At Bloomberg Tyler Cowen writes about the separation of children and parents:
It’s horrible to forcibly separate lawbreaking parents from their young children, but we do that to American citizens, too. According to one 2010 study, more than 1.1 million men and 120,000 women in U.S. jails and prisons have children under the age of 17. These separations can be traumatic, and they help perpetuate generational cycles of low achievement and criminal behavior.
These problems are especially pressing for female prisoners and their children. From 1991 to 2007, the number of children with a mother in prison more than doubled, rising 131 percent. About two-thirds of the women in state prisons are there for nonviolent offenses. Sixty percent of those women have children under the age of 18, and in one survey one-quarter of the prisoners’ children were under the age of 4. Forty-one percent of the women in state prison had more than one child.
I have a simple proposal: Let’s take one-tenth of those women and move them from prison to house arrest, combined with electronic monitoring. That would allow for proximity to their children. If the U.S. isn’t plagued by a subsequent wave of violent crime — and I don’t think it will be — let us try the same for yet another tenth. Let’s keep on doing this until it’s obviously not working. In some of these cases the court might rule that the mother — especially if she is prone to child abuse or substance abuse — will not have full custody rights to her children. Many other children, though, will benefit, and even visitation rights can help a child.
That’s an interesting proposal and one which I wish would receive more consideration.
I also think we need a greater reconsideration of our body of law. Far too many people want a civil code system in which everything is either explicitly legal or illegal. Bringing all human conduct within the law is a policy that primarily serves lawyers.
Why not Dads? Absent dads are just as devestating in their own way.
1) Parental considerations are often featured in sentencing. For example, Jesse Jackson, Jr. and his wife were convicted of a non-violent felonies and sentenced concurrently to allow one to parent their children. There are women’s prisons with nurseries in some states, which have been shown to reduce recidivism rates, over mothers who turn over their children to family or foster-care.
2) While Cowen is pretty good on such things, never trust libertarians when they discuss “nonviolent offenses.” The truth is in the sentencing/probation report about the nature of the conduct, not the highest offense charged/pled. And in particular, drug offenses are likely related to addictions identified by behavior that has negative consequences on parental responsibilities.