Leila Morsy and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute have written a new report on how mass incarceration affects children’s outcomes in school. Here is a summary that they wrote. Please read the full report.

 

They write here:

 

Black parents, especially black fathers, are incarcerated at a rate that is unmatched by any other country in the modern world. Largely to blame for such unjustified rates are our racially discriminatory “war on drugs” policies that began in the 1970s. While crime, especially violent crime, has declined since the 1990s, arrests and incarceration have continued to rise.

 

This should be of urgent concern to anyone interested in education policy. The mass incarceration of African American men has important damaging consequences for children in school. The number of children affected by mass incarceration is now so great that we can reasonably infer that it contributes significantly to lowered achievement of African American children and thus to the gap in cognitive and non-cognitive achievement between black and white children.

 

In a new report, Mass Incarceration and Children’s Outcomes, we review research across the fields of criminal justice, health, sociology, epidemiology, and economics. We describe the growth in incarceration of the past few years, and how an African American child is much more likely to have an incarcerated parent than a white child, a circumstance not justified by differences by race in criminal activity. We then review the extensive research demonstrating that when parents are incarcerated, children do worse across cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures. We review convincing research that shows, for example, that children of incarcerated parents are at increased risk of dropping out of school. They are more likely to develop learning disabilities, including ADHD. Their behavior in school deteriorates. They are at heightened risk of worse physical and mental health, including migraines, asthma, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The statistical sophistication of the studies we reviewed reasonably eliminates the possibility that the shortcomings we describe in student outcomes may be attributable to socioeconomic or demographic characteristics of the children, rather than to their parents’ present or previous incarceration. Our report concludes with criminal justice policy recommendations to raise the achievement of children with incarcerated parents.

 

President Obama has responded to this discriminatory sentencing with a stepped-up rate of pardons and commutations. But such presidential action is not enough: Most prisoners are in state facilities, not federal ones. In 2014, over 700,000 prisoners nationwide were serving sentences of a year or longer for non-violent crimes. Over 600,000 of these were in state, not federal prisons.

 

“Stop and frisk” practices by local police, advocated by President-elect Trump, is not a federal policy. Once in office, Mr. Trump will have little influence over it. Reform of local and state government policies and practices that result in excessive and discriminatory incarceration is no less realistic or urgent now than it was before the presidential election.

 

State policymakers have great reach to change criminal justice policies that will positively impact how children do in school. Educators should embrace reform as a priority for advocacy. Children’s cognitive and behavioral problems caused by mass incarceration are difficult for teachers to overcome. Decreasing the number of black children affected by mass incarceration is likely to have a greater positive effect on student achievement than many school-based reforms currently advocated by education policymakers. Criminal justice policy is education policy.