Prosecutorial and Judicial Responsibility to Consider Children at Sentencing

The Existing Guidance Is Already There

The Quaker United Nations Office offers a resource on international standards and guidance protecting the rights of children of incarcerated parents. Stemming from a 2019 United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, the guide offers practical and useful perspectives that judges should take into account when sentencing parents to incarceration.

That matters because the system is not being asked to invent a humane framework from scratch. A framework already exists. The issue is whether courts and prosecutors are willing to use it.

Responsibility Does Not End With the Judge

The article’s logic is broader than sentencing alone. All actors, including law enforcement, prison professionals, the judiciary, and prosecutors, should be respectful of a child’s rights and their best interests. Prosecutors in particular should consider the effect of the sanctions they request on the well-being and best interests of the accused person’s children.

That point matters because family harm does not suddenly appear at sentencing. It is built step by step through charging, detention, plea pressure, sanction requests, and supervision design.

Non-Custodial Alternatives Are Part of the Answer

The guidance also encourages preventing separation through the use of non-custodial alternatives to incarceration for parents. That is not some fringe idea. It is a practical response to the known damage caused when children lose a parent to incarceration.

Too often, courts talk as though incarceration is the default moral answer and alternatives must be specially justified. The harder truth is the reverse: when children are involved, incarceration should require far more serious justification than the system usually demands.

Trauma-Informed Practice Is Still Largely Missing

Too often, neither police nor prosecutors engage in or embrace trauma-informed practices. The reality can look like the exact opposite: purposefully traumatizing, vindictive, and unprofessional conduct that deepens the injuries already being imposed on families.

That is what makes the broader contradiction so hard to ignore. Actors in the system often serve on boards of child advocacy groups and speak publicly about protecting children. Limiting harm to children should be at the forefront of their sentencing agenda and subsequent practices. Too often, it plainly is not.

The Government Already Knows Childhood Trauma Matters

Even more frustrating is that multiple government programs have Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, at the core of their childhood neglect and abuse prevention frameworks. The state already knows that trauma in childhood produces serious long-term consequences.

Yet courts, prosecutors, and police are still permitted to inflict complex trauma on innocent children through incarceration decisions and related practices. Apparently, if the government is doing the traumatizing, it is treated as acceptable.

Who here is actually walking the walk?

In Closing

Hopefully, better judges and prosecutors in other jurisdictions will encounter these resources and limit the damage inflicted upon children.

The larger point is simple: if the harm is known, the tools exist, and the damage is preventable, then continued indifference is not oversight. It is a choice.

Why This Case Matters

This piece matters because it forces a clearer moral accounting. Sentencing is not just about offense gravity or guideline ranges when dependent children are involved. It is also about whether the state is willing to count the harm it knows it is about to impose.

If judges and prosecutors have the power to reduce avoidable damage to children and still refuse to do so, then the problem is not lack of knowledge. It is lack of responsibility.