Pittsburgh
17% of children placed in foster care had a mother who was booked in the Allegheny Jail at least once between January 1988 and May 2007. On a per year basis, that percentage jumped from 14% in 2001 to 21% in 2004.
The Urban Institute received a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to conduct exploratory research on the impact of parental incarceration and the experiences of affected children.
The purpose of the work was to learn more about the impact of parental incarceration as well as to explore the possibilities for using criminal justice and human services data to understand the population of affected children.
This report presents findings and lesson learned from the three sites. It begins with a discussion of the datasets obtained by each site and how they were linked, followed by a review of the analyses conducted and the sites’ findings on child of incarcerated parents in their jurisdictions. The report closes with a discussion of the possibilities and challenges involved in merging and analyzing administrative data on this population.
This analysis used linked datasets across multiple jurisdictions to provide a full picture of families and children of incarcerated mothers. After obtaining and merging datasets, each site (Pittsburgh, Providence and Chicago) selected families that had been affected and conducted an exploration of the experiences of these families.