Articles of Interest: A Look at the Difficulties Faced by Fathers on North Carolina’s Death Row

A June 18, 2024 arti­cle pub­lished in the Assembly exam­ines the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ships fathers on North Carolina’s death row have with their chil­dren, as they grap­ple dai­ly with the uncer­tain­ty of their sen­tence. The author, Waverly McIver, high­lights the hard­ship these fam­i­lies endure through the expe­ri­ences of two death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers, Jason Hurst and Terry Robinson. 

According to Warden Jamel James of North Carolina’s Central Prison, home to all death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers in the state, about 70 of the 136 men impris­oned are fathers. Programs like Proverbs 226 are aimed at build­ing rela­tion­ships between incar­cer­at­ed par­ents and their chil­dren, but death row pris­on­ers are not eli­gi­ble to par­tic­i­pate. Research that has exam­ined the impact a parent’s incar­cer­a­tion has on a child’s well-being has found var­i­ous detri­men­tal effects ​“from poor­er phys­i­cal health and aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance in ear­ly child­hood to a high­er pres­ence of risk behav­iors in ado­les­cence,” but few stud­ies have exam­ined these effects on the chil­dren of death row pris­on­ers, who are faced with an addi­tion­al lay­er of uncer­tain­ty. ​“You have to know how to com­mu­ni­cate with your loved ones, espe­cial­ly when you think that every day you wake up they’re gonna kill you,” said Alexander Harris, Mr. Robinson’s old­er son. ​“Like, that’s a feel­ing that nobody knows until you’re on death row.”