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Formerly Incarcerated Parents and Their Children

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Demography

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.

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Notes

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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).

  5. 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.

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Bruce Western

  2. Justice Lab, Columbia University, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, NY, 10115, USA

    Natalie Smith

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  1. Bruce Western
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  2. Natalie Smith
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Correspondence to Bruce Western.

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.

Table 5 Means of covariates used in sensitivity test
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Table 6 Proportion of multinomial logit coefficients changing sign and proportion of 95 % intervals including 0, over 256 alternative models
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Table 7 Multinomial logistic regression analysis of contact with formerly incarcerated fathers for all biological and social children: Boston Reentry Study
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Western, B., Smith, N. Formerly Incarcerated Parents and Their Children. Demography 55, 823–847 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0677-4

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