Mothers and Their Children in Prison
This is a very interesting article on new programs being developed for children of women in prison. In Ohio, some children are allowed to stay with their mothers in prison until they are 18 months old. In Kentucky, there is a prison that has a nursery, but children do not live with their mothers.
Read more about this here
Which approach to you think is best? What makes the most sense for both the rehabilitation of the mother and the development of the child? At what age is prison an unhealthy environment for children?
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I believe the article was taken down; however, using your questions as my only context I will attempt to answer our question.
I believe 18 months is too long for the child to stay with an incarcerated mother. While I believe that the birth mother may provide love to her own child with more ease than a surrogate parent in most situations the child will not remember the time spent in the prison (with the birth mother), but the child may become ill due to the American prison system’s lack of cleanliness.
Since there are no obvious benefits to keeping the child with the incarcerated birth mother and there are some possible detriments, the time at which the prison becomes an unhealthy environment is upon being born.
i truly believe that there is no respectable age for a child to be imprisoned in jail or any type of unlawful facility be it with or without their mothers.no child deserves to be in jail unless they were convicted of a hainous crime or an illegal act in a court of law with a case that was presented in front of a judge.but for a child to imprisoned just for the heck of it is downright known to humanity as an act of injustice that needs to be corrected and acted upon.this is an issue that WILL and has ALREADY impacted our nation.and being that i am only 16 years of age even i know right from wrong and this is just indescribebly wrong in the eyes of man and congress,and in the eyes of America
why should the child suffer from what his mother did? the child is only in prison to comfort his mother; i dont believe its just for the child. the child should be with people who can care for him/her financially, emotionally, and in any other way possible. I understand the mother may want to be with her child but if she cared about the child she would set aside her selfishness and think of whats best for him/her.
This is my response and will most likely be part of my essay;
I understand in developing countries, children may need to commit crimes like stealing to survive. And without moral guidance (and after becoming desensitized to all they see), they may be likely to fall into gangs and organized crime, and to commit heinous crimes such as rape and murder.
Serious crimes such as rape and murder from children should be evaluated legally in a fair system (ideally, by educated peers), and children should be psychologically evaluated if they commit these crimes. There does need to be a certain point of accountability where they are responsible for their actions (as they are coherent of their decision making in their late teens).
However, we would like to stop the problem at the source, by providing more public care and education options, so that children have their basic needs met and can develop a sense of right and wrong. By eliminating the problem at the source, there would no longer be the debate of how long children have to stay in prison, because they’d have more options to avoid that situation entirely.