New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents

Lead Organization: The Osborne Association

Key Partners: New York City Department of Probation, New York State Administration for Children’s Services, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The New York Center for Child Development, Kings County District Attorney’s Office, New York State Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children, The Bronx Defenders, the Women in Prison Project of the Correctional Association of New York and Hour Children. 

Project Location: New York State (focus on the Bronx and Brooklyn)

Contact: Tanya Krupat, program director, New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents, The Osborne Association, tkrupat@osborneny.org 

Project Description: 

An alarming number of children in the United States grow up with a parent who is incarcerated at some point during their childhood. While this experience is diverse and varied, it is often traumatic and almost always loaded with stigma, leading many children to hide this fact from friends and others. Parental incarceration is now recognized as an adverse childhood experience which can place children at risk for poor overall mental and physical health, due in part to resulting isolation and a lack of familial connectedness with their absent parents. 

The Osborne Association, as the coordinator of the New York Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents, will advocate for the use of Family Impact Statements during sentencing and increased visiting opportunities for families during periods of incarceration by reconsidering where parents serve their time (closer to their children), in the hopes that these changes can bolster a child’s feelings of family support and lessen the traumatic effects of having an incarcerated parent. Family Impact Statements are written to convey to a judge how the children and family of a person convicted of a crime will be affected by various sentencing decisions. New York State courts do not currently consider proximity to children when deciding where to incarcerate a parent. Maintaining family ties is not only in the interest of a child’s positive health outcomes during incarceration, but upon their parent’s release as well; research now demonstrates that having strong family ties reduces the likelihood of recidivism.  

The statewide project, which with focus particularly on children in the Bronx and Brooklyn, will be led by a group of medical and mental health practitioners, criminal justice experts and child development specialists. Sixty-three percent of Bronx residents and 41 percent of Brooklyn residents live in single-parent households, which can be explained in part by the high level of incarceration in those communities. In 2009, 88 out of every 1,000 adults living in the Bronx and 50 out of every 1,000 living in Brooklyn were arrested at least once.

The Open Society Foundations and the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund will provide a cash match to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant.