Africa’s children haunt the US prison system

The New York Times has yet again 'discovered' a crisis among African American youth. Africa’s children haunt the United States, home of 'the incarceration generation': 'The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behaviour, social isolation, depression and problems in school – all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.'

‘Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,’ said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the ‘incarceration generation’. Incarceration rates in the United States have multiplied over the last three decades, in part because of stiffer sentencing rules. At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison, according to federal data. But many more are affected over the course of childhood, especially if they are black, new studies show. Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a father in prison, compared with one in 14 white children with dropout parents, according to a report by Dr Wildeman recently published in the journal Demography. For both blacks and whites, the chances of parental incarceration were far higher than they were for children born just 12 years earlier, in 1978.’

None of this is new news or surprising. Cage the fathers, super-exploit the mothers, forget the children. It’s a simple program. Put a nation of mothers behind bars, where too often there are no fathers or other guardians around and there is no public support, and you imprison the children. Where’s the surprise? Shackle pregnant women prisoners in labour and delivery, in the name of security. Are you surprised? This has all been said before. It’s common knowledge.

Albie Sachs is a South African judge who also haunts the US prison system. Why? Because he is a decent human being, that’s why. He decided to listen to a woman colleague, who argued that a woman, Mrs M, could be a good mother who had made some mistakes – many mistakes in fact – but a good mother who was not a monster. His female colleague argued as well that Mrs M’s children had rights, constitutionally protected rights. In effect, she argued that the constitution codifies responsibility, state as well as individual. Albie Sachs did not shrug; instead, he listened and heard. In the S versus M case, Sachs decided that primary caregivers of children should not be sent to jail. That decision haunts US prisons as it haunts The New York Times story.

Sachs later discovered that he was not alone in his finding. In Scotland, Kathleen Marshall’s report, Not seen. Not heard. Not guilty, argued that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ‘are systematically ignored by the court system. The report found that almost two-thirds of prisoners in the Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling had children under 18, but there was no provision to take their rights into account during sentencing.’ Kathleen Marshall’s report haunts the prisons and the accounts of prisons in the United States.

In South Africa, Albie Sachs took responsibility and acted. In Scotland, so did Kathleen Marshall. In the US, it’s time, it’s way past time, for similar action. Perhaps South Africa could send some judges whose judicial expertise is founded in human decency and a sense of social justice, to bring a distinctly human – and African – solution to a distinctly American risk for the children descended from Africa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Dan Moshenberg is co-convener of Women In and Beyond the Global, and director of the Women’s Studies programme, George Washington University. A different version of this article appears at Women In and Beyond the Global.
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