The Unequal Consequences of Mass Incarceration for Children

• In Event: 369 - Regular Session. Criminology

Abstract

In response to the rising incarceration rates in the United States, a growing literature documents the mostly deleterious intergenerational consequences of paternal incarceration. But despite good reasons to suspect that paternal incarceration has unequal—and potentially countervailing—consequences for children, research almost exclusively considers the average effects of paternal incarceration. Therefore, in this manuscript, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,146) to estimate both the average and heterogeneous effects of paternal incarceration on children’s problem behaviors and cognitive skills in middle childhood. Results show that, on average, paternal incarceration is associated with problem behaviors but not cognitive skills at age nine. However, taking into account the social contexts that shape children’s likelihood of experiencing paternal incarceration documents a pattern of more complex findings. Paternal incarceration has deleterious effects on both problem behaviors and cognitive skills among children least likely to experience paternal incarceration. For children most likely to experience paternal incarceration, those who also experience a multitude of additional vulnerabilities, paternal incarceration is mostly inconsequential. Given that paternal incarceration is concentrated among the most vulnerable children, but is most consequential for the least disadvantaged of these vulnerable children, suggests that incarceration has complicated implications for the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage and the production of childhood inequalities.

Author

• Kristin Turney, University of California-Irvine