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RACIAL INEQUALITIES IN CONNECTEDNESS TO IMPRISONED INDIVIDUALS IN THE UNITED STATES<sup>1</sup
Abstract
In just the last forty years, imprisonment has been transformed from an event experienced by only the most marginalized to a common stage in the life course of American men—especially Black men with low levels of educational attainment. Although much research considers the causes of the prison boom and how the massive uptick in imprisonment has shaped crime rates and the life course of the men who experience imprisonment, in recent years, researchers have gained a keen interest in the spillover effects of mass imprisonment on families, children, and neighborhoods. Unfortunately, although this new wave of research documents the generally harmful effects of having a family member or loved one incarcerated, it remains unclear how much the prison boom shapes social inequality through these spillover effects because we lack precise estimates of the racial inequality in connectedness—through friends, family, and neighbors—to prisoners. Using the 2006 General Social Survey, we fill this pressing research gap by providing national estimates of connectedness to prisoners—defined in this article as knowing someone who is currently imprisoned, having a family member who is currently imprisoned, having someone you trust who is currently imprisoned, or having someone you know from your neighborhood who is currently imprisoned—for Black and White men and women. Most provocatively, we show that 44% of Black women (and 32% of Black men) but only 12% of White women (and 6% of White men) have a family member imprisoned. This means that about one in four women in the United States currently has a family member in prison. Given these high rates of connectedness to prisoners and the vast racial inequality in them, it is likely that mass imprisonment has fundamentally reshaped inequality not only for the adult men for whom imprisonment has become common, but also for their friends and families.
... For instance, exposures to "mass incarceration, " which refers to the extreme historical and contemporary levels of incarceration, occurrences that are so concentrated in communities of color that it becomes a common stage of in life-course (35). Approximately 50% of Black women have an imprisoned relative, compared to only 12% of their white counterparts (36). Further, Black people are more likely than the overall population to know an incarcerated individual, and to have a neighbor or an intimate partner incarcerated (36). ...
... Approximately 50% of Black women have an imprisoned relative, compared to only 12% of their white counterparts (36). Further, Black people are more likely than the overall population to know an incarcerated individual, and to have a neighbor or an intimate partner incarcerated (36). Women make up 83% of those responsible for the costs associated with family member's court costs, which results in a financial burden that compounds any existing struggles to meet basic material needs (37). ...
... Despite specific calls for research on the life-course influences of mass incarceration on the health of Black people and communities (40), few studies have quantified the direct or contextual effect of mass incarceration on poor health and mortality within this group (41), and none have examined its effect on Black maternal health. This distinct overexposure to incarceration that Black communities experience may be an important contributor to maternal health inequities and research and action to address this crisis is needed (36,41). ...
For decades, Black mothers have been most likely to suffer the worst outcomes of pregnancy, including death. Even though traditional individual level risk factors do not explain racial inequities in maternal morbidity, most studies identify Black race as a predictor, instead of the ways in which our society is structured around racism that makes Black mothers vulnerable to adverse health outcomes. As an example, the U.S is exceptional in incarcerating its residents, and Black men are six times and Black women are three times more likely than their white counterparts to be incarcerated. Relatedly, violent death caused by homicides disproportionately impacts Black communities, such that is the leading cause of death for males and females aged 10–34 years. Estimates suggest that more than 50% of urban residents know more than 10 murder victims, and approximately 200 people are affected by each neighborhood murder. Recent research has begun to shed light on the impacts of stressful neighborhood social conditions on risk of the adverse birth outcomes among Black mothers however, few studies have quantified the impact of macro-social neighborhood factors like violent death exposures and mass incarceration on Black maternal health. Future research that leverages relevant theoretical frameworks, is co-created and co-led with affected communities, and focuses on relevant neighborhood level traumas is warranted if we are to address the longstanding racial inequities in maternal health.
... Among U.S. female populations, Black women disproportionately experience contact with the justice system. Prior to adulthood, one in four Black women experience arrest (Lee et al. 2015), and data indicate that Black women incur incarceration at a rate almost twice that of White women (Carson 2020). Furthermore, Black women experience a double disadvantage of personally mediated contact with the criminal justice system as well as vicarious exposure resulting from network members' involvement (Sewell et al. 2021). ...
... Much of the research investigating the harms of familial incarceration focuses on co-parents and children of incarcerated men. While Black women are inequitably exposed to familial incarceration, little research examines potential ethnic heterogeneity in this experience (Comfort 2008;Lee et al. 2015;Wildeman and Lee 2021). We build upon foregoing work by assessing associations between familial incarceration and mental health using a measure that encompasses the incarceration of any immediate family member. ...
The present study uses elements of the social stress and intersectionality theories to examine associations between forms of criminal justice contact and mental health among African American and Afro-Caribbean women. While mass incarceration disproportionately targets, detains, and affects Black populations, the experiences and consequences of criminal justice contact for Black women remain understudied. Utilizing the National Survey of American Life ( n = 3,011), this study examined ethnic-stratified associations between criminal justice contact and three mental health indicators among Black women—psychological distress, self-rated mental health, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We assessed justice contact based on any contact (i.e., direct contact and/or family member incarceration), and then disaggregated contact into direct (i.e., personally experienced negative police interactions, arrests, and incarceration) and familial incarceration. Findings showed that any contact as well as direct forms of contact were associated with higher psychological distress for African American women and odds of PTSD for both groups. Furthermore, negative police interactions and family member incarceration were associated with psychological distress for African American women, while only familial incarceration worsened self-rated mental health for Afro-Caribbean women. This study yields important insights for research at the intersection of gender-ethnic status, spillover outcomes of formal social control, and mental health stratification.
... To accomplish this, we build national longitudinal relationship and residence crosswalks that incorporate novel linkages across a range of 1. For an example of prominent studies focusing on incarceration or jail, see Mumola (2000); Wildeman (2009); Lee et al. (2015); Wildeman and Andersen (2015); Billings (2018); Norris, Pecenco, and Weaver (2021); and Enns et al. (2019). ...
... 6. There is a similar body of evidence focusing on siblings and other members of an individual's social circle who have been to prison (Lee et al. 2015;Enns et al. 2019). the vast differences in the operations of the respective criminal justice systems (Barclay et al. 2003). ...
Children’s indirect exposure to the justice system through biological parents or coresident adults is both a marker of their own vulnerability and a measure of the justice system’s expansive reach in society. Estimating the size of this population for the United States has historically been hampered by inadequate data resources, including the inability to observe nonincarceration events, follow children throughout their childhood, and measure adult nonbiological parent cohabitants. To overcome these challenges, we leverage billions of restricted administrative and survey records linked with Criminal Justice Administrative Records System data and find substantially larger exposure rates than previously reported: prison, 9% of children born between 1999–2005; felony conviction, 18%; and any criminal charge, 39%. Charge exposure rates exceed 60% for Black, American Indian, and low-income children. While broader definitions reach a more expansive population, strong and consistently negative correlations with childhood well-being suggest that these remain valuable predictors of vulnerability. Finally, we document substantial geographic variation in exposure, which we leverage in a movers design to estimate the effect of living in a high-exposure county during childhood. We find that children moving into high-exposure counties are more likely to experience postmove exposure events and exhibit significantly worse outcomes by age 26 on multiple dimensions (earnings, criminal activity, teen parenthood, mortality); effects are strongest for those who moved at earlier ages.
... Nearly 2 million people are held in a cage on any given day. One in eight white women and one in two black women has a currently incarcerated loved one (Lee et al. 2015). One in nine children has an incarcerated parent, and those children are subject to a raft of negative mental and behavioral health effects (Wakefield and Wildeman 2013). ...
... (Roberts, 2004(Roberts, , p.1272. Studies report that about 44% of African American women and 32% of African American men have a family member in incarceration, significantly surpassing their White counterparts at 12% and 6%, respectively (Lee et al., 2015). African Americans also make up the largest share of the victims of wrongful convictions (Gross et al., 2017;Taslitz, 2006). ...
This research employs a convenience sample survey design to explore the complex interaction between race, gender, and public perceptions of wrongful convictions. Examining 324 responses from diverse groups, the study finds that these views are not uniform across different demographics. African Americans and women exhibit significantly heightened perceptions of wrongful convictions and more robust support for justice reform. The regression results also highlight that age, education, and professional background in law enforcement significantly influence these perspectives. Notwithstanding its limitations, the study forms foundation for further inquiry into the role of socio-demographic factors in shaping public attitudes toward criminal justice system.
