All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated

An intimate and heartwrenching investigation into the lives of children of imprisoned parents, by an award-winning journalist.

"I think they shouldn't have took my mama to jail….Give her the opportunity to make up for what she did. Using drugs, she's hurting herself. You take her away from me, now you're hurting me."—Terrence, a fifteen-year-old boy left to fend for himself after his mother was imprisoned for nonviolent drug possession

One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision—incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in thirty-three American children—and one in eight African American children—goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society.

Following in the tradition of the bestseller Random Family, journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status: ignored, neglected, stigmatized, and endangered, with minimal effort made to help them cope.

Topics range from children's experiences at the time of their parent's arrest, to laws and policies that force even low-level offenders to forfeit their parental rights, to alternative sanctions that take into account prisoners' status as mothers and fathers.
All Alone in the World defines a crucial aspect of criminal justice and, in doing so, illuminates a critical new realm of human rights.

Nell Bernstein is an award-winning journalist and former Soros Justice Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute whose articles have appeared in Newsday, Salon.com, Mother Jones, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She lives in Berkeley, California.