Promoting Child Wellbeing Among Children Who Experience Maternal Incarceration

• Date: 01 February 2015
• Published date: 01 February 2015
• Author: Michael E. Roettger
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12119

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

MATERNAL INCARCERATION AND

CHILD WELLBEING

Promoting Child Wellbeing Among

Children Who Experience Maternal

Incarceration

Michael E. Roettger

The Pennsylvania State University

It is my pleasure to introduce an excellent research article and two highly thought-

provoking commentaries on the topic of maternal incarceration and child wellbeing,

a policy concern of increasingly important significance. Despite mothers comprising

less than 5% of the prison population in the United States, the number of children who

have experienced a mother undergo incarceration numbers into the hundreds of thousands.

In 2007, Glaze and Maruschak (2008) estimated that approximately 147,000 children had

a mother incarcerated in state or federal prison. The cumulative estimate is likely much

larger.Wildeman (2009) has estimated that approximately 0.6% of all White and 3.3% of all

Black children born in 1990 experienced a mother undergo incarceration. Assuming these

percentages apply to the population of children younger than 18 years of age in the United

States in 2010, approximately 328,000 White and 373,000 Black children will have experi-

enced a mother undergo incarceration before reaching their 15th birthday.1Suchnumbers,

along with an array of related economic, behavioral, and health risks these children face,

emphasize the national importance of adopting evidence-based policies and interventions

that reduce adverse outcomes for children who experience maternal incarceration.2

Although broad agreement might exist for generating policy and programs that reduce

adverse effects, developing research that has direct policy implications related to maternal

incarceration is a much more difficult task. Through their thoughtful and rigorous analysis,

Direct correspondence to Michael E. Roettger, 310 Biobehavioral Health, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention

Research Center, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 (e-mail: mer29@psu.edu).

1. The numbers are derived by multiplying Wildeman’s (2009) percentages with the U.S. Census Bureau’s

(2014) report for the numbers of White and Black children residing in the United States on July 1, 2010.

Racial populations include those of Hispanic origin.

2. For an overview of these risks, see Murray, Bijleveld, Farrington, and Loeber (2014).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12119 C2015 American Society of Criminology 121

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 14 rIssue 1