... Not experiencing saturation of carceral contact personally, in one's family, racial group or neighborhood leaves these voters to lack political knowledge about the criminal legal system. Such lack of knowledge is much less common in Black communities, given that Black people are more likely to know someone who is incarcerated and almost half of Black women currently have a family member incarcerated (Lee et al., 2015). Even if voters in majority-white neighborhoods are sympathetic to racial justice issues, their geographically racialized experiences and daily lives allow continued ignorance about this structural reality (Mills, 2007). ...
Why do many liberal voters in diverse, urban areas express racially egalitarian values but oppose anti-carceral policies that would weaken structural racism? How does this manifest particularly among people whose racial groups and neighborhoods experience the omission of targeting by the carceral state—voters in majority-white neighborhoods? Based on 28 canvassing interviews conducted in 2019 in Los Angeles County, this study shows one way that the omission of carceral state targeting produces ideological schema that bolster structural racism. Specifically, I demonstrate that non-Republican voters typically use four predispositions to make sense of their opinions on a proposed jail decarceration policy: (1) conceptions of criminalized people, (2) beliefs about the purpose and effects of the criminal legal system, (3) understandings of structural racism in the criminal legal system, and (4) racialized emotions. In the absence of carceral state targeting and coherent partisan ideology, these predispositions work together to structure three commonly used schema to formulate opinions towards anti-carceral policies: dangerous, deserving, or harmed. The geographically racialized omission of carceral state targeting thus allows for these voters to use ideological schemas that bolster the continued reproduction of carceral racism in their sense-making of anti-carceral policy proposals.
... The current analysis examined stressors that occurred in the 12-month period preceding the assessment of ABP, with an exclusive focus on African-American women. This is important because many of the network events examined such as unemployment, chronic illnesses, problems with the police/legal system, and even caregiving (if resulting from potential foster care placement of a child, or debilitating health conditions in a network member) are disproportionately experienced by African-American men and women, relative to men and women from other racial/ethnic backgrounds (Lee et al., 2015;Looney & Turner, 2018;Roberts, 2022). Moreover, in many instances, these stressors have been shaped by both historical and contemporary discriminatory policies and practices (Alexander, 2020;Edwards et al., 2019). ...
Objetivo: Los factores estresantes de la vida se han relacionado con el riesgo cardiovascular; sin embargo, los estudios generalmente se enfocan en los factores estresantes que impactan directamente al individuo, es decir, los factores estresantes personales. La investigación sugiere que las mujeres, en particular las mujeres afroamericanas, pueden ser más vulnerables a los factores estresantes de la red que involucran a familiares y amigos, posiblemente debido a las normas sobre la necesidad de ser una “supermujer.” Sin embargo, pocos estudios han examinado estos fenómenos. Métodos: Examinamos las asociaciones entre los factores estresantes de la red y personales, y la presión arterial (PA) elevada en N = 392 mujeres afroamericanas de 30 a 46 años. Los eventos vitales negativos evaluados por el cuestionario se clasificaron en perturbadores de la red o estresores personales. La PA se evaluó en la clínica y mediante monitorización ambulatoria de 48 horas. Los modelos de regresión lineal y logística examinaron las asociaciones entre el tipo de factores estresantes y la PA sistólica (PAS) y PA diastólica (PAD), diurna y nocturna de 48 horas, y la hipertensión sostenida después de ajustar las covariables relevantes. Las interacciones con el esquema de supermujer (SWS por sus siglas en inglés) evaluado por cuestionario se probaron en análisis exploratorios. Resultados: En modelos ajustados por edad y sociodemográficos, los estresores de la red se asociaron significativamente con la PAS diurna (b (Error Estándar) = 2.01 (0.51), p ≤ .0001)) y la PAD durina (b (Error Estándar) = 1.59 (0.37), p ≤ .0001), pero los estresores personales no (valores p > .10). Las asociaciones persistieron después del ajuste por factores de riesgo cardiovascular y psicosocial. Los patrones fueron similares para la PA nocturna y la hipertensión sostenida. No hubo interacciones con SWS. Conclusiones: Los factores estresantes de la red, pero no los personales, se asociaron con tasas elevadas de PAS y PAD diurnas, así como con hipertensión sostenida en mujeres afroamericanas, independientemente del respaldo de SWS. Se necesita investigación futura para determinar si las intervenciones de manejo del estrés centradas en los factores estresantes de la red podrían afectar la PA en esta población de alto riesgo.
... Extant theory and research suggest that women of color face unique challenges centered on gendered racism (Essed, 1991). Compared to Black men, Black and Latina women must navigate through gendered role expectations with continual surveillance and punitiveness from the criminal legal system, not limited to their criminalization, overpolicing, economic stress, strains on motherhood, and familial incarceration (Collins, 2002;Lee et al., 2015;Patterson et al., 2020;Richie, 2017). Other scholars provide insight that young women of color have both direct and indirect experiences with the criminal legal system that are often shaped by their race/ethnicity and gender. ...
... Además, se detectó que estas mujeres tenían una posibilidad 41 % mayor de tener enfermedad cardiovascular con respecto a aquellas mujeres sin un pariente en prisión (Connors et al., 2020). Otros estudios realizados en Estados Unidos han encontrado también que tener a un familiar en prisión aumenta los factores de riesgo para la enfermedad cardiovascular (Lee et al., 2014(Lee et al., , 2015. Bruns y Lee (2020) mostraron además que el encarcelamiento de la pareja se asocia al consumo de sustancias ilícitas. ...
Este estudio cualitativo presenta los resultados de una encuesta no representativa realizada a personas con un familiar privado de la libertad en México. El objetivo fue entender cómo las principales medidas adoptadas por las autoridades para mitigar contagios dentro de los reclusorios afectaron a familiares que cuidan de las personas encarceladas. La encuesta recibió 234 respuestas que fueron procesadas en el software R (R, 2022). Si bien los resultados no son representativos de la población estudiada, ilustran cómo la adopción de ciertas políticas, tales como la suspensión de las visitas o la suspensión de los procesos legales, agravaron los problemas que tienen quienes cuidan de las personas privadas de la libertad y contribuyeron a hacer de la cárcel un factor de desigualdad social, económica y de salud. El estudio apunta a la importancia de tomar en cuenta a las familias de las personas privadas de la libertad al adoptar políticas públicas en los centros penitenciarios.
... Unfortunately, the consequences of incarceration are not solely reserved for the individual incarcerated. The impacts of incarceration can have devastating consequences on the family system as a whole (Beckett et al., 2018;Lee et al., 2015;Wakefield et al., 2016) creating challenges for family well-being and healthy family relationships for an already vulnerable group Tadros, 2022;Tadros, Durante, McKay, et al., 2022;Tadros & Vlach, 2022;Tadros & Tate, 2022). ...
The consequences of incarceration are not solely reserved for the individual incarcerated, rather the impacts of incarceration have been shown to extend to the entire family system. The parent-child relationship is multifaceted and necessitates empirical evidence that significantly honors the voices that are at the center of experience but typically silenced by the stigma and prejudice nature of incarceration. Via a phenomenological approach, mothers of incarcerated adult sons were interviewed. Five themes emerged from eight interviews: emotional impact, barriers and challenges for families, mental health services, systemic issues, and advocacy and support. Our findings inform clinical implications for mental health professionals working with the incarcerated population. We provided recommendations on how to best advocate for this population through research, clinical work, and policy.
... That men of color are disproportionately incarcerated further reveals that the social networks called on to help those in prison disproportionately involve women of color (Katzenstein and Waller 2015; Walker and García-Castañon 2017). Roughly 12 percent of white women have an incarcerated family member, as compared to 44 percent of Black women (Lee et al. 2015). Page et al.'s (2019) research into bail companies reveals how system actors understand and exploit this gender dynamic, relying on gendered aspects of care to pressure partners (disproportionately women of color) into bailing out their loved ones (disproportionately men of color). ...
