Abstract
The negative effects of incarceration on child well-being are often linked to the economic insecurity of formerly incarcerated parents. Researchers caution, however, that the effects of parental incarceration may be small in the presence of multiple-partner fertility and other family complexity. Despite these claims, few studies have directly observed either economic insecurity or the full extent of family complexity. We study parent-child relationships with a unique data set that includes detailed information about economic insecurity and family complexity among parents just released from prison. We find that stable private housing, more than income, is associated with close and regular contact between parents and children. Formerly incarcerated parents see their children less regularly in contexts of multiple-partner fertility and in the absence of supportive family relationships. Significant housing and family effects are estimated even after we control for drug use and crime, which are themselves negatively related to parental contact. The findings point to the constraints of material insecurity and the complexity of family relationships on the contact between formerly incarcerated parents and their children.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Our analysis of parent-child relationships includes minor and nonminor children. Of the 173 biological children in the sample, 134 were aged 21 or younger, and 116 were aged 18 or younger at the time of prison release. Of the 97 social children in the sample, 75 were aged 21 or younger, and 63 were aged 18 or younger.
Following Carlson and Furstenberg (2006), we call the other parents of respondents’ children “parental partners.” Sykes and Pettit (2014) estimated from the Survey of Inmates of State and Federal Correctional Facilities that 5 % of the prison population had multiple-partner births in 2012. Given that 31.6 % report having two or more children, the corresponding multiple-partner fertility rate is approximately 16 % (5 / 31.6 = .158). Carlson and Furstenberg (2006) and Cancian et al. (2016) reported high relative rates of multiple-partner fertility.
The mean number of parental partners is larger in the child-level data than in the respondent-level data because respondents’ children with multiple partners are relatively overrepresented in the child-level data.
Analysis of only fathers indicates that the association between coresidence with children and stable housing is especially strong for mothers. Mothers who live in private households after incarceration typically live with their children (Table 7 in the appendix).
In Brian’s case, parole supervision clearly limited contact with children by restricting his travel. Across the sample as a whole, however, common conditions of supervision—curfews, drug tests, and programming—did not appear to limit contact between respondents and their children, and community supervision was not significantly correlated with parent-child contact.
References
Amato, P. R., & Gilbreth, J. G. (1999). Nonresident fathers and children’s well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 61, 557–573.
Arditti, J. (2012). Parental incarceration and the family. New York, NY: NYU Press.
Braman, D. (2004). Doing time on the outside: Incarceration and family life in urban America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Cancian, M., Chung, Y., & Meyer, D. (2016). Fathers’ imprisonment and mothers’ multiple-partner fertility. Demography, 53, 2045–2074.
Carlson, M., & Furstenberg, F. F., Jr. (2006). The prevalence and correlates of mulitpartnered fertility among urban U.S. parents. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68, 718–732.
Durose, M. R., Cooper, A. D., & Snyder, H. N. (2014). Recidivism of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010 (Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report No. NCJ 244205). Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4986
Edin, K., & Kefalas, M. (2005). Promises I can keep: Why poor women put motherhood before marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Edin, K., & Nelson, T. J. (2013). Doing the best I can: Fatherhood in the inner city. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foster, H., & Hagan, J. (2009). The mass incarceration of parents in America: Issues of race/ethnicity, collateral damage to children, and prisoner reentry. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 623, 179–194.
Foster, H., & Hagan, J. (2015). Punishment regimes and the multilevel effects of parental incarceration: Intergenerational, intersectional, and interinstitutional models of social inequality and systemic exclusion. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 135–158.
Geller, A. (2013). Paternal incarceration and father-child contact in fragile families. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75, 1288–1303.
Geller, A., Cooper, C. E., Garfinkel, I., Schwartz-Soicher, O., & Mincy, R. B. (2012). Beyond absenteeism: Father incarceration and child development. Demography, 49, 49–76.
Geller, A., Garfinkel, I., & Western, B. (2011). Paternal incarceration and support for children in fragile families. Demography, 48, 25–47.
Herbert, C. W., Morenoff, J. D., & Harding, D. J. (2015). Homelessness and housing instability among former prisoners. Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 45–79.
Hissel, S., Bijleveld, C., & Kruttschnitt, C. (2011). The well-being of children of incarcerated mothers: An exploratory study for the Netherlands. European Journal of Criminology, 8, 346–360.
Holzer, H. J. (2009). Collateral costs: Effects of incarceration on employment and earnings among young workers. In S. Raphael & M. A. Stoll (Eds.), Do prisons make us safer? The benefits and costs of the prison boom (pp. 239–266). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Johnson, E. I., & Easterling, B. (2012). Understanding unique effects of parental incarceration on children: Challenges, progress, and recommendations. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74, 342–356.
Kruttschnitt, C. (2010). The paradox of women’s imprisonment. Daedalus, 139(3), 32–42.
Kruttschnitt, C., & Gartner, R. (2003). Women’s imprisonment. Crime and Justice, 30, 1–81.
Leamer, E. E. (1983). Let’s take the con out of econometrics. American Economic Review, 73, 31–43.
