Misidentifying the Effects of Parental Incarceration? A Comment on Johnson and Easterling (2012)

Abstract

Key Words: child well-being, mass imprisonment, parental incarceration, selection bias.Throughout the last 40 years, the American imprisonment rate has increased from a fairly stable rate of about 100 prisoners per 100,000 members of the population in the early 1970s to about 500 per 1 00,000 now (Blumstein & Cohen, 1973; Glaze, 2011). Yet the American imprisonment rate is not only historically novel but also comparatively extreme, as it exceeds those in all other countries and dwarfs those in other developed democracies (Walmsley, 2008). This sea change in imprisonment may have implications for family life, especially among African American families residing in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, for whom incarceration is now common (Sampson & Loeffler, 2010; Western & Wildeman, 2009). Fully 25% of African American children will ever have a parent imprisoned, and this is true of more than half of African American children whose fathers did not complete high school (Wildeman, 2009).As a result of these increases in imprisonment, a large literature on the consequences of incarceration for family life has emerged, some of which has appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family (Dyer, Pleck, & McBride, 2012; Green, Ensminger, Robertson, & Juon, 2006; Johnson & Easterling, 2012; Lopoo & Western, 2005; Poehlmann, 2005; Turney, Schnittker, & Wildeman, 2012). Although some research has considered the effects of having a male family member incarcerated on adult women's well-being (Wildeman, Schnittker, & Turney, 2012) or household finances (Geller, Garftnkel, & Western, 2011; Schwartz-Soicher, Geller, & Garftnkel, 2011), much of it considers how parental incarceration affects child wellbeing. In a recent Journal of Marriage and Family article, Johnson and Easterling (2012) reviewed research on the effects of parental incarceration on child well-being, focusing on the various conceptual frameworks linking parental incarceration and child well-being and the important methodological and conceptual challenges related to selection bias (p. 342) plaguing research in this area. After reviewing 10 relevant studies, the authors reached three conclusions. First, research on the effects of parental incarceration on child well-being is not particularly rigorous, as it has used few methods to diminish the often-substantial concerns about selection bias. Second, on the basis of the one study that found children with imprisoned fathers were no worse off than children of divorced parents (Moerk, 1973), the authors concluded there are good reasons to be skeptical that imprisonment has any effects above and beyond paternal separation more broadly (pp. 347-348). Finally, on the basis of rigorous studies that did not use children of divorced parents as the comparison, the authors concluded that, if there are effects of parental incarceration, it is unclear whether parental incarceration helps or harms child well-being, as the direction of average effects varies across studies (p. 348).In this comment, we address the gaps in Johnson and Easterling's (2012) review of the empirical research - gaps we consider sufficiently large that we consider the review to be an inaccurate portrayal of the existing research on the consequences of parental incarceration for child well-being. We first briefly summarize their methodological suggestions for minimizing selection bias, their review of the literature, and their key conclusions. We then introduce 12 relevant studies that were excluded from their review and emphasize how including these studies not only changes the assessment of the methodological rigor of the literature in this area but also leads to substantively different conclusions. Because we are mostly in agreement with their discussion of conceptual frameworks, we do not address that portion of their article.UNDERSTANDING UNIQUE EFFECTS OF PARENTAL INCARCERATION ON CHILDRENJohnson and Easterling's (2012) argument can be summarized as follows:Children whose parents are incarcerated often differ from children whose parents are not incarcerated on a number of dimensions other than parental incarceration status alone, making it difficult to infer whether the problems that have been observed among children whose parents are incarcerated are due to the parent's incarceration or other adversities in the child's ecology, (p. …