The New York Times article I chose for my CRQ was When Parents Are in Prison, Children Suffer by KJ Dell’Antonia. My attention was drawn to this article through the lines, “She is just one of the five million American children who have had a parent incarcerated at some point in their lives. Her father’s sentence is hers, too” (Dell’Antonia Para 3). As an avid watcher of Law and Order and as an American citizen who watches the news, I feel as though I have a good grasp on the insanely large number of people incarcerated for a multitude of reasons. However bad these people are, and I believe most of them are the worst kind of bad people, I rarely think about the families they leave behind. Every man behind bars has a mother and every woman behind bars has a father and depending how present or not present these people were in their lives, they are left to pick up the pieces after sentencing. I thought that the beginning of the article was common sense, of course a child of a criminal is negatively affected by their parent’s actions and jail sentence, how could they not be? It is sad to think that people can not stop their bad ways when they have children. I did not however realize that there were very few systems in place to help these children and that the burden often fell to their other parent or extended family. ““A prison sentence for a parent shouldn’t be a life sentence for a family,” said Ryan Chao, the Casey foundation’s vice president for civic sites and community change” (Dell’Antonia Para 11). I was intrigued to read about the Casey Foundations programs and plans to help convicts when they get out of prison to get their lives back on track for their kids and their programs to hopefully stop the cycle of crime from generation to generation. After reading this article, I realized that every person can see that the children of criminals are innocents, born into an unfortunate situation that was not of their choosing and that they need help. The children are not the bad guys and if the statistics are true then over five million American children are at risk because of the choices that their parents made. This really got me thinking why I had never heard of these programs or this problem before. Why are the children of criminals not talked about more? Just because their parents made mistakes and are possibly bad people does not make their innocent children guilty.
Dell’Antonia, KJ. “When Parents Are in Prison, Children Suffer.” Well. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2016.