It is estimated that nearly two million children have an incarcerated parent. This article reviews the challenges that these children face and potential psychological and behavioral implications. Due to the disruption in the child's life, mentoring can be a critical factor to encourage positive outcomes, and the article concludes with reviewing relevant mentoring programs.

This research brief from the Urban Institute describes preliminary findings from a study of the experiences of prisoners returning home to areas around Cleveland. Providing a broad range of reentry challenges, authors examine potential factors related to post-release success or failure, which include employment, health challenges, and family and community life.

The Urban Institute and Winston Salem State University surveyed Weed and Seed sites around the country to review the extent to which Weed and Seed sites are engaged in prisoner reentry efforts. This report summarizes the ways that Weed and Seed sites are focusing on prisoner reentry and working with partner organizations to reduce recidivism and create safer, healthier communities.

Ready4Work is a demonstration project through the Department of Labor, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the Ford Foundation to provide services to ex-prisoners. The program is designed to meet the needs of this population, as well as examine the capacity of community- and faith-based organizations to serve the population. Early outcomes show that participants are maintaining employment at high rates and have significantly lower levels of recidivism than the national average.

From the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, this report highlights reasons to engage incarcerated parents and their children in programs to help support reunification. The authors offer recommendations to help balance addressing criminal behavior of parents and child safety to keep families connected.

This resource from the Urban Institute provides information on how to address prisoner reentry issues through mapping and analysis of neighborhood-level data. Through mapping data, local officials and stakeholders can improve service delivery to this target population.

To help provide information on states' experiences related to the goal of reducing nonmarital births, and the factors that helped shape state policies, this study examines, in two parts, state perspectives and experiences regarding nonmarital birth policy since the passage of PRWORA.

This brief looks at child welfare agencies' reliance on kin, that is, relatives, to care for children who may otherwise need to be in state custody. In most states, these agencies use voluntary kinship arrangements on a fairly limited basis when caseworkers believe that children face low risk of abuse or neglect. Agencies are confronted by many challenges, including whether to remain involved with a family and how to provide assistance to them.

BSF works with state/local partners to develop or refine interventions to promote healthy marriage among interested unwed parents at or near the birth of their child.

Authored by Kelly Noonan, Rider University, National Bureau of Economic Research; Nancy E. Reichman, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and Hope Corman, Rider University, National Bureau of Economic Research. In this report, the authors estimate the effect of poor child health on the labor supply of new fathers post- welfare reform, using a national sample of mostly unwed parents and their children--a group at high risk of living in poverty. The researchers address the potential endogeneity of child health and find that having a young child in poor health reduces the father's probability of being employed by eight percentage points and that it reduces his work effort by over five hours per week. These results add to a growing body of literature suggesting that young children with serious health problems are likely to receive lower levels of health investment than their healthier peers.