It’s not just the people in prison who are paying the punishment for their crimes.

Children of incarcerated parents are more likely to suffer a variety of mental, physical and behavioral health issues than those whose parents are not incarcerated, a new study finds. They are often at the same risk levels for certain health problems that children of divorced or dead parents are. In the case of some of the conditions studied – including attention deficit disorder and certain developmental issues – children with incarcerated fathers are more at risk than those whose fathers are absent for other reasons, like death and divorce.

“Parental incarceration can be really detrimental to children, and it is not just something that affects the incarcerated,” says Kristin Turney, the study's author and aprofessor of sociology at the University of California-Irvine.

Her research showed that children of incarcerated parents are three times as likely to suffer from depression, at least twice as likely to suffer from learning disabilities and anxiety, and exhibited higher rates of asthma, obesity, language problems and even epilepsy or seizure disorders.

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The study, being published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, used data from the National Survey of Children’s Health from 2011-2012 of children from birth to age 17. It compared various health indicators and their social consequences as seen in children of incarcerated parents to those whose parents were not in jail, as well as to children in other stressful family situations like parental divorce, death or those who witness parental abuse or mental health issues.

The study controlled for race, parental educational attainment and parental health, as well as for situational factors like parental employment and relationship status – even though some of those factors could have been caused by an incarceration. The study stops short of showing incarceration caused the problems found in affected children, but determines that there is indeed a relationship between parents who are in jail and their children’s health.

A majority of prisoners have children, and more than 1.7 million children have a parent in state or federal prison at any given time – even more have parents in other types of incarceration, according to the study. A vast majority of those children are ethnic minorities, and they, along with poor children, are particularly vulnerable to certain health problems connected to having incarcerated parents.

“Incarceration doesn’t affect all kids in the same way,” Turney says.

Her study comes as debate over mass incarceration has been revived in light of its rising costs. Some proposed changes include relaxing drug laws, limiting mandatory minimum sentencing and increased flexibility for when juveniles should be tried as adults. The United States leads the world with its incarceration rate, boasting one-quarter of the world’s prison population while only having 5 percent of the world’s population. Attempts to cut down on incarceration rates have united politicians from both sides of the aisle.

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“A lot of the policy discussion really revolves around the offender and those who are in incarceration, but the reality is that is just a small part of the story,” Turney says. “Focusing only on the offenders really does a disservice to families and the children and the communities that are affected by incarceration.”

In the meantime, Turney says, teachers, physicians and psychologists should take these factors into consideration and screen for children whose parents are incarcerated. The children's program "Sesame Street" has started to tackle the issue of parental incarceration by creating special programming available at prisons across the county that includes a puppet character whose father is in jail.

According to David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, those in charge of creating in-house prison policies should take note of the findings as well. He says a number of prisons and jails have made it harder for incarcerated parents and their children to maintain their bonds. For instance, Arizona state prisons charge a $25 fee for first-time visitors (the law does not apply to children, but presumably many children would need to be accompanied by adults who would have to pay the fee). Other local jails have instituted postcard-only rules, limiting the types of letters and drawings children and incarcerated parents can send to one another. Many jails hold exclusive contracts with certain phone companies, making phone calls costly for some families.

“Reasonable people can disagree about whether someone should be incarcerated and how long they should be incarcerated,” Fathi says. “But everybody agrees that their children are innocent and their families should not also suffer.”