When parents go to jail, children are the hidden victims

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About 14% of children in Dallas County have parents who are incarcerated.

This column is part of our State of the City project, in which The Dallas Morning News explores the most critical issues facing our communities. The first series focuses on public safety.

When parents are arrested in Dallas, it sets off a cascade of events that have a lasting impact on people who have been accused of no crime: their children. As many as 100,000 children a year in Dallas have parents who are behind bars, about 14% of children across the county. They are the hidden victims of the criminal justice system.

Seventy-five percent of people in Texas jails are in pretrial detention, without ever being convicted of a crime, up from 32% 25 years ago. Parents detained in Dallas County jails are separated from their children for more than a month, on average. People often languish in jail with no contact to family or social supports, because they are too poor to afford the $10,000 median bail amount. That figure represents eight months of income for the typical detainee, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

A large majority of people have been sent to jail for nonviolent offenses that are most often rooted in mental health and substance abuse issues. Once incarcerated, people with mental illness stay longer in jail than those with no mental health problems. Upon release, they are at a higher risk of rearrest than those who do not have mental illness.

Putting an arrested person in jail before a trial removes that person from a community, a job and a family. As a result, incarceration severs human connections and worsens intergenerational cycles of poverty.