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Measuring the Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

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Incarceration and Generation, Volume II

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ((PSIPP))

Abstract

Many children have parents who serve prison time. Various theories suggest either positive or negative intergenerational effect of incarceration, making this an empirical question. A large correlational literature generally finds negative criminal, behavioral, academic, and health effects for the child. These results are unlikely to capture causal effects due to correlated unobservables. An emerging literature using panel data and quasi-experimental methods finds mixed results, with some evidence that parental incarceration is actually beneficial for a child. Additional rigorous and compelling causal evidence is required to fully measure the intergenerational effects of incarceration.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    More broadly, Foster and Hagan (2015) discuss how state and school policies can interact with parental incarceration. Also see Elder (1998) for a life course perspective on parental incarceration.

  2. 2.

    Pattillo, Weiman and Western (2004) and Travis, Western and Redburn (2014) provide broad overviews of this topic. Hagan and Dinovitzer (1999) and Foster and Hagan (2009, 2015) discuss related theoretical perspectives.

  3. 3.

    For instance, when events can occur multiple times and can be mutually correlated (as is often the case with criminal activity), then it becomes challenging to isolate the short-run and long-run effects even using panel data methods. Baltagi and Griffin (1984) consider two polar cases: i) if recurring events are independent over time,then one can easily recover the short-run effects associated with each event, and ii) if an event can occur only once and the researcher has a long enough observation window, then a long-run effect can be recovered.

  4. 4.

    With heterogeneous treatment effects, an additional monotonicity assumption is required, which implies that this IV approach identifies the effects of parental incarceration for children whose parents were sentenced to prison as a result of being assigned a strict judge relative to children whose parents were assigned to a lenient judge and thus did not receive a prison sentence. Imbens and Angrist (1994) refer to this group as compliers.

  5. 5.

    In related work (Bhuller et al. 2020), we document how correlational evidence can lead to misleading conclusions. Using a random judge design, we find that when an individual is incarcerated, it strongly discourages subsequent criminal behavior. In contrast, OLS finds positive associations between incarceration and recidivism, even after controlling for a rich set of characteristics. In other words, bias due to selection on unobservables, if ignored, leads to the erroneous conclusion that time spent in prison is criminogenic rather than deterrent.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Manudeep Bhuller

  2. Department of Economics, University of California San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA

    Gordon B. Dahl

  3. Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway

    Katrine V. Løken

  4. Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Magne Mogstad

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  1. Manudeep Bhuller
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  2. Gordon B. Dahl
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  3. Katrine V. Løken
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  4. Magne Mogstad
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Correspondence to Manudeep Bhuller .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Silvia Gomes

  2. CICS.NOVA - Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH), Lisbon, Portugal

    Maria João Leote de Carvalho

  3. University Institute of Maia—ISMAI, Maia, Portugal

    Vera Duarte

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Bhuller, M., Dahl, G.B., Løken, K.V., Mogstad, M. (2022). Measuring the Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration. In: Gomes, S., Carvalho, M.J.L.d., Duarte, V. (eds) Incarceration and Generation, Volume II. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82276-7_9

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