Parental Incarceration and Offspring Violent Victimization: A Finnish Total Population Study

• In Event: Implications of psychological and biological factors for personal and criminal justice outcomes and experiences

Abstract

Parental incarceration is associated with adverse offspring outcomes such as poorer educational achievement, physical and mental health problems, and criminal behavior. Whether these relationships are causal is still unclear. Prison sentenced parents are a highly selected group, which must be accounted for when studying possible effects of incarceration on offspring. In an earlier register-based study from Finland, we found elevated risks for offspring criminality after adjusting for family SES, co-residence with parents and the severity of parental criminality. Because victimization is often found to overlap with criminality, we assessed whether children of prison sentenced parents are at an elevated risk of violent victimization. Using Finnish nationwide longitudinal data on children born 1987-2003 (N=1,017,072), we found that 1.73% and 0.18% of children to have fathers and mothers who were respectively sentenced to prison before the child turned 18 years. We subsequently used linked medical and cause of death records to study the relationship between parental prison sentences and offspring violent victimization, separately in childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Preliminary results of the analysis will be presented.

Authors

• Ilona Nissinen, Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy, University of Helsinki, Finland

• Antti Latvala, University of Helsinki

• Karoliina Suonpää, University of Helsinki

• Pekka Martikainen, Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki, Finland