Skip to main page content
  Home > Issues in Depth > Prisoners With Children > Overview
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC)
  Home | About Us | Publications | News & Events | Issues In Depth | Healing Wall Online | Donations / Interns | Contact Us | Links
printer-friendly format
 
DonateNow

Overview

The incarceration of women uniquely impacts families and communities because women are often the primary caregivers of children. Additionally, because the prison industrial complex disproportionately impacts people of color, Black, Latino and Native children are at a greater risk for losing a parent to incarceration. When a man goes to prison, wives, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and aunts often work to keep the family together. When a women goes to prison - and there is no one able to care for her child - she runs the risk of losing her parental rights, meaning she no longer has any legal rights regarding her child. Too often, thousands of children end up as wards of the state and are shuffled throughout the foster care system. More still are adopted out, never to see their incarcerated parent again.

Children whose parents are incarcerated do not automatically enter the foster care system. Many parents taken into custody are able to arrange for extended family members to care for their children during the time they are in prison. However, an increasing number of children are entering the foster care system and are facing the additional trauma of being cared for by strangers. In fact, 10% of mothers in state prisons reported that their children were in the foster care system as compared with only 2% of fathers in prison.

Once a child is placed in foster care, the “permanency planning” clock starts ticking for both the child and the parent. Depending upon the age of the child at the time he or she is removed from the physical custody of the parent, court-ordered services to facilitate reunification of the family will be provided for between six months and twelve months.

 

Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
1540 Market St., Suite 490  •  San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 255-7036  •  info@prisonerswithchildren.org