Punishment and Inequality in America

6. Incarceration, Marriage, and Family Life

Incarceration, Marriage, and Family Life As imprisonment became common for less-educated black men by the end of the 1990s, the penal system became familiar to their families. By 1999, 30 percent of noncollege black men in their mid-thirties had been to prison and through incarceration many were separated from their wives, girlfriends, and children. Women and children in low-income urban communities now routinely cope with husbands and fathers lost to incarceration and adjust to their return after release. Poor single men are also affected, burdened by the stigma of a prison record in the marriage markets of disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Discussions of the family life of criminal offenders typically focus on the crime-suppressing effects of marriage rather than on incarceration. Researchers find that marriage offers a pathway out of crime for men with histories of delinquency. Not a wedding itself, of course, but marriage in the context of a warm, stable, and constructive relationship offers the antidote to crime.1 Wives and family members in such relationships provide the web of obligations and responsibilities that restrain young men and reduce their contact with the male friends whose recreations veer into antisocial behavior .2 The prison boom places the link between crime and marriage in a new light. If a good marriage is important for criminal desistance, what effect does incarceration have on marriage? CHAPTER 6 The connections between incarceration, marriage, and the family are also implicated in the larger story of rising urban inequality. Over the last three decades, American family life was transformed by declining marriage rates and growth in the number of single-parent households. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of white women aged twenty-five to thirty-four who were married declined from over 80 percent to just over 60. Marriage rates for African American women dropped from 60 to around 30 percent. The decline in marriage propelled growth in the number of single-parent households , although this effect was confined to those with little education.3 The share of college-educated single mothers remained constant at around 5 percent but that of their less-educated counterparts increased from 8 to 18 percent . Trends were most dramatic among less-educated black women, with the share of single mothers increasing from about 30 to over 50 percent. By 2000, stable two-parent households had become relatively rare, especially among blacks with less education. Poverty researchers closely followed the changing shape of American families . Growing numbers of female-headed families increased the risks of enduring poverty for women and children. Growing up poor also raised a child’s risk of school failure, poor health, and delinquency. Writing in the mid-1980s, William Julius Wilson traced the growth in the number of female -headed black families to the shrinking number of “marriageable men” in poor urban neighborhoods.4 The shortage was driven by two processes. High rates of male incarceration and mortality tilted the gender ratio, making it harder for poor urban women to find partners. These effects were small, however, compared to the high rate of joblessness that left few black men in inner cities able to support a family. Many studies later examined the impact of men’s employment on marriage rates and found that the unemployed are less likely to be married and that joblessness can increase chances of divorce or separation.5 Studies of the effects of employment dominated research on marriage among the disadvantaged, and the idea that incarceration destabilized family life was not developed. Here I study the effects of the prison boom on marriage and the family. Given its prevalence among young less-educated black men, imprisonment may have devastated family life in poor urban neighborhoods. Before accepting this hypothesis, though, we should consider that criminal offenders are unlikely to marry or develop strong family bonds, even if they do not go to prison. I try to untangle the links between the penal system, marriage, and 132 PUNISHMENT AND INEQUALITY IN AMERICA the family with three pieces of empirical evidence. First, to better understand the familial bonds of prisoners, I calculated marriage rates in the penal population , and estimated the number of children with incarcerated fathers. Next, data from two social surveys—the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY), and the Fragile Families Survey of Child Wellbeing—were used to estimate the effects of incarceration on a single man’s chances of marriage and...