Blair Hopkins

BLAIR HOPKINS

All in a Day’s (Sex) Work and SWOP behind Bars*

The Correlation between Intergenerational Poverty and Intergenerational Trauma by Laura Lemoon

ACES is also known as Adverse Childhood Experiences, a term created by the CDC in Partnership with Kaiser Permanente. The groundbreaking study found that children who experience trauma have more negative health outcomes as an adult. A study by the National Institutes of Health also found that brain development of children can be negatively impacted from growing up in poverty. This is due to factors such as exposure to greater levels of stress, cold or lack of proper heating, and high-fat diets.

Intergenerational poverty has a very strong relationship to intergenerational trauma. The nature of poverty has the potential to facilitate the propensity for trauma. An example would be a teenager whose parents are rarely home because they have to work so much that the child ends up getting into trouble and going to jail. A second example is the mom who can’t participate fully in parenting her child because unemployment and a limited income has meant she can no longer access her mental health care, which leaves her unable to function. There are many more examples of how interrelated poverty and trauma are correlated.

SWOP Behind Bars eases the impacts to families of incarcerated persons through programs like MoneyTalks, which provides financial tools and education to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons who may not have ever had access to financial education due to the axes of intergenerational poverty and intergenerational trauma. One of the biggest ways in which the State fails incarcerated people is by not sufficiently working to counter the impacts of poverty and trauma; a second is the lack of their supporting a transition from prison to the outside world. Incarcerated people, upon release, are maybe given a ride to the nearest bus stop, possibly a very small stipend, and that’s about it. This is a huge contributor to recidivism, and we know that people with more ACES (adverse childhood experiences) are likely to have a higher rates of adverse health (including mental health) outcomes and difficulties of financial barriers when compared to adults with fewer or none. By not fully addressing the potential impacts of issues such as poverty, trauma, and systemic racism, prisons are failing incarcerated persons.

Five Facts We All Need to Know About the Intersections of Race and Mass Incarceration by SWOP Behind Bars

Mass incarceration is a highly complex issue that has deep, historical roots. Paired with considerations around racial inequity, it becomes even more historical in nature. According to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, many people don’t know that racist policy changes during the 1960s and the criminalization of social issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness (not an actual increase in crime) were what contributed to even higher rates of incarceration among Black and Latino men. If you are looking for a deeper understanding around the issues of racism and mass incarceration, these are the top five facts you need to know:

1. As evidenced by the below Harvard University graph, Black and Latino men are at an even higher rate of vulnerability to incarceration when they do not have a high school diploma or a GED. Multiple things contribute to this, including disproportionate poverty rates in Black and Latino households and disproportionate rates of having a parent behind bars.

Figure 4. Black Men with Low Education Levels are at High Risk for Incarceration, Much Higher than White Men with Similar Education Levels

Note. Figure 4 shows the cumulative probability of male incarceration by age 30 to 34. Source: B. Pettit, B. Sykes, and B. Western, “Technical Report

on Revised Population Estimates and NLSY79 Analysis Tables for the Pew Public Safety and Mobility Project” (Harvard University, 2009).

2. According to the National Institutes of Health, having an incarcerated parent puts Black families in the position of being more susceptible to economic hardship, greater difficulty of missing basic needs, and greater need to rely on social services. According to Harvard University, this difficulty can continue after the incarcerated parent is released, and they struggle to find work due to their record.

3. As reported by the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 65,000 incarcerated persons are released from jail every year and two thirds will be re-incarcerated within three years. The USDOJ states that this is because many people have no safety nets, such as jobs, places to live, or spare money to ease the transition back into society, so it becomes very difficult not to resort to certain behaviors to get money out of desperation.

4. Mass incarceration fuels poverty, especially in Black and Latino communities. This is because mass incarceration 1) fuels job instability, 2) results in less lifetime earnings and less intergenerational wealth, 3) removes primary earners and drains assets, 4) limits access to public benefits, and 5) disrupts the social and economic fabric of neighborhoods.

5. There are many things that can be done to advocate for dismantling mass incarceration; this includes policy work at the state and federal levels, advocating for more robust college funding opportunities, and ending the employment discrimination of people with prison records. Great ways to take the first step toward this are volunteering with nonprofits that work towards dismantling mass incarceration, such as Sex Worker’s Outreach Project Behind Bars or making donations to organizations that actively work against these problems (i.e., SWOP Behind Bars).

*Editor’s Note: To view her work as Deputy Director and to view Hopkins’s activist websites, All in a Day’s [Sex] Workand SWOP behind Bars, in their entirety, please visit

https://www.adswproject.org/about and https://www.swopbehindbars.org.