Parental Incarceration: Quasi-experimental evidence from three margins

• In Event: Intergenerational Consequences of Incarceration and Violence: Racial Disparities and Family Mobility

Abstract

This paper investigates the causal effects of parental detention and incarceration on both defendant and child outcomes using linked administrative data from Wisconsin spanning court records, educational performance, and criminal system contact. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of criminal defendants to decision-makers with varying tendencies to detain or incarcerate, we construct separate instrumental variables for three distinct margins of criminal case processing: pretrial detention at bail, jail sentences, and prison sentences. Each instrument is plausibly exogenous to unobserved family characteristics, but highly predictive of detention or incarceration at the relevant margin on an individual case. For example, in the jail sentencing sample, our judge incarceration measure implies that assignment to the most stringent rather than the least stringent judge increases the probability of incarceration from 18.4 to 52.0 percent, relative to a sample mean of 33.8 percent. Our analytic sample includes children linked to a parent criminal case between 2002 and 2020. We first examine defendants’ subsequent criminal justice contact, finding evidence that detention and incarceration reduce later system involvement in the short and medium run, lowering the likelihood of recidivism for roughly three years. We also document post-incarceration effects on public benefit receipt and labor market attachment, allowing us to characterize a broader set of direct consequences for defendants beyond future criminal case outcomes alone. We then examine a range of child outcomes, including high school completion, standardized test proficiency benchmarks, chronic absenteeism, school discipline, and criminal justice involvement. By separately identifying the effects of bail, jail, and prison, we move beyond a single measure of parental incarceration and instead assess whether different forms of legal detention have distinct consequences for defendants and their children. Taken together, the results provide a more precise account of the direct and intergenerational effects of detention and incarceration across multiple stages of the criminal legal process.

Author

• Ezra G. Goldstein, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Presenting Author