — and fruitless — cycle of crime and punishment that the mandatory drug sentencing laws of the past three decades have set into motion, and their devastating effect on the very children, families, and communities that they were allegedly created to protect.

this looks like a good book.