Invisible Sentences: Exploring the Intergenerational Social Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children in Uganda.

Parental incarceration in Uganda constitutes a deeply entrenched form of structural violence, producing recursive and trans-generational harms that disproportionately affect children in already marginalised socio-economic contexts. This article investigates the intergenerational social effects of parental imprisonment on children, advancing a critical criminological analysis rooted in southern epistemologies and relational justice. Employing a multi-method research design, the study integrates grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), legal hermeneutics, and spatial-criminological analysis, underpinned by 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, narrative interviews with children and caregivers, and doctrinal reviews of Ugandan sentencing and child protection jurisprudence. Findings reveal a spectrum of collateral harms, including educational attrition, psychosocial distress, community-based stigmatisation, and administrative neglect, reproduced through institutional logics that systematically erase the juridical subjectivity of children with incarcerated parents. Quantitative data, triangulated with GIS-based spatial mapping, demonstrate statistically significant overlaps between incarceration clusters and zones of chronic child welfare deprivation, illuminating carceral spillover effects at both household and community levels. Theoretically, the article critiques the prevailing offender-centric logic embedded in Ugandan penal regimes, advocating instead for a relational penology that centres the interdependence of caregivers and children. By conceptualising affected children as juridically invisible and structurally occluded, the study reinterprets institutional silence and policy inertia as modalities of secondary penalisation. The research advances an urgent call for the codification of child-sensitive sentencing guidelines, cross-sectoral data accountability systems, and investments in kinship-based care infrastructures. Situated within broader global critiques of penal excess and intergenerational justice (Cunneen, 2020; Hannah-Moffat, 2019), this article positions Uganda as a paradigmatic site for theorising global carceral rationalities. It contributes to the growing field of Southern criminology and human rights centred penal reform by foregrounding the rights, vulnerabilities, and social futures of children entangled in the shadows of criminal justice systems.