In reaction to the tremendous increase in incarceration of poor and minority-race adults, perceiving that such adults suffer from losing not only liberty but also family ties, and citing the damage that children suffer from parental incarceration, advocates for prisoners have promoted programs to increase inmates' contact with their children. When convinced that such programs reduce criminal recidivism, legislators and prison officials have approved and funded such programs. As described in Part I, children-in-prison programs, which predominantly involve children of minority race, range widely in the degree to which they make prison a part of children's lives. At the extreme, there is a fast-growing phenomenon of states placing newborn children into prisons to live for months or years with their incarcerated mothers, mostly in separate units termed "prison nurseries."
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