Do Prisons Make Us Safer?: The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom

6. Ever-Increasing Levels of Parental Incarceration and the Consequences for Children

Rucker C. Johnson Ever-Increasing Levels of Parental Incarceration the Consequences and 6 for Children The enormous increase in incarceration led to a parallel, but far less documented , increase in the proportion of children who grew up with a parent incarcerated at some point during their childhood. Moreover, the concentration of these incarceration trends among less-educated African Americans has resulted in a larger gulf between the early-life experiences of white and black children, which may have profound effects on their laterlife socioeconomic attainments. The implications for child well-being of policy-induced increases in the incidence of parental incarceration are not well understood. The consequences of incarceration on children have received little attention in academic research, prison statistics, public policy, and media coverage. If we fail to consider potential impacts of incarceration on children , we risk neglecting at-risk youth; this may contribute to crime problems in the next generation. This is an important potential negative externality and unintended consequence of criminal-justice policy, with parental incarceration imposing larger social costs than merely the prison cost. This chapter aims to produce nationally representative estimates of the prevalence of parental incarceration for children born between 1985 and 2002, by race and socioeconomic status. It also aims to investigate the effects of parental incarceration on child outcomes, including early antecedents of youth crime, using intergenerational correlations in the likelihood of criminal involvement (arrest, conviction, incarceration). The empirical analyses use nationally representative longitudinal data covering a nearly forty-year period in the United States to produce evidence that concern each of these issues. I exploit unique features of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and its Child Development Sup- plement (CDS) to tackle these interrelated research questions. This is the first such study of the full U.S. population. Using the PSID-CDS, I provide evidence on a series of important descriptive questions regarding how often white, black, and Hispanic children experience paternal incarceration; how the risk has changed over the past twenty-five years (recent birth cohorts versus older birth cohorts from other data sources); and how this risk varies within racial and ethnic groups. The focus of the regression analysis section investigates the consequences for children of parental incarceration. The results highlight changes in the child’s family income and poverty status before, during, and following a father’s incarceration. It is shown that children from families with an incarceration history have worse behavioral outcomes. This chapter presents evidence on intergenerational correlations in deviant behavior . Several different empirical strategies are employed to distinguish whether this correlation emanates primarily from observed and unobserved disadvantaged childhood-environment characteristics (proximate causes) versus the causal effects of parental incarceration. PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON PARENTAL INCARCERATION AND CHILD WELL-BEING Children of prisoners have been referred to as the “orphans of justice” and “innocent victims of punishment.” The limited extant evidence on prisoners’ children is drawn from small-scale, mostly qualitative research studies, and have rarely included longitudinal follow-up. The consequences of ever-increasing levels of incarceration for children are perhaps the least understood aspect of the potential positive or deleterious impacts of incarceration policy on families and communities. Over the decade of the 1990s, the number of children with a parent in state or federal prison in the United States rose from 1 million to 1.5 million (Mumola 2000). Ninety-two percent had a father in prison, which disproportionately affects black children. The number of parents in prison doubled over this period, with nearly 3.6 million parents placed under some form of correctional supervision, including parole, by 2000. On any given day, 7 percent of black children have an incarcerated parent, compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic children and 0.8 percent of white children. Before entering prison, 64 percent of imprisoned mothers lived with their children, compared to 44 percent of imprisoned fathers in the United States (Mumola 2000). Current prison statistics contain only point-in-time prevalence rates, which mask the extent of childhood experiences of incarceration that could be gleaned from incidence rates. Snapshot cross-sectional estimates significantly 178 Do Prisons Make Us Safer? understate cumulative risk of exposure to parental incarceration during childhood. Parental separation that results from incarceration may pose unique risks in its effect on children and the family, relative to parental separations due to divorce, which has a voluminous research literature. A prison sentence may be a death sentence of...