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Broken Bonds: Unveiling the Impact of Incarceration on American Families

By Sydney Richner


Despite being the “land of the free,” the United States incarceration rates continue to top global charts, with more than 1.9 million people behind bars. Although this number marks the largest number of prisoners worldwide, when actually counting those touched by the criminal justice system, this number is rendered, for lack of a better word, minute. Five million children alone have experienced parental incarceration at some point throughout their childhood, 2.6 million of whom are children with a parent currently locked away. Far…far away. Two-thirds of parents in prison have never been visited by their child due to strict visitation processes and sheer distance: with 66% of parent prisoners being placed in prisons more than 100 miles from their homes. Mass incarceration is detrimental to the children involved, whose parents they are unable to see and whose emotional development often takes a severe hit. Experiencing a parent go through incarceration has been likened to parental divorce or death, with some studies claiming that the experience is found to be even more detrimental to a child’s well-being. With the children of America being our future, are they really worth risking for the illusion of a safer present?


It doesn’t stop at children; for every person behind bars, spouses, siblings, and cousins alike are all but robbed of a loved one. Talk about criminal. And yet, even with the staggering millions of people with an imprisoned family member, little research has been done on the familial impact of mass incarceration. As the author of this article, I do not have the resources to account for a significant gap in data collection and analysis. What I can offer is further insight into one of the many families fractured by our prison epidemic. Numbers, after all, are all individual LIVES.



Stephanie Spurgeon, now a paralegal for the Innocence Project of Florida, was once a client. She was falsely convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, eight and a half of which she served. Prior to this, she was a licensed home daycare provider for five years, with two children and a husband of nineteen years. She was a Girl Scout leader for her daughter’s troop and a Cub Scout leader for her son’s. She was the perfect “all around” mom: president of the HOA, chair of the neighborhood crime watch, etc. The child she stood accused of killing was the infant of a teen mother who she offered her daycare services to out of the kindness of her heart, wanting to help underprivileged children and parents in need. Spurgeon says, “I had started taking care of special needs children…then, I decided that there seemed to be a need for teen daycare…” She took Maria Harris in for a day, despite many providers denying teenage mothers services due to the red tape and cost concerns. “It was kind of like a charity thing for one family,” Spurgeon recounts. That same day, Maria Harris fell asleep and never woke up. She died eight days later of a brain hemorrhage. Doctors blamed Spurgeon for the hemorrhage, misidentifying the cause of the injury as abuse. Years later, upon re-examination, it was discovered that Maria Harris more than likely had a rare diabetic disease that caused her death. Nevertheless, Spurgeon paid the price for her kindness.


Unfortunately, so too did her family. Spurgeon’s marriage dissolved throughout her incarceration. She returned home as a single mother. What’s more, Spurgeon’s incarceration had a devastating effect on the entire family unit.

Spurgeon details, “My family was always such, such a close unit. You know, I had an extended family, cousins, uncles, and everyone. We would all get together, have Christmases and things like that. And, you know, the house was always packed. And when I left, when this happened to me, it shattered everything.” Spurgeon continues,

“I come from a family of law enforcement. We always believed that the justice system worked.” After her arrest, her family began to question the integrity of our system. In turn, this caused a strain between non-law enforcement and law enforcement family members. “It shattered our entire family. Nothing was the same,” Spurgeon states. Her law enforcement family members were prohibited from seeing her in prison for fear of associating with her newfound “criminal” title.


“It’s one thing to see a parent go through it,” Spurgeon says, “but a child having to go through it...it was just absolutely devastating what my kids went through. And I don’t think that they will ever recover or be whole again.” Children of incarcerated parents face a heightened risk of “both internalizing and externalizing behavior problems, cognitive delays, and difficulties in school.” For many children, the incarceration of their parents results in an “ambiguous loss,” with all the feeling of losing a parent and little traditional familial/community support. In response to this isolation, children with parents in prison often develop antisocial personalities or behaviors. “My son is very introverted and just not social at all,” Spurgeon reflects. Meanwhile, Spurgeon’s daughter’s response to her

incarceration, in contrast, was anger that manifested in violence. “She is like a raging bull. She'll just plow right over you,” Spurgeon states, “She ended up having to get a GED. She got thrown out of three schools because my face was all over the news, and she was fighting everybody, defending my honor.” Children of an incarcerated parent

