Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison

Appendix B: A Portrait of the Children and Their Mothers

197 APPENDIX B A PORTRAIT OF THE CHILDREN AND THEIR MOTHERS This appendix contains descriptive statistics highlighting some demographic information about the mothers and children who took part in the study, as well as information on the mothers’ criminal histories. DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS Selected demographic characteristics of the mothers in the sample overall, as well as within each of the three recruitment sites, are shown in table B.1. The women ranged in age from 23 to 52, with an average age of 34.1. Nearly three-quarters of the mothers were black, while the rest were white. Although African Americans represented a larger percentage of women in the nonincarcerated sample (86.5 percent) than in the two groups of incarcerated women (60 percent in jail, 64.7 percent in prison), they were no less likely, statistically, to have been in detention or prison than were white women. Six women (8 percent) were of Hispanic ethnicity. Although Hispanic women were overrepresented in the jail sample (15 percent of that sample, compared to only 8 percent of the overall sample), there was no statistically significant relationship between a woman’s ethnicity and her likelihood of being incarcerated. However, white women were slightly overrepresented in both the jail and the prison samples compared to the overall population in those facilities. This may have been because inmates from racial or ethnic minority groups and their families were more fearful that a white woman like me was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, who might call child protection authorities for some reason, putting their children at risk of being placed in the foster-care system.1 A few women in the city jail did talk about their concern that the local authorities would step in, but that was a general anxiety that seemed unrelated to the research. Only one woman—who happened to be white—explicitly worried that I would call the authorities because her son was living on his own while she was in jail. On average, the mothers had 3.3 children. Some had as many as ten children; nine had one child each. For women who had more than one child, it was very likely that their children had different fathers. For instance, in App-B.qxd 4/20/11 10:25 AM Page 197 families where the mother had two children, 90 percent of the children had different fathers. Of the sixty-five families with more than one child, only four (6 percent) comprised children who all had the same father. Most of the women were not married, with 52.7 percent never having married and another 20.3 percent reporting they were separated, divorced, or widowed. Women who were married (14.9 percent) or living in a common-law marriage (12.2 percent) were no less likely than the other women to have had children fathered by different men. As might be expected from a sample drawn from individuals involved in the criminal justice system, the women generally came from a low socioeconomic stratum. Most mothers were not employed, relying on state aid to support their families. Of those who were not incarcerated when initially interviewed, twenty-six (70.3 percent) were not employed. Of these, three said APPENDIX B 198 TABLE B.1 Demographic characteristics of mothers (means and percentages) In pretrial Total No pretrial detention Sample detention (jail) In prison (N ⫽ 74) (N ⫽ 37) (N ⫽ 20) (N ⫽ 17) Age 34.1 34.59 32.95 34.53 (6.01)a (6.57) (5.59) (5.33) Race/ethnicity (%) African American 74.3 86.5 60.0 64.7 White 25.7 13.5 40.0 35.3 Latina ethnicity 8.0 5.4 15.0 5.9 Number of children 3.3 3.4 3.1 3.24 (1.80) (1.80) (1.55) (2.11) Marital status (%) Married/common law 27.0 32.4 15.0 29.4 Separated/divorced/widowed 20.3 21.6 25.0 11.8 Single 52.7 45.9 60.0 58.8 Years of education 11.07 11.25 10.55 11.31 (1.43) (1.16) (1.43) (1.85) a Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations. App-B.qxd 4/20/11 10:25 AM Page 198 they were looking for work. Eight (21.6 percent) of the women interviewed at home were working full-time and another three (8.1 percent) had part...