Severe Deprivation and System Inclusion Among Children of Incarcerated Parents in the United States After the Great Recession

The expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades and the corresponding rise of parental incarceration raises questions about whether the children of current and former inmates are at an increased risk of material hardship that necessitates social service intervention. Recent sociological scholarship finds that the greater surveillance experienced by former inmates and the criminally involved precludes them from seeking medical care and social services. Yet there is no scholarship that assesses health care and social service utilization among children exposed to parental incarceration. In this article, we investigate how race and educational inequality in parental incarceration were associated with markers of deprivation and social program enlistment after the Great Recession. Using data from the 2011–2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), we not only find that children with an incarcerated parent experience greater levels of deprivation—material hardship, unmet health needs, and residential instability—but that these children are drawn into social service programs at a higher rate than the rate for children unexposed to parental incarceration. Nearly 2.1 million children (or 81 percent of minors) with an incarcerated parent are enrolled in at least one social service program. Our findings are consistent with a “system inclusion” perspective, which aligns with David Garland’s and William Julius Wilson’s theoretical and historical explanations of social service participation among disadvantaged minors.