Murray, J., & Farington, D. (2008). Effects of parental imprisonment on children. Crime and Justice, 37, 133–206.
Nepomnyaschy, L. (2007). Child support and father-child contact: Testing reciprocal pathways. Demography, 44, 93–112.
Nurse, A. M. (2002). Fatherhood arrested: Parenting from within the juvenile justice system. Nashville, TN, Vanderbilt University Press.
Sered, S. S., & Norton-Hawk, M. (2014). Can’t catch a break: Gender, jail, drugs, and the limits of personal responsibility. Oakland: University of California Press.
Siegel, J. A. (2011). Disrupted childhoods: Children of women in prison. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Stack, C. (1974). All our kin. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Sykes, B. L., & Pettit, B. (2014). Mass incarceration, family complexity, and the reproduction of childhood disadvantage. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 654, 127–149.
Tach, L., Edin, K., Harvey, H., & Bryan, B. (2014). The family-go-round: Family complexity and father involvement from a father’s perspective. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 654, 169–184.
Tach, L., Mincy, R. B., & Edin, K. (2010). Parenting as a “package deal”: Relationships, fertility, and nonresident father involvement among unmarried parents. Demography, 47, 181–204.
Travis, J. (2005). But they all come back: Facing the challenges of prisoner reentry. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
Travis, J., Western, B., & Redburn, S. (Eds.). (2014). The growth of incarceration in the United States: Exploring causes and consequences. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Turanovic, J. J., Rodriguez, N., & Pratt, T. C. (2012). The collateral consequences of incarceration revisited: A qualitative analysis of the effects on caregivers of children of incarcerated parents. Criminology, 50, 913–959.
Turney, K. (2016). The unequal consequences of mass incarceration for children. Demography, 54, 361–389.
Turney, K., & Wildeman, C. (2013). Redefining relationships: Explaining the countervailing consequences of paternal incarceration for parenting. American Sociological Review, 78, 949–979.
Wakefield, S. (2015). Accentuating the positive or eliminating the negative? Paternal incarceration and caregiver-child relationship quality. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 104, 905–928.
Wakefield, S., Lee, H., & Wildeman, C. (2016). Tough on crime, tough on families? Criminal justice and family life in America. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 665, 8–21.
Wakefield, S., & Wildeman, C. (2013). Children of the prison boom: Mass incarceration and the future of American inequality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Western, B., Braga, A., Davis, J., & Sirois, C. (2015). Stress and hardship after prison. American Journal of Sociology, 120, 1512–1547.
Wildeman, C. (2009). Parental imprisonment, the prison boom, and the concentration of childhood disadvantage. Demography, 46, 265–280.
Wildeman, C., & Turney, K. (2014). Positive, negative, or null? The effects of maternal incarceration on children’s behavioral problems. Demography, 51, 1041–1068.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grant 5R21HD073761-02 from NIH/NICHD, SES-1259013, SES 1627693, and SES 1424089 from the National Science Foundation; a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation; and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Catherine Sirois, Brielle Bryan, Laura Tach, and Demography editors and reviewers on earlier drafts of this paper; and the significant assistance of the Massachusetts Department of Correction, which provided access to correctional facilities and advice and collaboration throughout the research. The data for this article are from the Boston Reentry Study, a research project conducted by Bruce Western, Anthony Braga, and Rhiana Kohl.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
We study the robustness of the results to alternative models drawing on an approach described by Leamer (1983), which involves recording variability in a set of coefficients of interest over all possible subsets of possible covariates. Additional covariates in the current analysis include measures of correctional supervision (time served in prison and probation or parole status), baseline measures of physical and mental health (self-reported depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and chronic disease), a measure of family history (growing up in a single-parent family), and a measure of the transition from prison to community (social isolation in the first week after prison release). Means of covariates are reported in Table 5. The eight candidate covariates are correlated with the covariates of interest and are plausibly related to parental contact after incarceration. With eight candidate covariates, analysis explores sensitivity of the coefficients over 28 = 256 possible models.
Sensitivity of the results is measured in two ways. First, we report the proportion of regression coefficients of 256 alternative models with the opposite sign of that reported in Tables 3 or 4. Leamer (1983) initially proposed a change in sign as an indication of sensitivity to the model specification. Second, we report the proportion of nonsignificant coefficients over the 256 alternative models.
Results of the sensitivity analysis are reported in Table 6. Lower numbers close to 0 indicate greater stability of the reported regression results across alternative models. Reading across the first row of the table, for example, the coefficient for unstable housing never changes sign across 256 alternative models. Unstable housing is associated with less contact with children across 256 alternative models. The second row indicates that the unstable housing coefficient is never significant for the “occasional contact” outcome but is always significant for weekly contact and coresidence. Results are generally robust to a wide range of alternative models for the key coefficients for unstable housing, reincarceration, parental contact with a biological child, contact in prison, pre-arrest support, feelings toward partner, and drug and alcohol use.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Western, B., Smith, N. Formerly Incarcerated Parents and Their Children. Demography 55, 823–847 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0677-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0677-4