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Parental Incarceration and Within-Individual Changes in Criminal Justice Involvement Across Developmental Stages

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Abstract

The current study examines the association between parental incarceration and the change in the number of arrests and number of months incarcerated across three life-course periods. Examining individuals’ involvement in the criminal justice system throughout the life-course is a well-documented area of research in criminology. However, limited research has examined how factors such as parental incarceration shape criminal justice involvement across different key life-course stages. To conduct the current study, we employed the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 (NLSY97) and used conditional piecewise latent growth models. The NLYS97 is a nationally representative dataset of individuals born in the United States between 1980 and 1984. We evaluated whether parental incarceration (before 16)—both paternal and maternal—influences within-individual changes in the number of arrests and months incarcerated between 17 and 25 years (late-adolescence), 26 and 30 years (early-adulthood), and 31 and 35 years (adulthood). The results show that parental incarceration differentially influences the change in the number of arrests and number of months incarcerated across the three life-course periods. Moreover, the magnitude and direction differ by the parent incarcerated and the race of the participant. The findings suggest that factors associated with parental incarceration might be associated with differential effects on criminal justice involvement across key life-course periods. To reduce the likelihood of CJS involvement as adolescents age into adulthood, interventions should be implemented to protect children from the social, economic, and health-related harms of having a parent go to prison.

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Notes

  1. Research that examines within-individual changes in people more broadly generally assesses an individual’s exposure to various factors and how this exposure influences a specific outcome over prolonged periods of time (Caruana et al., 2015).

  2. Although timing of developmental stages differs across individuals, research on human and brain development commonly suggests that people do not become fully developed until the age of 25—with approximately a 2-year error period—with various neurological transitions occurring between the ages of 26 and 31. For instance, the cerebral white matter increases exponentially during the transition from early adulthood (26 and 30 years) to adulthood (31 and 35 years; Stiles & Jernigan, 2010).

  3. The data is publicly available at https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator/pages/search?s=NLSY97#

  4. The reorganization of information by age is permitted when using the FIML estimator in a conditional piecewise latent growth model (LGM; pg. 79-81 Bollen & Curran, 2006). The appropriateness of this technique for Latent Curve Models is addressed on pages 79–81 of Bollen & Curran, 2006.

  5. We are unable to determine if the respondents were informed to only report about biological parents or include both biological parents and parental figures in their responses due to data restrictions.

  6. Alpha represents the term used to estimate the intercept, while beta represents the term used to estimate the change in the slope during the specified time period (equations detailed on pg.104 of Bollen & Curran, 2006).

  7. As a supplemental analysis, a model was estimated examining the association between parental incarceration before the age of 16 and the change in number of arrests and number of months incarcerated from 12 to 16, 17 to 25, 26 to 30, and 31 to 35. The results of these model were largely identical to the models presented in the primary text (see https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Parental-Incarceration-and-CJS-contact-068B).

  8. A complete detailed description of a piecewise LGM is provided in Appendix A.

  9. As discussed in the Supplemental Results section, all of the models were replicated using alternative specifications for the developmental periods (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Parental-Incarceration-and-CJS-contact-068B). The two alternative specifications were: (1) 17 to 20 years (late adolescence but prior to legal alcohol consumption), 21 to 25 years (late adolescence but after legal alcohol consumption), 26 to 30 years (early adulthood), and 31 to 35 years (adulthood); (2) 17 to 20 years (late adolescence), 21 to 30 years (early adulthood), and 31 to 35 years (adulthood).

  10. After estimation, the residuals for the growth factors had weak to small statistical associations, suggesting that the piecewise latent growth model captured a substantial amount of the variation associated with the growth in the number of arrests and number of months incarcerated over time. These findings were consistent across all of the models and supported by the observation of minimal differences between the predicted values on the observed constructs and the true values on the observed constructs (see Appendix C).

  11. This model was replicated with American Indians (N = 50), Asian (N = 127), and other (N = 918) groups to capture all of the racial groups present in the NLSY97. Unfortunately, due to the limited sample size and the complexity of the model, the model would not converge upon a single solution for these racial groups. A similar problem existed when we combined all of these racial groups into “other.” Moreover, when we tried to compare the effects of parental incarceration on future justice system outcomes for Hispanic and non-Hispanic respondents, the model did not converge either (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Parental-Incarceration-and-CJS-contact-068B).

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Silver, I.A., Semenza, D.C. & D’Amato, C. Parental Incarceration and Within-Individual Changes in Criminal Justice Involvement Across Developmental Stages. J Dev Life Course Criminology 9, 590–616 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-023-00237-y

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