When Dr. Heather M. Washington began studying mass incarceration’s effects on families and children, the field was relatively new, she says. As a first-generation student at West Virginia University (WVU), the former McNair scholar began conducting original research on fathering and incarceration.
This undergraduate interest, which included the family’s role in juvenile delinquency, sparked her current academic journey researching and teaching about mass incarceration’s effects on families and children today.
Dr. Heather M. Washington
“This was something that really spoke to me because it was a way that I could marry these two topics that I was most interested in learning more about,” Washington says. “I love to do research. I knew I wanted to do this for a living.”
After completing graduate and doctoral work at Ohio State University, Washington began teaching at the University of Albany, SUNY, in 2012 and transitioned to her alma mater WVU in 2016.
Washington inspires and challenges her students to think critically about neighborhood conditions and culture, incarceration and family and students’ personal research interests. She likes exposing students to situations, environments and topics that they “typically don’t think much about,” she says. She even devotes a few weeks in her classes to discuss these issues and, in one class, screens the HBO show “The Wire” to supplement what students learn about juvenile delinquency in class readings and lectures.
Each semester, students get to delve into Washington’s research, which has built on previous work done around intergenerational transmission of crime from parents to children, exploring the “heterogeneous effects” of mass incarceration and parental incarceration on children’s developmental outcomes.
“We know that incarceration is detrimental to children, but not all children are going to experience incarceration in the same way,” she says. “For example, some children might have more social support available, both in their families and in the community at large, more than would be available to other children.”
