School absence across parental criminal involvement and criminal legal contact

• In Event: Parental Incarceration and Collateral Consequences

Abstract

Parental crime and criminal legal contact can halt beneficial educational pathways and heighten the risk of adverse school outcomes for children. But few studies allow for detailed assessments of how educational outcomes respond to the various decisive points on the trajectory of parental criminal involvement and criminal legal contact. Using Danish administrative data, this paper links parental criminal offense dates, conviction dates, and incarceration spells to monthly records of children's school absence during 2011-2022. The granularity of the data allows for the separation of the impacts of parental crime, parental conviction, and parental incarceration on school absence. Results suggest that school absence is substantially elevated both at the time of parental crimes and at the time of parental incarceration – and primarily so for children living with the parent with criminal legal contact. Taken together, these results emphasize the distinct and destabilizing consequences of both criminal activities and incarceration in relation to school outcomes.

Authors

• Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, ROCKWOOL Foundation

• Garrett Baker, Duke University

• Lars H. Andersen, ROCKWOOL Foundation

• Christopher Wildeman, Duke University

• Noa Hendel, ROCKWOOL Foundation