‘A Silent Public Health Crisis’

Shedding a light on the trauma of intergenerational incarceration

JULY 26, 2024

As a trial court judge in Georgia’s most populous county, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C. McBurney knows that the American justice system concerns itself with the rights of criminal defendants – the right to a lawyer, an impartial jury, a speedy trial, among numerous other rights outlined in the Sixth Amendment.

By design, the criminal legal system has an “inward focus,” McBurney told an audience of court management professionals from across the country at a July 22 conference held by the National Association for Court Management. He made his remarks alongside Meadows Institute Executive Vice President for Justice and Health Yolanda Lewis on a panel titled “How Courts can Reduce the Impact of Parental Incarceration.”

As Lewis sees it: “We need to think outward, about the children.”

The challenge for judges, McBurney said, is to consider the impact on children when parents and caregivers are sentenced to periods of incarceration. “If I send a [defendant] to state prison, it is more likely than not that there are children under the age of 18 left behind,” McBurney said. “If we think about the number of kids affected, it starts to get scary.”

Currently, 4 in 10 American children grow up in households where a parent or co-residing adult has faced criminal charges, been convicted of a felony, or spent time in prison. “When that person is arrested, and taken out of the picture, that causes trauma” for the children left behind, McBurney said.

Those children, often voiceless victims, bear the brunt of a myriad of adverse consequences, said Lewis, including psychological strain, chronic disease, antisocial behavior, economic hardship, and an increased risk of becoming involved in criminal activities.

“It is such a common situation that it cries out for us to be thinking about it a little more carefully,” McBurney said. “We are not helping anyone by turning our backs on the problem. It’s the community’s problem of which [courts] are an important institution.”

A former trial court administrator in Fulton County, where she worked closely with Judge McBurney, Lewis called parental incarceration a “silent public health crisis” and said courts need to be more innovative in finding ways to identify such at-risk children and connect them with effective and accessible community-based services to promote well-being and resiliency.

“We need to get upstream and work with community care providers to intervene” in children’s lives before the trouble begins, she stressed.

The Meadows Institute is working to do just that, Lewis added.

Starting with test sites in Texas and Georgia, the Meadows Institute is partnering with local stakeholders to build new pathways to identify children impacted by parental incarceration and connect them to available community resources.

Judges and other court personnel will be the key to piloting successful strategies, Lewis stressed. “All of this starts in the courts. None of it works without effective court and case management. Many of the pieces are in place; we just need to connect them.”