Is there a direct correlation between education and incarceration? According to a recent article in The New York Times there is a direct negative correlation between education and incarceration. The New York Times has dubbed this generation as The Incarceration Generation. Black children born in the 1990s are twice as likely to have a parent in prison by the age of fourteen than a child born in 1978. White children born in the 1990s are about one and one-half times as likely to have a parent in prison by the age fourteen than a child born in 1978. For the most part it’s usually the fathers that end up incarcerated. For Black children born in 1978, 13.8% of their fathers as opposed to 1.4% of their mothers were incarcerated. For white children born in 1978, the figures were 2.2% and 02% respectively. For Black children born in the 1990s, 25.1% of their fathers as opposed to 3.3% of their mothers were incarcerated by the time they reached the age fourteen. For white children born in the 1990s, the figures were 3.6% and 0.6% respectively. That breaks down to one in four Black children to 1 in 25 white children. How does the parents’ education effect incarceration rates?
In 1978, 22% of the incarcerated Black fathers were high school drop out while only 10.2% of Black fathers who graduated high school were incarcerated. That’s almost a 200% difference. For Black children born in the 1990’s the figures are even more alarming, 50.5% of the fathers who had dropped out of high school were incarcerated as opposed to 20.4% of the fathers who had graduated from high school. For white children the percentage spread is much the same. In 1978, 4.1% of the fathers who had dropped out of high school were incarcerated as opposed to only 2.0% of the fathers who had graduated high school. In the 1990s, the figures were 7.2% and 4.8% respectively.
Incarceration in the United States has tripled over the pass thirty years because of stiffer sentencing rules and not necessarily because there are more crimes being committed. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the DOJ (Department of Justice) statistics, there are, at any given time, over 1.5 million children in America with at least one parent serving a prison sentence. According to Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, “Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents."
What is the solution to this growing problem? What can we as a society do to put an end to children deprived of a parent from following in that parent’s footsteps. Many children who have fathers in prison are forced to drop out of high school to take low paying jobs in order to help support their families. out The lack of at least a high school education, for what ever the reason it wasn’t achieved, was one of the causes that led their fathers to turning to crime in the first place. We, as a society, need to do whatever is needed to keep our young people in school. Children with a father in prison tend to be more aggressive, trouble makers, but is expelling them or making things so hard on them that they quit the answer. I think not. Expelling them forces them to take up street life as a means to survive We, as a society, are depriving families of breadwinners, no matter how justified we are in sentencing those men to long prison terms. As a society, we need to deelop more programs to help those families cope both financially and emotionally. As it is now, we, as a society, not only punish the criminal for the crimes he or she committed, but we punish their innocent families as well. We are in the 9th year of the 21st century, isn’t it time we stop punishing the innocent along with the guilty?
References
Eckholm, E. (2009, July 4). The incarcerated generation. The New York Times, politics/education. Retrieved July 5, 2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05prison.html?th&emc=th
