Children of Incarcerated Parents: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners.

This book summarizes the current research on children whose parents are incarcerated, and discusses the implications of those findings for policy and intervention. It uses a developmental perspective to integrate theory with research and delineates how both resilience processes and contextual factors shape experiences and outcomes for children whose lives are affected by the incarceration of a parent. Following a chapter on multidisciplinary perspectives on research and intervention with children of incarcerated parents, Part 1 discusses background information and current trends in service planning and intervention development, and shares findings from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on incarcerated parents and their children. Part 2 on developmental research, describes findings from longitudinal research on the effects of parental incarceration on children, attachment in infants and children of incarcerated parents, the effects of parental incarceration for school-aged children and for adolescents in family, school, and peer contexts, and the contexts of race, ethnicity, and culture for children of incarcerated parents. Findings from intervention research are discussed in Part 3, including research on interventions within prison nurseries, parenting programs for prisoners, mentoring interventions for children of incarcerated parents, and theory-based multimodal parenting intervention for incarcerated parents and their children. The final part of the text explores the interface between corrections and child welfare for children of incarcerated parents, implications and recommendations for research and intervention, and a research and intervention agenda for children of incarcerated parents. Numerous research.