The Social Injustice of Parental Imprisonment

Abstract

Children of prisoners are often negatively affected by their parents’ incarceration, which raises issues of justice. A common view is that the many negative effects associated with parental imprisonment are unjust, simply because children of prisoners are impermissible harmed or unjustly punished by their parents’ incarceration. We argue that proposals of this kind have problems with accounting for cases where it is intuitive that prison might create social injustices for children of prisoners. Therefore, we suggest that in addition to the question of whether children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed, we should ask whether the inequalities that these children endure because of their parent’s incarceration are objectionable from a social justice perspective. To answer this latter question, we examine the negative effects associated with parental imprisonment from the perspective of luck egalitarianism. We develop a luck egalitarian account that incorporates insights from the philosophy of childhood. On our account, children of prisoners might endure two different types of objectionable inequalities, since they are often deprived of resources that are important for ensuring fair equality of opportunity in adulthood, but also because they are likely to suffer inequalities in terms of childhood welfare. After defending this account, we explore its implications for policy.

Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law

“…I will go on to explain how the very instrumental and empirically strong Nordic research on public sentiments of justice can help us better understand the possible ways in which the views, values, and attitudes of marginalised groups can achieve representation in our criminal justice systems. With regard to the latter I will use prisoners' families and children as a case study; an example of a group in society that risks experiencing significant inequality and social injustice (Bülow and Lindblom 2020;Condry and Smith 2018) as well as 'legal alienation' . Finally, I argue that adopting a human rights approach is a sound way of addressing this problem in a way that brings the legal consciousness of these families and children to bear on the criminal justice system.…”