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Parental Criminal Justice Involvement

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Handbook on Children with Incarcerated Parents

Abstract

This chapter presents a review of the research on the experiences of families involved in the criminal justice system. We discuss parental incarceration and other forms of justice involvement through the lens of criminal justice system processing. We partition our essay into two stages: (1) an overview of the criminal justice system and its complexities, and (2) a description of criminal justice processing (i.e., arrest, charging and adjudication, and punishment) and the potential for effects on children, using policy interventions and reforms as salient examples. In so doing, we highlight the challenges families face prior to parental incarceration and shed light on the complexities of the criminal justice system that are often insufficiently appreciated in the research literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University-Newark, Newark, NJ, USA

    Sara Wakefield & Chase Montagnet

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  1. Sara Wakefield
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  2. Chase Montagnet
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Correspondence to Sara Wakefield .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Family Translational Research Group, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    J. Mark Eddy

  2. Human Development & Family Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Julie Poehlmann-Tynan

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Wakefield, S., Montagnet, C. (2019). Parental Criminal Justice Involvement. In: Eddy, J., Poehlmann-Tynan, J. (eds) Handbook on Children with Incarcerated Parents. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16707-3_3

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