Is the devil in the details?

Abstract

Wakefield and Wildeman (2011, this issue) have presented us with the next step in a growing body of research that demonstrates the widespread and long-term human costs of the U.S. imprisonment binge. As they note, this research includes prisoners’ diminished earnings (Western, 2002), their reduced odds of marriage (Western and McLanahan, 2000), their declining health (Massoglia, 2008), and their limited opportunities for civic engagement (Uggen and Manza, 2002). Because this incarceration binge has affected young Black males disproportionately—with roughly one in three African American men having a felony conviction (Wakefield and Uggen, 2010: 389)—these human costs will perpetuate, if not exacerbate, many of the racial disparities that already exist in the United States. Not only will the social and economic trajectories of these individuals be disadvantaged, but also, as others have noted, there is a high probability that there will be intergenerational costs as well (Hagan and Dinovitzer, 1999; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Western and Wildeman, 2009). Although research on the effects of paternal incarceration on the well-being of their children has grown substantially, much of it has been limited by sampling constraints and the problems attendant to the nonrandom assignment of individuals to prison (see Murray and Farrington, 2008). Attempting to overcome some of these problems, Wildeman and Wakefield (2011) use two longitudinal data sets that encompass young children and adolescents (Fragile Families and Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods) and propensity score models to assist in reducing the differences between fathers who experience imprisonment and those who do not. In their first set of analyses,