Parental Incarceration: Personal Accounts and Developmental Impact, Authors Denise Johnston and Megan Sullivan, 2016

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Program and Services Should Be Designed For All Children at Risk

The intersection of parental incarceration and child welfare is one of the growing concerns for child related programs and children welfare initiatives such as Domestic Violence Service Providers and Law Enforcement. In this case, when children and young adults are forced to be separated from their parents because of the implications of incarceration, they may incur devastating effect. Additionally, the caregivers of the children are also impacted negatively by incarceration. In other words, working together with incarcerated parents alongside their families can be challenging when it comes to caseworkers but through the employment of community resources and agencies, it is acknowledged that caseworkers can overcome this challenges and enhance the outcomes of the incarcerated parents and their children. However, it is important to note that violence holds friends, victim’s families and the community hostage since it rips the neighborhood apart hence preventing individuals from socializing effectively or coming together. Therefore, programs and services should not be designed specifically for COIP (Children of Incarcerated Parents) alone but rather improved for all children at risk.

It is the belief of the families, communities, and a nation at large that children will achieve in school and in the process, be able to shape their destiny in the sense that, they may end up leading productive and satisfying lives. However, this optimistic belief is not the case for all school going children. In this case, most worrying is the fact that low income makes Hispanic and African American school children to lag behind their peers when it comes to academic achievement since most of them are believed to experience challenges during their school years. One reason behind these failures is the fact that there are dramatic differences in their early life experiences coupled with poor accessibility to programs. On some occasions, there is also the tendency of mismatch between the cultural orientation of the children and the school culture. As a result, most of the children often find themselves lost and in an effort to fit, they end up engaging in irresponsible and delinquent behaviors. Some of their delinquent behaviors are copied from their close friends and families. It is for this reason that programs should be put in place to help monitor and rehabilitate not only COIP, but also all the children since they are at risk of being affected by an incarcerated family member even if they are not their parents.

Violence anywhere in the society, family, community and the nation impacts all the members of that community or society. In this case, by establishing strategies that will not only deal with a particular section of the community but rather the entire community, will be crucial, in ensuring that individuals are protected, family, neighborhoods and the community at large. Equally important, programs, regulations, and policies can help improve the state of all the children at risk of being affected by what is happening around them just like is the case with COIP. In this case, it is important to ensure that adequate programs are in place for victims of violence, children of incarcerated parents, and all the other children who may be at risk of being impacted negatively. In so doing, the children may be helped in aspects such as anger management, conflict mediation, as well as other nonviolent ways of handling their problems.