Paternal Incarceration Research Articles

Paternal Incarceration and Children’s Social-Emotional Functioning at Age Nine: Why Fathers’ Violence Matters

ABSTRACTResearch documents the consequences of parental incarceration for children’s well-being, and studies have begun to explore heterogeneity in parental incarceration’s influence on child outcomes. This study investigates the effect of paternal incarceration on children’s social competence. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal study of new parents in urban areas, I examine (1) the effect of recent paternal incarceration on multiple measures of children’s social-emotional functioning, including children’s social competence, and (2) whether fathers’ violence against mothers and children weakens the effect of recent paternal incarceration on children’s social-emotional functioning. The results from propensity score and multivariate regression analyses show that recent paternal incarceration is detrimental to children’s social-emotional functioning, in general. However, for some indicators of children’s social-emotional functioning, the effects of recent paternal incarceration depend on whether fathers are abusive.

Paternal incarceration and the family: Fifteen years in review

AbstractSince the turn of the 21st Century, research has highlighted the use of the American criminal justice system as a forager of young, low‐income, low‐educated, men of color, but less is known about how these men exist within such realities and construct meaningful relationships in their families. Research in the early 2000s has focused on how paternal incarceration affects these men, their partners, and their children. However, there is limited research about how these men understand fatherhood and the mechanisms for how paternal incarceration disrupts relationships and exacerbates inequality in the larger family system. Highlighting the consequences to family and child well‐being, the incarceration literature is beginning to focus on the variational and complicated experiences that families cope with when a father is incarcerated. This paper reviews the literature since the early 2000s, tracing what is known about incarcerated fathers and consequences for their children and families. In doing so, this paper discusses both the evolution of the literature and how more research about family processes is needed to understand the dynamic experiences of families and caregivers who manage periods of confinement during the age of mass incarceration in America.

Explaining the Consequences of Paternal Incarceration for Children's Behavioral Problems

ObjectiveTo measure the extent to which changes within children's families associated with paternal incarceration account for increased externalizing and acting‐out behavior in children with incarcerated fathers.BackgroundPaternal incarceration has consistently been linked with aggression and acting‐out behaviors in children, yet mechanisms underlying these behavioral problems remain unclear. Identifying these paths is essential for both understanding how incarceration contributes to intergenerational disadvantage and determining how best to mitigate the collateral consequences of incarceration for children.MethodLongitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study are used with structural equation modeling to test the extent to which the co‐occurring changes to material hardship, family engagement, and caregiver stress mediate the association between paternal incarceration and child behavior at 9 years of age.ResultsTwo key findings emerged from this analysis. First, changes in family‐level well‐being account for nearly half of the total association between recent paternal incarceration and aggressive or externalizing behavior in children. Second, fathers' weakened family relationships and families' increased material hardship are the strongest and most consistent mechanisms explaining these outcomes.ConclusionIn clarifying pathways, these findings are an important step toward understanding and ultimately targeting the most harmful components of the incarceration experience for children.ImplicationsA wide array of prevention and intervention efforts exist to mitigate the implications of paternal incarceration for children. These analyses suggest that for child behavioral outcomes, focusing on incarceration‐related changes to material hardship and father engagement occurring within families may be a productive way to disrupt intergenerational disadvantage.

Parental Incarceration and Child Well-being: Conceptual and Practical Concerns Regarding the Use of Propensity Scores.

The aim of the current investigation was to examine the appropriateness of propensity score methods for the study of incarceration effects on children by directing attention to a range of conceptual and practical concerns, including the exclusion of theoretically meaningful covariates, the comparability of treatment and control groups, and potential ambiguities resulting from researcher-driven analytic decisions. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we examined the effects of maternal and paternal incarceration on a range of child well-being outcomes, including internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test scores, and early juvenile delinquency. Our findings suggested that propensity scores and treatment effect estimates are highly sensitive to a number of decisions made by the researcher, including aspects where little consensus exists. In light of the conceptual underpinnings of propensity score analysis and existing data limitations, we suggest the potential utility of different identification methods and specialized data collection efforts.

Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected depends both on what incarceration does to their parent and what they learn from their parent's experience. To overcome endogeneity concerns, we exploit the random assignment of judges who differ in their propensity to send defendants to prison. Using longitudinal data for Norway, we find that imprisonment has no effect on fathers' recidivism but reduces their employment by 20 percentage points. We find no evidence that paternal incarceration affects a child's criminal activity or school performance.

Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected depends both on what incarceration does to their parent and what they learn from their parent's experience. To overcome endogeneity concerns, we exploit the random assignment of judges who differ in their propensity to send defendants to prison. Using longitudinal data for Norway, we find that imprisonment has no effect on fathers' recidivism but reduces their employment by 20 percentage points. We find no evidence that paternal incarceration affects a child's criminal activity or school performance.

Paternal Incarceration and Children’s Schooling Contexts: Intersecting Inequalities of Educational Opportunity

Research on the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment has focused on the interactions that families and communities have with the criminal justice system. Less attention is paid to interactions that children of the incarcerated have with another important social institution: schools. This article describes the types of schools that children with incarcerated fathers attend. Using newly available data on children’s early elementary environments from a longitudinal birth-cohort sample of urban families, the analyses show that children of the incarcerated are more often in disadvantaged schools and in schools with climates worse than the schools of same-age peers with no histories of paternal incarceration. I offer a first exploratory step toward understanding the interplay among three of America’s most powerful social institutions—families, schools, and the criminal justice system—and the ways that they interact to structure the educational trajectories of what scholars are calling “children of the prison boom.”

Becoming a “Better” Father: Supporting the Needs of Incarcerated Fathers

Given the importance of fathering to the well-being and development of children, paternal incarceration has a major impact on children and families. Drawing on interviews with 64 incarcerated fathers in New South Wales, Australia, this article explores their experiences. The men’s childhood familial separation and disconnection is frequently repeated in adulthood, with limited contact with their own families even when not in custody. Despite barriers to connection, the interviewees express strong aspirations to be “good” fathers and to achieve a “better life” for their children. The absence of stable models of responsive fathering in early life is a common theme that has implications for the development of education and support programs for imprisoned fathers.

Schools as Surveilling Institutions? Paternal Incarceration, System Avoidance, and Parental Involvement in Schooling.

Parents play important roles in their children's lives, and parental involvement in elementary schooling in particular is meaningful for a range of child outcomes. Given the increasing number of school-aged children with incarcerated parents, this study explores the ways paternal incarceration is associated with mothers' and fathers' reports of home- and school-based involvement in schooling. Using Fragile Families Study data, we find that a father's incarceration inhibits his school- and home-based involvement in schooling, but associations for maternal involvement are weaker. Results are robust to alternative specifications of incarceration that address concerns about selection and unobserved heterogeneity. Findings also hold across levels of father-child contact. We also conducted a test of the system avoidance mechanism and results suggest it partially explains reductions in school involvement for fathers following incarceration. Given the reoccurring interest in the interconnection between families and schools and how this translates into success, this study suggests that paternal incarceration is associated with lower parental involvement in schooling and highlights the role of system avoidance in this association. Attachment to social institutions like schools is quite consequential, and this work highlights another way mass incarceration influences social life in the United States.

Attachment in young children with incarcerated fathers.

The present study examined young children's attachment behaviors during paternal incarceration and reported on initial validity of a new measure used to rate children's attachment-related behaviors and emotions during visits in a corrections setting. Seventy-seven children, age 2 to 6 years, and their jailed fathers and current caregivers participated in the home visit portion of the study, whereas 28 of these children participated in the jail visit. The results indicated that 27% of children witnessed the father's crime and 22% of children witnessed the father's arrest, with most children who witnessed these events exhibiting extreme distress; children who witnessed these events were more likely to have insecure attachments to their caregivers. Consistent with attachment theory and research, caregivers who exhibited more sensitivity and responsivity during interactions with children and those who provided more stimulating, responsive, learning-oriented home environments had children who were more likely to have secure attachments (measured with the Attachment Q-Sort). We also found preliminary evidence for the validity of our new measure, the Jail Prison Observation Checklist, in that children's attachment-related behaviors and emotions during the jail visit correlated with their attachment security observed in the home. Our observations indicate that, in certain contexts, noncontact visits with incarcerated parents can be stressful for children and that children's caregivers may play a significant role during these visits.

Social exclusion in families affected by paternal imprisonment

Although social exclusion is often described as an outcome of paternal imprisonment, few studies have directly measured the extent of social exclusion in prisoners’ families or benchmarked it against the general population. This paper compares social exclusion among caregivers of children affected by paternal incarceration with overall estimates of social exclusion across the Australian population and with estimates of social exclusion among a matched subset. Caregivers of children with imprisoned fathers were much more heavily excluded than adults in the general population. Compared to a matched sample, differences were smaller and mostly related to inadequate financial resources. We propose that single parent status and financial hardship are key mediators of the relationship between paternal incarceration and social exclusion.

