Effects of the Pretrial Supervision Phase on Children of Defendants: Opportunities for New Data Collection and Analysis

• Activity Number: 408
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics
• Author(s): Mary McGraw-Gross*+ and Cynthia McMurray and Michael Kisielewski and Valerie Cruz
• Companies: StatAid and National Society of Public Affairs and Administration and StatAid and
• Keywords: data collection ; federal statistics ; incarceration ; survey data ; focus groups ; data analysis

Abstract

Research indicates that children of criminal offenders are at higher risk of experiencing adverse social, economic, and developmental effects than their peers. They are six times more likely to be imprisoned, and one-tenth of them will be incarcerated prior to adulthood. Traditionally interventions to mitigate those effects have begun during the post-conviction phase. This underscores the need for data collection and analysis during the pretrial phase to determine whether providing services earlier would yield equal or greater benefits than post-conviction services. This paper outlines children's economic, social, and cultural rights to create a baseline for studying how well those rights are maintained from a parent's pretrial supervision phase to post-incarceration. It then proposes a combined framework of survey and focus group data from agencies or programs to assess the experiences