The State You See uncovers a racial gap in the way the American government appears in people’s lives. It makes it clear that public policy changes over the last fifty years have driven all Americans to distrust the government that they see in their lives, even though Americans of different races are not seeing the same kind of government. For white people, these policy changes have involved a rising number of generous benefits submerged within America’s tax code, which taken together cost the government more than Social Security and Medicare combined. Political attention focused on this has helped make welfare and taxes more visible representations of government for white Americans. As a result, white people are left with the misperception that government does nothing for them, apart from take their tax money to spend on welfare. Distrust of government is the result. For people of color, distrust is also rampant but for different reasons. Over the last fifty years, America has witnessed increasingly overbearing policing and swelling incarceration numbers. These changes have disproportionately impacted communities of color, helping to make the criminal legal system a unique visible manifestation of government in these communities. While distrust of government emerges in both cases, these different roots lead to different consequences. White people are mobilized into politics by their distrust, feeling that they must speak up in order to reclaim their misspent tax dollars. In contrast, people of color are pushed away from government due to a belief that engaging in American elections will yield the same kind of unresponsiveness and violence that comes from interactions with the police. The result is a perpetuation of the same kind of racial inequality that has always been present in American democracy. The State You See is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the American government engages in subtle forms of discrimination and how it continues to uphold racial inequality in the present day.
... The average Black American knows far more about the criminal legal system than the average non-Black American due to racial disparities in policing and incarceration (Lee et al. 2015). In the previous section, we argued that police stops might reduce turnout because motorists stopped by the police might gain "new" information about the police and government more generally from this stop. ...
The American criminal legal system is an important site of political socialization: scholars have shown that criminal legal contact reduces turnout and that criminalization pushes people away from public institutions more broadly. Despite this burgeoning literature, few analyses directly investigate the causal effect of lower-level police contact on voter turnout. To do so, we leverage individual-level administrative ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida. We show that traffic stops materially decrease participation for Black and non-Black residents alike, and we also find temporal variation in the effect for Black voters. Although stops reduce turnout more for Black voters in the short term, they are less demobilizing over a longer time horizon. Although even low-level contacts with the police can reduce political participation across the board, our results point to a unique process of political socialization vis-à-vis the carceral state for Black Americans.
... Additionally, the social support that women provide to their families compared to men also places them in a uniquely disadvantaged position for accessing and utilizing health care upon reentry into society. For example, men comprise of over 90% of people in prison, and their loved ones who provide social support to them are disproportionately women, especially Black and other racially minoritized women (FBOP, 2020;Lee et al., 2015;Western, 2006). In fact, as Black women often lose same-race partners due to incarceration, they become the head of household (Link & Oser, 2018). ...
Research consistently finds the disproportionate negative health impact of the criminal justice system on racial and ethnic minorities. Yet less is known about the underlying mechanisms of health care utilization during community reintegration. We contribute to the literature theoretically by integrating two perspectives: network theory of social capital and multiple disadvantage hypothesis and providing a more nuanced explanation of health service use during reentry. We identify incarceration history as a unique disadvantaged status that precludes people from accessing social networks and social capital. We further elaborate on the phenomenon of racialized reentry and illustrate how multiple disadvantaged statuses are linked to social networks and health care.
... It has been widely demonstrated that the risk of imprisonment for non-White individuals is increased compared to their White counterparts, including for the same crime [35][36][37], and can be as high as 57% in Black men who do not have high school education. Nearly half of Black women had a family or extended family member imprisoned, compared to only 12% of white women [38]. Although there is likely also an overrepresentation of certain races in European prisons, the literature and research on this topic remain limited [39]. ...
... Further, according to Lee and colleagues, nearly half (44%) of all Black women in the U.S. have a family member who is incarcerated. By comparison, only 12% of White women have family in prison (Lee et al., 2015). In terms of economic inequalities in the incarcerated population, the median annual pre-incarceration income for Black and White male prisoners in 2014 was $17,625 and $21,975, respectively (Rabuy & Daniel, 2015). ...
Structural racism represents a key determinant of the racial health disparities that has characterized the U.S. population throughout its existence. While this reality has recently begun to gain increasing acknowledgment and acceptance within the health sciences, there are still considerable challenges related to defining the concept of structural racism and operationalizing it in empirical study. In this paper, building on the existing evidence base, we propose a comprehensive framework that centers structural racism in terms of its historical roots and continued manifestation in most domains of society, and offer solutions for the study of this phenomenon and the pathways that connect it to population-level health disparities. We showcase our framework by applying it to the known link between spatial and racialized clustering of incarceration – a previously cited representation of structural racism – and disparities in adverse birth outcomes. Through this process we hypothesize pathways that focus on social cohesion and community-level chronic stress, community crime and police victimization, as well as infrastructural community disinvestment. First, we contextualize these mechanisms within the relevant extant literature. Then, we make recommendations for future empirical pathway analyses. Finally, we identify key areas for policy, community, and individual-level interventions that target the impact of concentrated incarceration on birth outcomes among Black people in the U.S.
... Mass incarceration cannot be understood without reference to the long history of racial injustice throughout US history, especially the enslavement and subjugation of Black people (Alexander 2010;Muhammad 2011;Hinton and Cook 2021). The criminal justice system continues to be rife with bias and unfairness and reproduces racial inequality in communities that are struggling with poverty and numerous forms of violence (Western 2006;Lee et al. 2015;Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman 2016). Efforts to reduce reliance on incarceration should, we believe, treat equity, fairness, and remediation of past and current racial injustices as primary objectives. ...
... In the United States, one-third of Black men will experience incarceration in their lifetime [19]. The effects of incarceration reach beyond the individual and also impact the family and the community; 44% of Black women have a family member who has experienced incarceration, compared to just 12% of White women [20]. This disparity in incarceration has worsened racial health inequities observed across the United States. ...
People who are incarcerated have high rates of mental illness, substance use disorder, suicide attempts, and chronic medical conditions. Mortality rates are also significantly elevated following release. Additional work needs to be done to understand the risk factors for increased morbidity and mortality of people impacted by incarceration to better inform future interventions and system changes.
... Sentiment analysis packages tailored to criminal justice and its public health context could be used to assess sentiment, emotions, and opinions related to the urgency of this reform. Prior studies have established the disparate impact of mass incarceration on communities of color, as well as the socioeconomic and health effects that bolster long-standing ethnoracial inequities [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Additionally, previous research has highlighted the interconnected consequences of institutional racism whereby inequities in the health and criminal justice systems can reinforce inequities in other sectors [22,23]. ...
The health and safety of incarcerated persons and correctional personnel have been prominent in the U.S. news media discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining changing attitudes toward the health of the incarcerated population is imperative to better assess the extent to which the general public favors criminal justice reform. However, existing natural language processing lexicons that underlie current sentiment analysis (SA) algorithms may not perform adequately on news articles related to criminal justice due to contextual complexities. News discourse during the pandemic has highlighted the need for a novel SA lexicon and algorithm (i.e., an SA package) tailored for examining public health policy in the context of the criminal justice system. We analyzed the performance of existing SA packages on a corpus of news articles at the intersection of COVID-19 and criminal justice collected from state-level outlets between January and May 2020. Our results demonstrated that sentence sentiment scores provided by three popular SA packages can differ considerably from manually-curated ratings. This dissimilarity was especially pronounced when the text was more polarized, whether negatively or positively. A randomly selected set of 1,000 manually scored sentences, and the corresponding binary document term matrices, were used to train two new sentiment prediction algorithms (i.e., linear regression and random forest regression) to verify the performance of the manually-curated ratings. By better accounting for the unique context in which incarceration-related terminologies are used in news media, both of our proposed models outperformed all existing SA packages considered for comparison. Our findings suggest that there is a need to develop a novel lexicon, and potentially an accompanying algorithm, for analysis of text related to public health within the criminal justice system, as well as criminal justice more broadly.
... The rapid growth of the United States prison population since the 1980s has provided researchers with the perfect opportunity to investigate the effects of parental incarceration on children -a reality for a large number of American children, particularly those of African American heritage (Lee, McCormick, Hicken, & Wildeman, 2015;Wakefield & Wildeman, 2018). Generally, the importance of continued parental presence for child development is well established in the literature (Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, 2000). ...
It is generally accepted that men commit more crimes than women. The widespread acceptance of this view is based primarily on the number of convictions with most jurisdictions reporting considerably fewer incarcerated women/girls than men/boys. This manuscript argues however that decisions made by the various stakeholders that play a role in the incarceration of men are inherently gendered. These decisions are based on patriarchal perceptions and stereotypes related to the familial roles of men and women, and by extension their motivations for offending. Few studies have sought to explore the nature of these perceptions, and the effect these may have on incarceration patterns. Indeed, this form of inquiry remains absent from the research agenda of Caribbean criminologists. Using qualitative data from Barbados, this book analyses the extent to which these factors are taken into consideration not only by the police and members of the judiciary, but by examining the gendered decisions made by shop managers and proprietors in cases involving shoplifting, it seeks to analyse the extent to which these factors are taken into consideration before incidents reach the justice system. Critically, this book seeks also to juxtapose these assumptions against testimony from men incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Prison. The large proportion of males in Caribbean prisons when compared to their female counterparts necessitates an investigation into the factors that may contribute to differential treatment as they move through the justice system. Using data from Barbados, the present study seeks to fill this need.
What is the role of contemplative practices in the movement toward a more “just” criminal legal system? Over the past 8 years, we have explored this question through parallel lines of research and practice with police officers and incarcerated individuals who, despite very different relationships to this system, are all traumatized by an unjust system that erodes the humanity of all those connected to it. This article integrates our perspectives and critical reflections on this work with qualitative data from three groups we have engaged as research participants and community advisors. First, we share excerpts from semistructured interviews with police officers suggesting that an overemphasis on individual resilience and well-being may limit the extent to which mindfulness practices lead to interpersonal benefits or raise critical awareness of officers’ role in an unjust criminal legal system. Second, we share perspectives from community advisors on how future research and training with police officers can be more responsive to community concerns and priorities. Third, after sharing reflections on offering mindfulness practices in prisons, we summarize recommendations from an advisory board of formerly incarcerated individuals on how mindfulness can best support community reentry. To advance justice through contemplative practice and research, our experiences suggest we must be explicit about the ethical framework in which mindfulness practices are offered; bring these practices to individuals and organizations with the capability to influence systems change; and foreground shared humanity above perceived differences for individuals with very different relationships to the criminal legal system.
Background: Tobacco smoking and alcohol use contribute to a synergy of epidemics (a “syndemic”) that disproportionately affects persons involved with the criminal legal system (PCLS) and their social networks. An improved understanding of the complex interrelationships among the factors of the incarceration-tobacco-alcohol syndemic is essential to develop effective reform policies and interventions. However, collecting empirical data on these interrelationships is often hampered due to logistical and ethical challenges. Methods: We developed an agent-based network model (ABNM) to simulate the effects of the incarceration-tobacco-alcohol syndemic in the state of Rhode Island, USA. The model was validated and calibrated using empirical survey and demographic data. Outcomes included current smoking and heavy alcohol use rates in the first year after release among previously incarcerated agents and in their social networks. Results: The model successfully replicated demographic, substance use, and incarceration-related parameters. Simulation results suggest high rates of smoking (approximately 80% currently smoking persons in the first few weeks after release) and heavy alcohol use (approximately 40% current heavy alcohol use rate in the first few weeks after release) among PCLS, especially persons with multiple incarceration events. The model also estimated elevated rates of current smoking and current heavy alcohol use in the direct social contacts of PCLS. Discussion: This ABNM integrates biobehavioral health processes relating to incarceration and substance use. This model can be used as a platform to evaluate the potential impacts of interventions provided to PCLS and their networks
Scholarship examining the challenges that formerly incarcerated mothers experience after imprisonment often focuses on how their ex-offender status limits opportunities and leaves them alienated from their roles as citizens and as mothers. What is less understood however, is how women experience social exclusion from institutions that they initially perceive as supportive. Interviews with 33 formerly incarcerated Black mothers reveal how women respond to negative experiences with institutions after their imprisonment and how they interpret similar encounters of marginalization prior to their arrest and incarceration. In taking a life history approach to examining women’s experiences with social service agencies, this analysis examines the interplay between carceral logics, and the institutions purposed with facilitating women’s reintegration. The paper introduces the concept carceral logics of benevolence to capture how institutions that marginalized groups rely upon to extend benevolence, often further marginalize already vulnerable groups. Findings reveal that women interpret and respond to carceral logics of benevolence by engaging in institutional cynicism and drawing upon repertories of systemic marginalization.
Background
Early vascular ageing (EVA) contributes to elevated risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), which disproportionately affects African American women. Incarceration, an event disproportionately impacting African Americans, may be a stressor contributing to EVA in African American women. Further, the subjective perspective, commonly referred to as appraisal, of incarceration may also be important for health. We hypothesised that having family and/or friends incarcerated and appraising the incarceration as upsetting would be associated with indices of EVA.
Methods
In a community-based cohort of African American women aged 30–46 living in Atlanta, Georgia (n=391), participants were asked, at baseline, about family and/or friend incarceration and to appraise how upsetting the incarceration was. Multivariable linear regression examined associations between: (1) family and/or friend incarceration and indices of EVA (pulse wave velocity, augmentation index, central systolic blood pressure (SBP) and pulse pressure amplification) and (2) appraisal of incarceration and EVA indices.
Results
45% of participants (n=174) reported having a loved one incarcerated, and 59% (n=102) reported the incarceration as upsetting. Having a loved one incarcerated was associated with a higher central SBP (b=4.30; 95% CI 1.61, 6.99) and augmentation index (b=2.29; 95% CI 0.26, 4.33). Appraisal of incarceration was only associated with central SBP.
Conclusions
Family or friend incarceration was highly prevalent in this cohort of African American women and associated with indices of EVA. Mass incarceration of others may affect the physical health of African American women which may contribute to CVD disparities.
Objective
To consider whether one sibling's criminal legal system contact influences another's material conditions, social support, and mental health and behavioral problems.
Background
Sibling incarceration is both the most common form of familial incarceration in the United States, with more than one in four Americans reporting ever experiencing this event, and highly unequally distributed. Despite how prevalent and unequally distributed sibling criminal legal system contact is, little research considers the consequences of that event for family life. This study seeks to partially fill that gap by testing whether and how a sibling's criminal legal system contact is associated with changes in the material conditions, social support, and wellbeing of caregivers and other children.
Method
Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the authors estimate hierarchical linear models to consider the relationship between sibling criminal legal system contact and three core indicators of familial and child wellbeing: familial (1) social support and (2) material insecurity, and (3) child wellbeing, as indicated by behavioral and mental health problems using validated scales.
Results
Sibling criminal legal system contact is associated with a reduction in the wellbeing of other children and contributes to declines in familial social support and material security.
Conclusion
Taken together, the results suggest that a sibling's criminal legal system contact can disrupt home life for siblings and families alike, highlighting yet another way that mass criminalization may imperil families and children.
Importance
Racial and ethnic inequities in the criminal-legal system are an important manifestation of structural racism. However, how these inequities may influence the risk of severe maternal morbidity (SMM) and its persistent racial and ethnic disparities remains underinvestigated.
Objective
To examine the association between county-level inequity in jail incarceration rates comparing Black and White individuals and SMM risk in California.
Design, Setting, and Participants
This population-based cross-sectional study used state-wide data from California on all live hospital births at 20 weeks of gestation or later from January 1, 1997, to December 31, 2018. Data were obtained from hospital discharge and vital statistics records, which were linked with publicly available county-level data. Data analysis was performed from January 2022 to February 2023.
Exposure
Jail incarceration inequity was determined from the ratio of jail incarceration rates of Black individuals to those of White individuals and was categorized as tertile 1 (low), tertile 2 (moderate), tertile 3 (high), with mean cutoffs across all years of 0 to 2.99, 3.00 to 5.22, and greater than 5.22, respectively.
Main Outcome and Measures
This study used race- and ethnicity-stratified mixed-effects logistic regression models with birthing people nested within counties and adjusted for individual- and county-level characteristics to estimate the odds of non–blood transfusion SMM (NT SMM) and SMM including blood transfusion–only cases (SMM; as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention SMM index) associated with tertiles of incarceration inequity.
Results
This study included 10 200 692 births (0.4% American Indian or Alaska Native, 13.4% Asian or Pacific Islander, 5.8% Black, 50.8% Hispanic or Latinx, 29.6% White, and 0.1% multiracial or other [individuals who self-identified with ≥2 racial groups and those who self-identified as “other” race or ethnicity]). In fully adjusted models, residing in counties with high jail incarceration inequity (tertile 3) was associated with higher odds of SMM for Black (odds ratio [OR], 1.14; 95% CI, 1.01-1.29 for NT SMM; OR, 1.20, 95% CI, 1.01-1.42 for SMM), Hispanic or Latinx (OR, 1.24; 95% CI, 1.14-1.34 for NT SMM; OR, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.14-1.27 for SMM), and White (OR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.93-1.12 for NT SMM; OR, 1.09; 95% CI, 1.02-1.17 for SMM) birthing people, compared with residing in counties with low inequity (tertile 1).
