Over the past 50 years, the prison population ballooned from about 340,000 to 2.3 million incarcerated people. Beginning in the 1970s, the United States experienced explosive growth in prison populations. Parental incarceration refers to having a parent in prison or jail. One of the biggest risk factors for going to prison is parental incarceration. Why does parental incarceration lead to a cycle of incarceration? Nevertheless, the authors argue, there is little discussion around intergenerational incarceration and its impact on American families. Their book highlights that the cycle of incarceration can affect families for decades. In Generations Through Prison, researchers Mark Halsey and Melissa de Vel-Palumbo worked with second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation incarcerated people. Often, the cycle extends far beyond two generations. For example, a father and son who both spend time in prison experience intergenerational incarceration. Intergenerational incarceration is a term used to describe when family members from more than one generation enter the justice system. Intergenerational incarceration perpetuates high incarceration rates, and it increases the likelihood that families will live in poverty for generations. The impact of mass incarceration extends far beyond the walls of America’s prisons, though. American prisons house about 20% of all incarcerated people worldwide, despite making up just 4% of the world’s population. If unhealed and unaddressed, traumatic wounds can be unintentionally passed on, says Yael Danieli, PhD, the founder and executive director of the International Center for Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma in New York, who has spent decades researching postwar trauma responses of victims, children of victims, their families, and communities.The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Significant traumatic events and experiences, like the Holocaust, slavery, sexual abuse, and poverty, can affect people in such a way that survivors’ children and their children (sometimes continuing for decades on) are affected. While you may not have been abused, lived through discrimination, or survived war yourself, your thinking, habits, and the way you forge relationships may be rooted in the traumatic experiences your ancestors have dealt with. “This expresses itself biologically, chemically, psychologically, behaviorally, interpersonally, culturally, even nationally.” “It’s the multiple ways in which ancestral and parental post-trauma adaptational styles affect their offspring, and these ways are multidimensional,” Dr. Research suggests it begins if a parent experienced firsthand trauma or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) - defined as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood, spanning emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or neglect - which can affect the way they raise their children. When people experience trauma, it can shape how safe they feel in the world, says Christine Crawford, MD, MPH, an adult and child psychiatrist and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine. Crawford, who is also an associate medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).Ī review that looked at intergenerational trauma among war veterans’ children found that parents’ trauma could be transmitted to their families in three ways: direct traumatization by parental behavior, identifying with the parent’s experience, or family dysfunction (an indirect mechanism of transmission).ĭanieli’s research, which focuses on Holocaust survivors, found that families who have been affected by intergenerational trauma can be grouped into “adaptive styles,” including: “That trauma stays with you, so when you become a parent, you may not even know you’re interacting with your children in a way that may create trauma for them as well,” says Dr.Victim (being stuck in the trauma with emotional volatility, skepticism, and overprotectiveness).Numb (being emotionally detached, having an intolerance of weakness, and a “conspiracy of silence” - a term that describes a dynamic where survivors feel guilty to burden their families or even entire communities with their trauma and choose not to discuss it). Fighter (valuing, owning, and maintaining your identity in the face of adversity)ĭanieli says her research suggests that intergenerational trauma is universal, an occurrence everyone experiences to some degree.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |