1.5 Million U.S. Kids Have a Parent in Jail

Nearly 1.5 million American children have a mother or father in federal or state prison--a figure that has grown in step with the swelling of the nation’s prison population, the Justice Department reported. The department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics said that, at the end of last year, 1,498,800 U.S. children under age 18 had a parent in prison. That was a 60% increase since 1991--up 562,300 from the 936,500 children in that category then. During the same interval, the nation’s prison population grew by an almost identical 62%, to 1,284,894 prisoners in 1999.