Conclusions and Relevance
The findings of this study highlight the adverse maternal health consequences of structural racism manifesting via the criminal-legal system and underscore the need for community-based alternatives to inequitable punitive practices.
Women tend to be more vulnerable to the adverse psychological effects of “network events” (stressors that occur to loved ones). The cost-of-caring hypothesis is regarded as the primary mechanism for this vulnerability and posits that women’s relatively high level of emotional involvement in the lives of network members causes women to experience greater empathetic reactions when loved ones encounter stressors. Drawing on the stress process model, gender theory, and research on the collateral consequences of incarceration, we theorize stress proliferation, the process by which an initial stressor induces secondary stressors, as an additional mechanism and empirically test our theoretical propositions using the case of African Americans with an incarcerated family member. Using data from the National Survey of American Life, we ask: are African American women more vulnerable to the depressive effects of familial incarceration compared to African American men? If so, to what extent might African American women’s heightened vulnerability be explained by their greater susceptibility to stress proliferation? Results suggest that familial incarceration is associated with greater chronic strains, financial strain, and family conflict only among African American women. Further, the magnitude of the association between familial incarceration and depressive symptoms is significantly larger among African American women; however, after adjusting for stress proliferation variables, the gender difference in vulnerability attenuates and becomes statistically nonsignificant. We conclude that the emotional cost of caring may be compounded by social and economic costs of caregiving, heightening women’s vulnerability to depression following disruptive network events.
We analyze the consequences of using driver consent as a basis for initializing a traffic stop‐and‐search compared to those searches based on probable cause. We find that consent searches are less likely to result in contraband recovery than are probable cause searches. Moreover, police agencies with a relatively higher reliance on consent searches find similar amounts of contraband and make a similar number of arrests as agencies doing much less searching but with a greater reliance on probable cause. These patterns are amplified along racial lines, and there is no discernible relationship between the use of consent searches and crime. We also provide causal evidence that corroborate these observational findings by examining the consequences of a Texas Highway Patrol policy, which suddenly increased the consent search rate in two South Texas counties. We show the contraband recovery rate discontinuously decreases when the consent search rate discontinuously increases.
Background:
Most research on discrimination and health operationalizes discrimination as direct individual experiences. Here, we examine the social patterning of vicarious discrimination, an important but largely overlooked dimension of discrimination.
Methods:
Drawing on community-based participatory research with a multi-stage probability sample (n = 178) of African Americans in Tallahassee, Florida, we measured vicarious discrimination, or exposure to discrimination through one's family and friends. We used chi-square tests to examine gender differences in the social domains and relational sources of vicarious discrimination. Negative binomial regression models were fit to identify predictors of exposure to vicarious discrimination.
Results:
Vicarious discrimination is more prevalent than direct experiences of discrimination (73 versus 61%) and more than 20% of participants report vicarious discrimination in the absence of direct discrimination. For women, vicarious discrimination most often involved the workplace; for men, police. However, gender differences are smaller for vicarious versus direct discrimination. Close friends and children were top relational sources of vicarious discrimination for men and women, respectively. Middle-aged participants reported the most vicarious discrimination.
Conclusions:
Overall, our data show that vicarious discrimination is more common than widely understood and associated with individual-level sociodemographic characteristics that index one's position in broader social systems. The prevalence of vicarious discrimination in the absence of direct discrimination suggests that standard approaches, which measure individual exposures in isolation, are subject to misclassification bias. Our results imply that existing research on discrimination and health, which already demonstrates substantial harm, underestimates African Americans' true exposures to salient aspects of discrimination.
This study conceptualizes carceral violence to include the intimate sphere, highlighting a form of systemic racialized-gendered violence I term intimate carceral violence, which consists of two distinct violent effects of carcerality on relationships in Black communities: prisonized romance and coercive carceral care. I conducted qualitative interviews with 31 criminal-legal system–impacted Black women aged between 18 and 65 years in Southern California. Findings revealed that their romantic precarity included the challenge of finding partners due to the encroachment of the carceral state on Black communities. This study establishes how women engage in intimate carceral labor to mitigate their experiences of intimate carceral violence. I focus on the hidden work of managing an intimate partner’s emotions and behavior engendered by incarceration.
Mass incarceration has fundamental adverse effects that include weakening families and intimate relationships, altering children’s life chances, and undermining communities. Serious work on those effects began in the late 1990s and laid foundations on which subsequent research has built. More recent work, especially in the past dozen years, is more complex and has produced findings that are more nuanced and mixed. It is also theoretically and conceptually richer. The newer work involves substantially greater cross-disciplinary engagement, draws on new and more diverse data sources, and pays greater attention to pathways into prison. Fundamental challenges persist. They include measurement problems, overlap between the criminal justice and other governmental systems (e.g., education, public health, social welfare), and generalizability issues. Mixed results, definitional disagreements, and measurement challenges should encourage researchers to embrace complexity in the study of the effects of incarceration on family and community life.
Tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) can provide vital income support to people returning to their communities following incarceration. But the current design of the EITC prevents many from accessing the income support that it provides. In this article, I propose expanding the EITC so that it better serves communities that have been harmed by punitive criminal legal policy. An expanded EITC could raise the incomes of community members returning from incarceration by 8 to 40 percent and raise the incomes of some caregiving families by 20 to 35 percent. I also consider the potential of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) to encourage employers to hire justice-involved workers. Finally, I argue that policy-makers should develop a bolder, refundable tax credit targeted at individuals who return to their communities from a variety of institutions, including carceral facilities. With more inclusive tax credits, social policy can begin to redress the harms of mass incarceration and support a vision of public safety that is centered on flourishing communities.
Patterns of incarceration transmit generationally causing damage to families and communities across decades. Literature is replete with studies on the harmful impact of parental incarceration but is missing the voice of those living within this cycle. This study highlights the perspectives and lived experiences of those who have parents who have been incarcerated, are currently incarcerated themselves, and have children of their own. This middle generation sheds light on how and why they followed in their parents' footsteps and their desire to break this pattern for their own children. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
Objective:
This study documents life course patterns of vicarious exposure to the criminal legal system among parents and siblings in the United States.
Background:
The criminal legal system shapes family outcomes in important ways. Still, life course patterns of vicarious exposure to the system-especially to lower-level contacts-among parents and siblings are not well documented.
Method:
Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Kaplan-Meier survival curves, and Cox regression models, we estimate cumulative risks of vicarious exposure to arrest, probation, and incarceration among parents (n=3,885 parents; 185,444 person-years) and siblings (n=1,875; 44,766 person-years) and examine disparities by race-ethnicity, gender, and education, and at their intersections.
Results:
Vicarious exposure to the system is common-but highly unequal-among parents and siblings. Racially minoritized parents and siblings had greater levels and earlier risks of exposure. For example, by age 50, an estimated one in five Black parents experienced having a child incarcerated, a risk about twice as high as White and 50% higher than Latinx parents. By age 26, an estimated six in 10 Black young people with brothers experienced having a brother arrested; more than four in 10 experienced a brother on probation; and more than three in 10 experienced brother incarceration. For many estimates, racialized inequities in risks of vicarious system exposure widened at higher levels of education.
Conclusion:
These findings provide essential context for understanding the role of the criminal legal system in maintaining and exacerbating family inequality.
