While much has been written about the plight of prisoners worldwide, the consequences for children of the incarcerated have been largely ignored.

This thorough and compassionate text presents the results from four recent large-scale studies undertaken with thousands of children in England, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Drawing from a systematic meta-analysis of 50 studies, the authors provide a remarkably rich portrait of the impact of parental incarceration on child development.

Study components include the effects on children of their parents' arrest, trial, jail time, and return home, alongside the role of attachment relations, reduced quality of child care, social and economic strain resulting from reduced income, changes in discipline, social learning, and stigma among peers.