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Focus & Focus+ 32(2), Fall/Winter 2015–2016

The six articles in this issue examine the topic of incarceration, and how it affects prisoners and their families, both during and after imprisonment. The first article summarizes a seminar given by Christopher Uggen at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on crime, punishment, and American inequality, where he argued that basing criminal justice policy on the view that all people can be classified either as “bad actors” or “good citizens” is untenable and may lead to over-punishment. Michael Massoglia, Glenn Firebaugh, and Cody Warner look at the quality of neighborhoods that former prisoners call “home” after release, and whether that varies by race. They conclude that incarceration tends to harm whites more than blacks with respect to neighborhood attainment. Julie Poehlmann-Tynan summarizes recent research on children’s contact with incarcerated parents. She offers a number of policy recommendations intended to improve the experience of parent-child contact during parental incarceration and child and parent well-being in the context of parental incarceration. Anna R. Haskins uses newly available longitudinal data to look at the effects of a father’s incarceration on school-age children’s mental health, socioemotional development, and cognitive skills. She finds negative effects of paternal incarceration on both noncognitive and cognitive outcomes for children, and argues that these findings provide additional evidence that having an incarcerated father is an important avenue through which educational inequality is produced and reproduced among U.S. children. Signe Hald Andersen and Christopher Wildeman evaluate whether and how paternal incarceration may increase children’s foster care placement. They identify potential pathways through which this increase could occur, and, using data from Denmark, conclude that for Danish children having an incarcerated father results in large increases in the risk of children being placed in foster care. Finally, Madeleine Solan and Charles J. Homer, from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offer an approach to first reduce incarceration and then, in the event it occurs, to mitigate its negative effects. They provide some examples of the Obama administration’s related efforts.

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