The Unequal Collateral Consequences of Mass Incarceration for Children’s Educational Outcomes

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

In response to dramatic, highly concentrated increases in the American incarceration rate over the
last four decades, scholars have developed an acute interest in the growing population of children
who experience parental incarceration. A growing body of research documents the mostly negative
consequences of paternal incarceration for children’s educational outcomes, as well as for other
outcomes such as mental health, homelessness, and delinquency. In an era where incarceration is
both common and unequally distributed, mass incarceration has likely exacerbated racial and social
class inequalities among American children.
But research on the collateral consequences of paternal incarceration for children’s
educational outcomes (and for children’s wellbeing, more generally) is limited by its nearly exclusive
consideration of average effects and its lack of attention to the causal mechanisms linking paternal
incarceration to children’s educational outcomes. Sociological theory, as well as the deeply textured
qualitative research on this topic, suggests that it may be untenable to assume homogeneity in the
effects of paternal incarceration. First, the life course perspective suggests that the effects of paternal
incarceration may depend on the age of children when it occurs. For example, early childhood
represents a fundamental period in the life course for cognitive, social, and emotional development,
and children may be especially sensitive when paternal incarceration occurs during this period.
Second, the relationship between paternal incarceration and children’s educational outcomes by vary
by the fathers’ propensity to experience incarceration. On the one hand, cumulative disadvantage
theory implies that the deleterious effects of paternal incarceration may be strongest for children
most likely to have an incarcerated father (i.e., those who experience disadvantages across a host of
domains). On the other hand, theories about event stressors—stressful life events that are sudden
and unexpected—suggest that the deleterious effects of paternal incarceration on children may be
strongest for children least likely to have an incarcerated father (Eaton 1978; Wheaton 1982).
Therefore, in this manuscript, I consider three previously unanswered research questions:
First, what are the time-varying effects of paternal incarceration on children’s social emotional skills
(internalizing problem behaviors and externalizing problem behaviors, as measured by the Child
Behavior Checklist (CBCL)) and test scores (the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Third Edition
[PPVT], the Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension test, and the Woodcock-Johnson Applied
Problems test) in middle childhood? Second, what are the heterogeneous effects of paternal
incarceration on children’s educational outcomes? Third, what are the causal mechanisms linking
paternal incarceration to children’s educational outcomes? I answer these questions with data from
the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal cohort study of children born in
urban areas in 1998-1999, and a series of propensity score matching methods that carefully attend to
selection into incarceration.

Author

• Kristin Turney, University of California - Irvine