I've just worked on a few with a student tied to criminal justice. How about the way mandatory minimum sentencing is taking a lot of our young men and women and putting them in jail - creating permanent records - for possession of half a joint of marijuana? It's creating a new culture. Now children visit their parents in jail. The parents get screwed up by the jail culture and have to re-integrate when they come out. It's pretty tough.
Also, how does living in a women's shelter hidden from an abusive father affect children's emotional development?
If you search with google, use their google scholar search tool to get papers you can cite from -
http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en