The Atlantic: How Parental Incarceration Affects a Child’s Education

By Alia Wong

This past summer, The Atlantic’s Sarah Yager wrote about the rising popularity of prison nurseries as a means of saving costs, enhancing morale, and reducing recidivism among the ever-growing female inmate population. Such nurseries are, however, still fairly rare, and generally reserved for the women who give birth when they’re already behind bars and have babies 18 months or younger. Once the babies grow past that age, they’re sent out into the world to join the 3 million children in the United States who currently have a parent in custody—a population that, for policymakers, “can fade into the background.”