Parental Incarceration and Child Sleep and Eating Behaviors

To examine whether parental incarceration is significantly associated with a number of sleep and eating behaviors among offspring during early childhood. Data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, an at-risk sample of parents and their offspring, were employed to test this possibility. Both maternal and paternal incarceration history were examined as predictors of whether children manifested high levels of the following 7 health behaviors: sleep problems, short sleep duration, salty snack consumption, starch consumption, sweets consumption, soda consumption, and fast food consumption. Logistic regression techniques were used to carry out the analyses. Both maternal and paternal incarceration significantly increased the odds of a number of risky sleep and eating behaviors during childhood. Ancillary analysis also revealed that the predicted probability of exhibiting multiple risky behaviors across the sleep and eating domains was twice as large among children whose parents had both been incarcerated, relative to children whose parents had not been incarcerated. Parental incarceration may have important implications for the sleep and eating behaviors of offspring. Both scholars and practitioners may, therefore, want to consider the possible negative repercussions of parental incarceration for the sleep and eating behaviors of children, and the potential for these high-risk health behaviors to compromise the health and well-being of children as they age.

Maternal incarceration penalty: an examination of the effect of maternal conviction and incarceration on childhood delinquency

PurposeSeveral studies have reported the impact of paternal incarceration and criminal behavior on childhood delinquency; however, fewer studies have addressed the influence of maternal criminality on children’s behavioral outcomes. Integrating self-control and attachment theoretical frameworks, the purpose of this paper is to address the impact of mothers who have been stopped, arrested, convicted, and incarcerated in relation to their children’s delinquent behavior.Design/methodology/approachThe Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing data set was used to better understand this relationship. By using binary logistic regression, two types of delinquent behavior were assessed: destroying property and fighting.FindingsThe results revealed that mothers’ criminal behavior affected children’s fighting tendencies but did not significantly impact children’s tendency to destroy property. Furthermore, certain childhood antisocial traits and demographic characteristics revealed to also impact children’s delinquent behavior. From the results, implications and prevention strategies were drawn describing techniques to combat delinquency.Originality/valueThis research lays a foundation for future researchers to explore mother-child attachment and the transmission of low self-control from mother to child in relation to criminality. The current research is one of the first studies to specifically address how maternal criminal behavior affects their children’s tendency to engage in delinquency, specifically examining property destruction and fighting.

The Unequal Consequences of Mass Incarceration for Children.

A growing literature has documented the mostly deleterious intergenerational consequences of paternal incarceration, but less research has considered heterogeneity in these relationships. In this article, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,065) to estimate the heterogeneous relationship between paternal incarceration and children's problem behaviors (internalizing behaviors, externalizing behaviors, and early juvenile delinquency) and cognitive skills (reading comprehension, math comprehension, and verbal ability) in middle childhood. Taking into account children's risk of experiencing paternal incarceration, measured by the social contexts in which children are embedded (e.g., father's residential status, poverty, neighborhood disadvantage) reveals that the consequences-across all outcomes except early juvenile delinquency-are more deleterious for children with relatively low risks of exposure to paternal incarceration than for children with relatively high risks of exposure to paternal incarceration. These findings suggest that the intergenerational consequences of paternal incarceration are more complicated than documented in previous research and, more generally, suggest that research on family inequality consider both differential selection into treatments and differential responses to treatments.

Paternal Incarceration and Teachers’ Expectations of Students

In the past 40 years, paternal imprisonment has been transformed from an event affecting only the most unfortunate children to one that one in four African American children experience. Although research speculates that the stigma, strain, and separation resulting from paternal incarceration cause the poor outcomes of children of incarcerated fathers, evidence regarding these mechanisms is lacking. In this article, we use an experimental vignette design to provide causal evidence regarding how the stigma of paternal incarceration affects third- to fifth-grade teachers’ expectations of students in a large southwestern school district (N = 107). We then replicate this experiment using an online Qualtrics panel of third- to fifth-grade teachers (N = 314). The results indicate that the stigma of paternal incarceration shapes teachers’ expectations of students, leading to a 10 percent to 40 percent increase in teachers’ expectations of children’s behavioral problems.

Adults Behaving Badly: The Effects of Own and Peer Parents' Incarceration on Adolescent Criminal Activities

A maturing literature across the social sciences suggests important impacts of the intergenerational transmission of crime as well as peer effects that determine youth criminal activities. This paper explores these channels by examining gender-specific effects of maternal and paternal incarceration from both own-parents and classmate-parents. This paper also adds to the literature by exploiting across-cohort, within school exposure to peer parent incarceration to enhance causal inference. While the intergenerational correlations of criminal activities are similar by gender (father-son/mother-son), the results suggest that peer parent incarceration transmits effects largely along gender lines, which is suggestive of specific learning mechanisms. Peer maternal incarceration increases adolescent female criminal activities and reduces male crime and the reverse is true for peer paternal incarceration. These effects are strongest for youth reports of selling drugs and engaging in physical violence. In contrast, the effects of peer parental incarceration on other outcomes, such as GPA, do not vary by gender.

PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN'S RISK OF BEING CHARGED BY EARLY ADULTHOOD: EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK*

In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically decreased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the reform affected a child's risk of ever subsequently being charged with a crime. Specifically, we use a difference‐in‐differences framework to compare all Danish children 12–18 years of age whose fathers were eligible for a noncustodial sentence instead of incarceration under the reform [N = 1,546] with a reference group of children whose fathers were convicted of similar crimes but were ineligible [N = 1,852] in the 2 years surrounding when the reform was enacted [July 1, 2000] as a way of testing the effects of the reform on children's risk of ever being charged with a crime by 22–28 years of age. Our estimates indicate that having a father sentenced under the reform sharply decreased the risk of being charged in the next 10 years for boys but not for girls. Taken together, these results indicate that both paternal criminality and paternal incarceration promote the criminal justice contact of male children and, hence, that paternal incarceration is not solely a symptom of criminality but also a cause of it.

Fathers' Imprisonment and Mothers' Multiple-Partner Fertility.

We consider the intersection between two striking U.S. trends: dramatic increases in the imprisonment of fathers and increases in the proportion of mothers who have children with more than one partner (multiple-partner fertility, or MPF). Using matched longitudinal administrative data that provide unusually comprehensive and accurate information about the occurrence and timing of imprisonment, fertility, and MPF for the population of the state of Wisconsin, we consider the relationship between paternal imprisonment and MPF among unwed mothers. Employing discrete-time event history analysis with multinomial logistic regression, we model the occurrence and timing of the mother’s second birth, distinguishing between a birth with the same father and a birth with a different father, and distinguishing between current imprisonment and a history of imprisonment. We find that current imprisonment is associated with an increased likelihood of MPF and a decreased likelihood of fertility with the same father (compared with no additional birth) and that a history of imprisonment is associated with increased MPF in some models but not in our preferred model. To control for unobserved heterogeneity among mothers and assess the evidence of a causal effect of fathers’ imprisonment, we also employ the case-time-control method, a fixed-effects method for the analysis of nonrepeated events. Results suggest that fathers’ current imprisonment may increase mothers’ MPF. Policy implications are discussed.

Beyond Boys' Bad Behavior: Paternal Incarceration and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood.

A growing number of American school-aged children have incarcerated or formally incarcerated parents necessitating a more comprehensive understanding of the intergenerational effects of mass imprisonment. Using the Fragile Families Study, I assess whether having an incarcerated father impacts children's cognitive skill development into middle childhood. While previous studies have primarily found effects for boys' behavior problems, matching models and sensitivity analyses demonstrate that experiencing paternal incarceration by age 9 is associated with lower cognitive skills for both boys and girls and these negative effects hold net of a pre-paternal incarceration measure of child cognitive ability. Moreover, I estimate that paternal incarceration explains between 2 and 15 percent of the Black-White achievement gap at age 9. These findings represent new outcomes of importance and suggest that paternal incarceration may play an even larger role in the production of intergenerational inequalities for American children than previously documented.

Home moves and child wellbeing in the first five years of life in the United States

By the time they are five years old, nearly 70% of children in the United States have moved home, with a substantial minority moving more than once. These early years are important for children’s later learning and development. Yet, there are a limited number of studies of residential mobility’s impact on young children. The literature indicates the importance of stressful family events, unstable housing, economic hardship, and neighbourhood conditions for residential mobility and child wellbeing. But research seldom examines the impact of these dimensions simultaneously. We used data from the first four waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to analyse precursors of residential mobility and the association of residential mobility with child behavior (N=2,511) and cognitive capabilities (N=2,033) at age five. Using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE), we find that the frequency of moving is explained by a range of stressful circumstances, including lack of parental employment, partnership transitions, paternal incarceration, unstable housing tenure, and financial hardship. These circumstances are associated with increased likelihood of moving home even when other family and neighbourhood conditions are controlled, suggesting that moving is part of a constellation of events and changes experienced by young children. Using OLS regression models we find that, for young children, the circumstances associated with moving residence appear to be more consequential for child wellbeing than does moving itself, even when children experience multiple moves.