The Social Injustice of Parental Imprisonment

Moral Philosophy and Politics 7 (2):299-320 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Children of prisoners are often negatively affected by their parents’ incarceration, which raises issues of justice. A common view is that the many negative effects associated with parental imprisonment are unjust, simply because children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed or unjustly punished by their parents’ incarceration. We argue that proposals of this kind have problems with accounting for cases where it is intuitive that prison might create social injustices for children of prisoners. Therefore, we suggest that in addition to the question of whether children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed, we should ask whether the inequalities that these children endure because of their parent’s incarceration are objectionable from a social justice perspective. To answer this latter question, we examine the negative effects associated with parental imprisonment from the perspective of luck egalitarianism. We develop a luck egalitarian account that incorporates insights from the philosophy of childhood. On our account, children of prisoners might endure two different types of objectionable inequalities, since they are often deprived of resources that are important for ensuring fair equality of opportunity in adulthood, but also because they are likely to suffer inequalities in terms of childhood welfare. After defending this account, we explore its implications for policy.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Liberal equality and the affective family.Colin Macleod - 2002 - In David Archard & Colin M. Macleod (eds.), The Moral and Political Status of Children. Oxford University Press. pp. 212--230.
Children as negative externalities?Serena Olsaretti - 2017 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 16 (2):152-173.
Parental Partiality and Future Children.Thomas Douglas - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (1).
Childhood, education and distribuendum gaps.Lars Lindblom - 2020 - Ethics and Education 15 (1):48-61.
Parental genetic shaping and parental environmental shaping.Anca Gheaus - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):20-31.
Parental Education and Expensive Consumption Habits.Danielle Zwarthoed - 2017 - Journal of Applied Philosophy (2):825-843.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-11-14

Downloads
24 (#563,024)

6 months
9 (#144,939)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Lars Lindblom
Linkoping University
William Bülow O'Nils
Uppsala University

Citations of this work

Add more citations

References found in this work

Justice as fairness: a restatement.John Rawls (ed.) - 2001 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
What is the point of equality.Elizabeth Anderson - 1999 - Ethics 109 (2):287-337.

View all 33 references / Add more references