When Are You Coming Home?: How Young Children Cope When Parents Go to Jail

As the United States approaches its 50th year of mass incarceration, more children than ever before have experienced the incarceration of a parent. The vast majority of incarceration occurs in locally operated jails and disproportionately impacts families of color, those experiencing poverty, and rural households. However, we are only beginning to understand the various ways in which children cope with the incarceration of a parent - particularly the coping of young children who are most at risk for the adversity and also the most detrimentally impacted. When Are You Coming Home? helps answer questions about how young ones are faring when a parent is incarcerated in jail. Situated within a resilience model of development, the book presents findings related to children’s stress, family relationships, health, home environments, and visit experiences through the eyes of the children and families. This humanizing, social justice-oriented approach discusses the paramount need to support children and their families before, during, and after a parent’s incarceration while the country simultaneously grapples with strategies of reform and decarceration.

Hilary Cuthrell currently serves as a Correctional Programs Specialist at the National Institute of Corrections, Federal Bureau of Prisons. She manages The Family Strengthening Project--a national project specifically focused on children of incarcerated parents in both local and state correctional facilities. She recently completed a post-doctoral position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also served as an adjunct faculty member at Indiana State University. She has been published in a number of journals but this will be her first book.

Luke Muentner, PhD, is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Pediatrics. His research investigates the consequences of parental incarceration and reentry for children; his work has been published in numerous criminology, developmental, and social work journals including Crime & Delinquency, Developmental Psychobiology, and Family Relations.

Julie Poehlmann is the Dorothy A. O’Brien Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has served as a professor in the human development and family studies department (HDFS) for the past 20 years. In addition to authoring 75 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, she is the editor of Children’s Contact with Incarcerated Parents: Implications for Policy and Intervention (Springer, 2015) and a co-editor of Handbook on Children with Incarcerated Parents (Springer, 2019).