Incarceration and reentry of fathers into the lives of their families

As many as 10,000,000 U.S. children have at least one parent, usually their father, who has been imprisoned (Reed & Reed, 1998). This is especially problematic in minority communities. We care about this issue because incarcerated fathers who maintain family ties and reenter family life successfully after incarceration are less likely to be rearrested (Petersilia, 2003). This presentation illuminates a case study in the making and represents our attempt to break the usual pattern of studying prisoners and recidivism from either an institutional or macro level within criminology, demography, or sociology or , conversely, an individual level with a deviance perspective. Instead, we use a family perspective-examining family processes, support mechanisms, attachment and bonding, and the reconstitution of family structures following periods of ambiguous parental absence and presence.