Mass Incarceration and Children’s Outcomes
Our ill-considered drug war has led to the mass incarceration of African Americans, powerfully described in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. African American men are six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated, although whites are more likely to commit drug crimes than African Americans. This is not merely a criminal justice issue. Education policy has paid it too little heed. The mass incarceration of African Americans has reinforced gaps between black and white students with respect to both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes. More than 10 percent of African American students have a parent in prison. Controlling for other characteristics, children of incarcerated parents are less likely to vote or engage in community service and have less trust in government. They are more likely to be retained in grade and are more likely to fall behind with schoolwork. They are more likely to suffer from other disadvantages that are known to depress student performance, such as physical abuse, mental health problems, illnesses (e.g. tuberculosis) and homelessness. In this talk, Morsy and Rothstein will describe how mass incarceration contributes to the achievement gap between African American and white children, and explain the inseparability of education and criminal justice reform.
Buffet lunch feast will be provided by Market Hall.
Leila Morsy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is interested in family, health, housing, and neighborhood factors contributing to school achievement differences between African American white students. Leila has an EdD in educational policy, leadership, and instructional practice, Harvard University Graduate School of Education. She can be reached at l.morsy@unsw.edu.au.
Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley). His recent work has documented the history of state-sponsored residential segregation, as in his report, The Making of Ferguson. He is the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (2004). His book on the segregation of America, The Color of Law, will be published in 2017. He can be reached at riroth@epi.org.