are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school, with the likelihood increasing from 4% generally to 23% for children with an incarcerated parent. In fact, children with imprisoned parents are frequently ostracized by their peers. Many children of prisoners report being victims of bullying due to their parent's incarceration, which predisposes them to a semi-constant fight-or-flight response or higher levels of emotional reactivity (i.e., anxiety or aggression). Spurgeon would tell her son, “Just say we're not related. Just deny that you're related to me.’ Spurgeon recalls, “Going to the car in the morning, they had sheets and blankets over their heads 'cause the media was on the front yard.”


Involvement with the criminal justice system extends far beyond the individual. This involvement impacts entire families, creating a ripple effect that can have lasting consequences on innocent relatives’ mental and physical health.  “Having a family member incarcerated is considered an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). The impact of ACEs over the course of a child’s life contributes to poor mental health and behavioral issues (alcoholism, depression, anxiety, suicide) and poor physical health in adulthood (heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, liver disease),” according to Partners for Justice. Spurgeon refers to this phenomenon as the “domino effect” of incarceration, leading to generational harm. For wrongful conviction cases, “people want to see a face who suffered such an injustice. While I feel like we are the face, me and my freedom family, seeing what their families went through just totally changes someone’s whole perspective. It affects [people] you don’t even think of…It’s a domino effect, and it affects the entire family,” states Spurgeon. Family members of the incarcerated are known, in criminal justice studies, as the “hidden victims” of our criminal justice system. Spurgeon goes on to say, “Being a kid who's relying on a parent to be there and the parent can't be there, it's just, I think that's a great thing to talk about because I think a lot of people think about the person who went through it. They don't think of a family or the kids that they left behind, that are left trying to pick up the pieces of a broken heart and a broken family.”


The so-called "land of the free" has become a land of the bereaved, where the collateral damage of the criminal justice system leaves a lasting imprint on the innocent. For family members of the incarcerated, their hearts lie behind metal cells. As their bodies and minds learn to live without them, much is lost in adaptation. The next time our criminal justice system attempts to put another innocent person behind bars, I urge you to think of more than the life of the accused “criminal” presented before you. Instead, think of the family they leave behind them.


Wessler, M. (2023b). New report mass incarceration: The whole pie 2023 shows that as the pandemic subsides, criminal legal system returning to “business as usual.” Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2023/03/14/whole_pie_2023/ 

2 Bryant, E. (2021). More than 5 million children have had an incarcerated parent. Vera Institute of Justice. https://www.vera.org/news/more-than-5-million-children-have-had-an-incarcerated-parent 

3 Wang, L. (2022). Both sides of the bars: How mass incarceration punishes families. Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/08/11/parental_incarceration/#:~:text=Most%20incarcerated%20parents%20and%20their,received%20a%20visit%20from%20them.

4 Parental incarceration can be worse for a child than divorce or death of a parent. American Sociological Association. (2014, August 16). https://www.asanet.org/parental-incarceration-can-be-worse-child-divorce-or-death-parent/ 

5 Michaels, C. (Ed.) (2013, June). Children with Incarcerated Parents - Considering Children's Outcomes in the Context of Family Experiences. St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Extension, Children, Youth and Family Consortium.

Berkel, C., O'Hara, K., Eddy, J. M., Rhodes, C. A., Blake, A., Thomas, N., Hita, L., Herrera, D., Wheeler, A. C., & Wolchik, S. (2023). The Prospective Effects of Caregiver Parenting on Behavioral Health Outcomes for Children with Incarcerated Parents: a Family Resilience Perspective. Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research, 24(6), 1198–1208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-023-01571-9 

7 Advocates for Children of Incarcerated Parents. (n.d.). Facts & figures. https://www.afcoip.org/facts-figures

8  Ye, Xinran. (2023). Where does the Stigma of Prisoners’ Children Come from: A Sociological Discussion Based on Criminal Genes. Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences. 8. 1593-1598. 10.54097/ehss.v8i.4528.

9 Partners for Justice. (2023). Generational Harm: Incarceration’s Impact on Children and Families. https://www.partnersforjustice.org/evidence/generational-harm 

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