Incarceration is no longer an uncommon experience in the United States for racial and ethnic minorities or for the poor. Close to half of US adults have been impacted by the incarceration of a family member, and as many as 10 million children have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. Children and families are the forgotten victims of incarceration and are confronted with many challenges due to the incarceration of their parent(s) or family member. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a review of the current research on parental, familial, and the lesser-known reality of sibling incarceration. Additionally, this chapter will discuss the historical context of family separation in the periods before and after slavery. Informed by this research, we suggest different approaches for examining the impacts of parental and familial incarceration in fragile communities in an effort to change the narrative from one of disadvantage to resiliency.KeywordsParental incarcerationFamilial incarcerationFragileSlaveryFamily separation
The relative importance of racial and class inequality in incarceration in the United States has recently become the subject of much debate. In this paper, we seek to give this debate a stronger empirical foundation. First, we update previous research on racial and class inequality in people’s likelihood of being imprisoned. Then, we examine racial and class inequality in people’s risk of having a family member imprisoned or living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood. We find that racial inequality in prison admissions has fallen in the twenty-first century, while class inequality has surged. However, in recent years, Black people with high levels of education and income were more likely than white people with low levels of education and income to experience the imprisonment of a family member or to live in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate. These seemingly contradictory conclusions can be reconciled by the fact that enduring structures of racial domination have made class boundaries among Black people more permeable than they are among white people. Imprisonment in the United States is increasingly reserved for the poor. But because Black Americans are disproportionately connected to the poor through their families and neighborhoods, racial inequality exceeds class inequality in people’s indirect experiences with imprisonment.
Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present a series of stylized facts about the carceral state and political behavior, highlighting places where we know a great deal (such as the relative underrepresentation of people with criminal convictions among voters) and places where more work is needed (such as nonvoting participation and community spillovers). Then, I discuss policy proposals that seek to mitigate the political impacts of the carceral state, and what is and is not yet known about what they might accomplish.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
In the literature on transitional justice, there is disagreement about whether countries like the United States can be characterized as transitional societies. Though it is widely recognized that transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and reparations can be used by Global North nations to address racial injustice, some consider societies to be transitional only when they are undergoing a formal democratic regime change. We conceptualize the political situation of low-income Black communities under the U.S. imprisonment and policing regime in terms of three criteria for identifying transitional contexts: normalized collective and political wrongdoing , pervasive structural inequality , and the failure of the rule of law. That these criteria are met, however, does not necessarily mean that a transition is taking place. Drawing on the American political development and abolition democracy literatures, we discuss what it would mean for the United States to transition out of its present imprisonment and policing regime. A transitional justice perspective shows the importance of not only pushing for truth and reparation, but for an actual transition.
Public attitudes toward people who are incarcerated have been studied; however, there is a paucity of information regarding how the public views pregnant women who are incarcerated. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative assessment investigating attitudes toward pregnant women who are incarcerated and prison conditions at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Participants included 507 students, staff, and faculty who were asked to specifically consider pregnant women who are incarcerated while completing the survey. We found that women, younger people, non-religious or non-Christian individuals, and those with higher levels of formal education perceived pregnant women who are incarcerated more positively and favored less punitive prison conditions. In addition, closer proximity to people who are incarcerated was associated with more positive attitudes toward pregnant women who are incarcerated but was not related to views on prison conditions. Qualitatively, participants reported that considering pregnant women who are incarcerated led them to respond with the same or less negativity than if they had been asked to consider people who are incarcerated as a whole, citing factors such as gender stereotypes and concern for the child. These results can be used as a foundation to understand how students, faculty, and staff at a large Midwestern university perceive pregnant women who are incarcerated and to inform education and policy efforts.
Researchers have written a good deal in the last two decades about the relationship between public education and criminal justice as a pipeline by which public school practices correlate with or cause increased lifetime risk for incarceration for Black and Latinx youth. This article flips the script of the school-to-prison pipeline metaphor by reversing the question. What are the effects of criminal justice on public schooling? Reviewing recent social science research from multiple disciplines on policing and incarceration, this article describes the relationship of criminal justice to public education as hobbling, a social process by which the massification of policing and incarceration systematically compromises the ability of target demographics of American children to enjoy their rights to a free and appropriate public education.
In this Review, we assess how mass incarceration, a monumental American policy experiment, has affected families over the past five decades. We reach four conclusions. First, family member incarceration is now common for American families. Second, individuals who will eventually have a family member incarcerated are worse off than those who never will, even before the incarceration takes place. Third, family member incarceration has negative effects on families above and beyond these preexisting disadvantages. And finally, policy interventions that address the precursors to family member incarceration and seek to minimize family member incarceration would best enhance family well-being. If the goal is to help all American families thrive, then the importance of simultaneous changes in social and criminal justice policy cannot be overstated.
Although research on the intergenerational consequences of criminal justice contact has focused primarily on parental incarceration, scholars have called for greater attention to the reverberating effects of other family members’ entanglements with law enforcement on youth. Using longitudinal data from the Mobile Youth Survey (MYS), this study examines direct and indirect linkages between household member arrest and youth outcomes and considers the roles of social (parenting, peer normative climate) and emotional (anger expression) processes. Results suggest that household members’ involvement with the criminal justice system has consequences for youth’s behavioral and criminal justice outcomes. Moreover, although social and emotional processes appeared to “matter,” they did not account for the negative outcomes associated with household member arrest. Results suggest the importance of adopting broader perspectives on family criminal justice contact that include attention to household member arrest as well as to both direct and indirect effects. Findings are discussed in terms of directions for future research and the need to specify mechanisms by which household member arrest may increase risk for adverse youth outcomes.
Stigma is often cited as a mechanism driving the consequences of incarceration for formerly incarcerated people and their families. Few studies, however, provide quantitative evidence of the nature and strength of stigma stemming from direct and indirect interaction with jails. In this article, we use an experimental vignette design to make two contributions. First, we use two nonincarceration control groups that allow us to differentiate the stigma attached to incarceration relative to one condition that is not stigmatized (colorblindness) from another that is (drug addiction). Second, we test whether having a partner or family member who has been incarcerated in jail generates stigma. We find that having a formerly incarcerated relative negatively impacts perceptions of personality traits, financial deservingness, and parenting quality. We also show that the stigmatized control condition is comparable with the prior incarceration of a male relative, but more favorable than one’s own prior incarceration, indicating unique incarceration stigma. These findings have implications for our understanding of social inequality because they demonstrate how members of marginalized groups who are most likely to experience incarceration or have an incarcerated loved one continue to face informal social exclusion and the attendant consequences long after the formal punishment.
This study aims to determine the relationship between career adaptability and work engagement among millennial employees in Yogyakarta
Objective
This study examined the correlates of involvement in extended family social support networks among African Americans.
Background
Previous literature has documented the importance of informal social support from extended family members for the African American population. Most research has investigated black-white differences in network involvement or has focused on impoverished African American families. Both approaches conceal important within-group variation in participation among the total African American population.
Method
This study relied on nationally representative data from the African American sub-sample of the National Survey of American Life (n = 3538). It employed ordinary least squares regression analysis to examine the sociodemographic and family factors that are associated with four key measures of involvement in extended family support networks: receiving and providing extended family support, frequency of family contact, and degree of subjective closeness.
Results
African Americans routinely interacted with members of their family, displayed a high degree of family closeness, and exchanged support fairly frequently. Findings also revealed significant variation in network involvement by sociodemographic characteristics: women, younger adults, and Southerners were typically most involved; individuals who experienced greater material hardship, were previously incarcerated, or served in the military reported less involvement. Results also showed that family closeness and family contact were particularly salient factors shaping the extent to which network members engaged in support exchanges.
Conclusion
The magnitude of within-group heterogeneity in network involvement underscores the importance of considering issues of intragroup diversity in the developing literature on African American extended family networks.
Research increasingly documents the repercussions of family member incarceration for health, but little is known about the relative health consequences of different types of family member incarceration (including parent, sibling, child, and romantic partner/co-parent incarceration) or demographic variation in the health consequences of family member incarceration. I used data from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS), a nationally representative cross-sectional survey of U.S. adults (N = 2808), to estimate the association between family member incarceration history and mental health, net of covariates. Adjusted logistic regression models suggest three conclusions. First, immediate family member incarceration is positively associated with fair or poor mental health. Second, parent and sibling incarceration—but not child or romantic partner/co-parent incarceration—is positively associated with fair or poor mental health, but the different types of family member incarceration are not statistically different from one another. Third, the association between family member incarceration and fair or poor mental health is similar across race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and incarceration history. These findings highlight that any family member incarceration—and not necessarily the type of family member incarceration—has repercussions for mental health, and that these associations are not contingent on demographic characteristics. Given the concentration of family member incarceration among people of color and the poor, this adverse experience may exacerbate population health inequalities.
Dramatic increases in criminal justice contact in the United States have rendered prison and jail incarceration common for US men and their loved ones, with possible implications for women's health. This review provides the most expansive critical discussion of research on family member incarceration and women's health in five stages. First, we provide new estimates showing how common family member incarceration is for US women by race/ethnicity and level of education. Second, we discuss the precursors to family member incarceration. Third, we discuss mechanisms through which family member incarceration may have no effect on women's health, a positive effect on women's health, and a negative effect on women's health. Fourth, we review existing research on how family member incarceration is associated with women's health. Fifth, we continue our discussion of the limitations of existing research and provide some recommendations for future research.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Though sociologists have examined how mass incarceration affects stratification, remarkably little is known about how it shapes educational disparities. Analyzing the Fragile Families Study and its rich paternal incarceration data, I ask whether black and white children with fathers who have been incarcerated are less prepared for school both cognitively and non-cognitively as a result, and whether racial and gendered disparities in incarceration help explain the persistence of similar gaps in educational outcomes and trajectories. Using a variety of estimation strategies, I show that experiencing paternal incarceration by age five is associated with lower non-cognitive school readiness. While the main effect of incarceration does not vary by race, boys with incarcerated fathers have substantially worse non-cognitive skills at school entry, impacting the likelihood of special education placement at age nine. Mass incarceration facilitates the intergenerational transmission of male behavioral disadvantage, and because of the higher exposure of black children to incarceration, it also plays a role in explaining the persistently low achievement of black boys.
High rates of imprisonment among American fathers have motivated an ongoing examination of incarceration's role in family life. A growing literature suggests that incarceration creates material and socioemotional challenges not only for prisoners and former prisoners but also for their families and communities. The authors examined the relationship between fathers' incarceration and one such challenge: the housing insecurity of the mothers of their children. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,125) and a series of longitudinal regression models, they found that mothers' housing security was compromised following their partners' incarceration, an association likely driven in part, but not entirely, by financial challenges following his time in prison or jail. Given the importance of stable housing for the continuity of adult employment, children's schooling, and other inputs to healthy child development, the findings suggest a grave threat to the well-being of children with incarcerated fathers.
In some American schools, about a fifth of the fathers have spent time in prison during their child’s primary education. We examine how variation across schools in the aggregation and concentration of the mass imprisonment of fathers is associated with their own children’s intergenerational educational outcomes and “spills over” into the attainments of other students. We assess the association of this interinstitutional and intergenerational “prison through school pathway” with downward and blocked educational achievement. Educational and economic resources and other predisposing variables partially explain school-linked effects of paternal imprisonment on measures of children’s educational outcomes. However, we find that the net negative school-level association of paternal imprisonment with educational outcomes persists even after we introduce school- and individual-level measures of a wide range of mediating processes and extraneous control variables. We discuss paternal imprisonment as a form of “marked absence.” The significance of elevated levels of paternal imprisonment in schools is perhaps most apparent in its negative association with college completion, the educational divide that now most dramatically disadvantages individuals and groups in American society.
This article explores intergenerational implications, specifically the troubled transitions of the children of incarcerated fathers from adolescence to adulthood. Although crime rates have decreased annually since the early 1990s, the social exclusion of fathers through imprisonment has increased, as has the further exclusion of young adults through homelessness, health-care uninsuredness, and political nonparticipation. Our latent class analysis indicates that 15 percent of youth are socially excluded, an estimate similar to administrative estimates of severely "disconnected" youth. We combine the logic of a cumulative disadvantage theory and the status attainment paradigm with three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effects of father's imprisonment on the social detainment and exclusion of children during the transition to adulthood. Problems of socialization and strain associated with the incarceration and absence of biological fathers, as well as state sanctioning of youth from these disrupted families, are important aspects of the cumulative process of disadvantage that we identify in these data; however, the interconnected roles of father's incarceration and intergenerational educational detainment are pivotal in producing exclusionary outcomes for children in emerging adulthood. Although there is much evidence that the effects we examine are generic across gender, there is also more specific evidence that the absence of biological fathers from households associated with incarceration leaves daughters at special risk of abuse and neglect by nonbiological father figures and through homelessness during the transition to adulthood.
Have the core discussion networks of Americans changed in the past two decades? In 1985, the General Social Survey (GSS) collected the first nationally representative data on the confidants with whom Americans discuss important matters. In the 2004 GSS the authors replicated those questions to assess social change in core network structures. Discussion networks are smaller in 2004 than in 1985. The number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. The mean network size decreases by about a third (one confidant), from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Most people have densely interconnected confidants similar to them. Some changes reflect the changing demographics of the U.S. population. Educational heterogeneity of social ties has decreased, racial heterogeneity has increased. The data may overestimate the number of social isolates, but these shrinking networks reflect an important social change in America.
We present new evidence on the effect of aggregate changes in incarceration on changes in crime that accounts for the potential simultaneous relationship between incarceration and crime. Our principal innovation is that we develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock (from whatever source) to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities. Given that incarceration rates adjust to permanent changes in behavior with a dynamic lag (given that only a fraction of offenders are apprehended in any one period), one can identify variation in incarceration that is not contaminated by contemporary changes in criminal behavior. We isolate this variation and use it to tease out the causal effect of incarceration on crime. Using state level data for the United States covering the period from 1978 to 2004, we find crime-prison elasticities that are considerably larger than those implied by OLS estimates. For the entire time period, we find average crime-prison effects with implied elasticities of between -0.06 and -0.11 for violent crime and between -0.15 and -0.21 for property crime. We also present results for two sub-periods of our panel: 1978 to 1990 and 1991 to 2004. Our IV estimates for the earlier time period suggest much larger crime-prison effects, with elasticity estimates consistent with those presented in Levitt (1996) who analyzes a similar time period yet with an entirely different identification strategy. For the latter time period, however, the effects of changes in prison on crime are much smaller. Our results indicate that recent increases in incarceration have generated much less bang-per-buck in terms of crime reduction.
Although recent studies suggest that 13% of young adults, including at least one-fourth of African Americans, experience parental
incarceration, little research has examined links between parental incarceration and physical health. Using data from the
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (1994–2008) and gender-based theories of stress, the authors examined whether
parental incarceration is associated with increased body mass index among women but not men. Panel analysis spanning adolescence
and adulthood, controlling for stressful life events, internalizing behaviors, and a range of individual, familial, and neighborhood
characteristics, reveals that body mass index for women who have experienced parental incarceration is 0.49 units (P < 0.004) higher than that for women whose parents have never been incarcerated. This association is not evident among men.
Similarly, in change score models between waves II and IV, women experiencing parental incarceration have a 0.92-unit increase
in body mass index (P < 0.026) relative to women who did not have a parent undergo incarceration. In supplemental analysis examining if gender
differences in incarceration stress response (externalizing vs. internalizing) explain these findings, the authors found that
obesity status moderates the relation between depression and parental incarceration. Results suggest a stress internalization
process that, for the first time, links parental incarceration with obesity among women.
High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children's development. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the relationship between paternal incarceration and developmental outcomes for approximately 3,000 urban children. We estimate cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models that control not only for fathers' basic demographic characteristics and a rich set of potential confounders, but also for several measures of pre-incarceration child development and family fixed effects. We find significant increases in aggressive behaviors and some evidence of increased attention problems among children whose fathers are incarcerated. The estimated effects of paternal incarceration are stronger than those of other forms of father absence, suggesting that children with incarcerated fathers may require specialized support from caretakers, teachers, and social service providers. The estimated effects are stronger for children who lived with their fathers prior to incarceration but are also significant for children of nonresident fathers, suggesting that incarceration places children at risk through family hardships including and beyond parent-child separation.
Using 2006 General Social Survey data, the authors compare levels of segregation by race and along other dimensions of potential social cleavage in the contemporary United States. Americans are not as isolated as the most extreme recent estimates suggest. However, hopes that "bridging" social capital is more common in broader acquaintanceship networks than in core networks are not supported. Instead, the entire acquaintanceship network is perceived by Americans to be about as segregated as the much smaller network of close ties. People do not always know the religiosity, political ideology, family behaviors, or socioeconomic status of their acquaintances, but perceived social divisions on these dimensions are high, sometimes rivaling racial segregation in acquaintanceship networks. The major challenge to social integration today comes from the tendency of many Americans to isolate themselves from others who differ on race, political ideology, level of religiosity, and other salient aspects of social identity.
The life expectancy of persons cycling through the prison system is unknown. The authors sought to determine the 15.5-year survival of 23,510 persons imprisoned in the state of Georgia on June 30, 1991. After linking prison and mortality records, they calculated standardized mortality ratios (SMRs). The cohort experienced 2,650 deaths during follow-up, which were 799 more than expected (SMR = 1.43, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.38, 1.49). Mortality during incarceration was low (SMR = 0.85, 95% CI: 0.77, 0.94), while postrelease mortality was high (SMR = 1.54, 95% CI: 1.48, 1.61). SMRs varied by race, with black men exhibiting lower relative mortality than white men. Black men were the only demographic subgroup to experience significantly lower mortality while incarcerated (SMR = 0.66, 95% CI: 0.58, 0.76), while white men experienced elevated mortality while incarcerated (SMR = 1.28, 95% CI: 1.10, 1.48). Four causes of death (homicide, transportation, accidental poisoning, and suicide) accounted for 74% of the decreased mortality during incarceration, while 6 causes (human immunodeficiency virus infection, cancer, cirrhosis, homicide, transportation, and accidental poisoning) accounted for 62% of the excess mortality following release. Adjustment for compassionate releases eliminated the protective effect of incarceration on mortality. These results suggest that the low mortality inside prisons can be explained by the rarity of deaths unlikely to occur in the context of incarceration and compassionate releases of moribund patients.
This paper investigates the connection between incarceration dynamics and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) infection rates, with particular emphasis on the black-white AIDS rate disparity. Using case-level U.S. data spanning 1982-96, we model the dynamic relationship between AIDS infection rates and the proportion of men in the age-, state-, and race-matched cohort that are incarcerated. We find strong effects of male incarceration rates on male and female AIDS rates. The dynamic structure of this relationship parallels the incubation time between human immunodeficiency virus infection and the onset of full-blown AIDS. These results persist after controlling for year fixed effects; a fully interacted set of age, race, and state fixed effects; crack cocaine prevalence; and flow rates in and out of prison. The results reveal that higher incarceration rates among black males over this period explain the lion's share of the racial disparity in AIDS infection among women. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
Incarceration is associated with increased cardiovascular disease mortality, but prospective studies exploring mechanisms of this association are lacking.
We examined the independent association of prior incarceration with incident hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia using the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study-a cohort of young adults aged 18 to 30 years at enrollment in 1985-1986, balanced by sex, race (black and white), and education (high school education or less). We also examined the association of incarceration with left ventricular hypertrophy on echocardiography and with barriers to health care access.
Of 4350 participants, 288 (7%) reported previous incarceration. Incident hypertension in young adulthood was more common among former inmates than in those without incarceration history (12% vs 7%; odds ratio, 1.7 [95% confidence interval {CI}, 1.2-2.6]), and this association persisted after adjustment for smoking, alcohol and illicit drug use, and family income (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 1.6 [95% CI, 1.0-2.6]). Incarceration was significantly associated with incident hypertension in those groups with the highest prevalence of prior incarceration, ie, black men (AOR, 1.9 [95% CI, 1.1-3.5]) and less-educated participants (AOR, 4.0 [95% CI, 1.0-17.3]). Former inmates were more likely to have left ventricular hypertrophy (AOR, 2.7, [95% CI, 0.9-7.9]) and to report no regular source for medical care (AOR, 2.5, [95% CI, 1.3-4.8]). Cholesterol levels and diabetes rates did not differ by history of incarceration.
Incarceration is associated with future hypertension and left ventricular hypertrophy among young adults. Identification and treatment of hypertension may be important in reducing cardiovascular disease risk among formerly incarcerated individuals.
The U.S. population of former prison inmates is large and growing. The period immediately after release may be challenging for former inmates and may involve substantial health risks. We studied the risk of death among former inmates soon after their release from Washington State prisons.
We conducted a retrospective cohort study of all inmates released from the Washington State Department of Corrections from July 1999 through December 2003. Prison records were linked to the National Death Index. Data for comparison with Washington State residents were obtained from the Wide-ranging OnLine Data for Epidemiologic Research system of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mortality rates among former inmates were compared with those among other state residents with the use of indirect standardization and adjustment for age, sex, and race.
Of 30,237 released inmates, 443 died during a mean follow-up period of 1.9 years. The overall mortality rate was 777 deaths per 100,000 person-years. The adjusted risk of death among former inmates was 3.5 times that among other state residents (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.2 to 3.8). During the first 2 weeks after release, the risk of death among former inmates was 12.7 (95% CI, 9.2 to 17.4) times that among other state residents, with a markedly elevated relative risk of death from drug overdose (129; 95% CI, 89 to 186). The leading causes of death among former inmates were drug overdose, cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide.
Former prison inmates were at high risk for death after release from prison, particularly during the first 2 weeks. Interventions are necessary to reduce the risk of death after release from prison.
When large numbers of parent-aged adults, especially men, cycle through stays in prison and jail at very high rates, communities are negatively affected in myriad ways, including damage to social networks, social relationships, and long-term life chances. These effects impair children, family functioning, mental and physical health, labor markets, and economic and political infrastructures. There are considerable methodological challenges in trying to link the consequences of concentrated incarceration to reduced public safety. Findings from studies are mixed. Yet, as empirical evidence grows of the negative collateral consequences of concentrated incarceration, the likelihood that concentrated incarceration is criminogenic in its effects on those communities becomes stronger. No well-established or proven strategy exists for combating the effects of concentrated incarceration on communities. Most current debates about penal policy are essentially oblivious to the problem. Solutions must flow from changes in the nation's penal philosophy and its sentencing laws.
Over the last three decades the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: The victims' movement, the women’s movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.
At no time in history, and certainly in no other democratic society, have prisons been filled so quickly and to such capacity than in the United States. And nowhere has this growth been more concentrated than in the disadvantaged-and primarily minority-neighborhoods of America's largest urban cities. In the most impoverished places, as much as 20% of the adult men are locked up on any given day, and there is hardly a family without a father, son, brother, or uncle who has not been behind bars. While the effects of going to and returning home from prison are well-documented, little attention has been paid to the impact of removal on neighborhoods where large numbers of individuals have been imprisoned. In the first detailed, empirical exploration of the effects of mass incarceration on poor places, this book demonstrates that in high doses incarceration contributes to the very social problems it is intended to solve-it breaks up family and social networks; deprives siblings, spouses, and parents of emotional and financial support; threatens the economic and political infrastructure of already struggling neighborhoods; and destabilizes the community, thus further reducing public safety. Especially at risk are children who, research shows, are more likely to commit a crime if a father or brother has been to prison. Demonstrating that the current incarceration policy in urban America does more harm than good, from increasing crime to widening racial disparities and diminished life chances for youths, the book argues that we cannot overcome the problem of mass incarceration concentrated in poor places without incorporating an idea of community justice into our failing correctional and criminal justice systems.
5.4 million Americans-one in every forty voting age adults-are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, one in four black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement-both for election outcomes, and for public policy more generally? This book exposes one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, this analysis informs all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals.
Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.
In response to dramatic increases in imprisonment, a burgeoning literature considers the consequences of incarceration for family life, almost always documenting negative outcomes. But effects of incarceration may be more complicated and nuanced. In this article, we consider the countervailing consequences of paternal incarceration for a host of family relationships, including fathers' parenting, mothers' parenting, and the relationship between parents. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we find recent paternal incarceration sharply diminishes parenting behaviors among residential but not nonresidential fathers. Virtually all of the association between incarceration and parenting among residential fathers is explained by changes in fathers' relationships with their children's mothers. Consequences for mothers' parenting, however, are weak and inconsistent. Furthermore, our findings show recent paternal incarceration sharply increases the probability a mother repartners, potentially offsetting some losses from the biological father's lesser involvement while simultaneously leading to greater family complexity. Taken together, the collateral consequences of paternal incarceration for family life are complex and countervailing.
A life course perspective on crime indicates that incarceration can disrupt key life transitions. Life course analysis of occupations finds that earnings mobility depends on stable employment in career jobs. These two lines of research thus suggest that incarceration reduces ex-inmates' access to the steady jobs that usually produce earnings growth among young men. Consistent with this argument, evidence for slow wage growth among ex-inmates is provided by analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Because incarceration is so prevalent-one-quarter of black non-college males in the survey were interviewed between 1979 and 1998 while in prison or jail-the effect of imprisonment on individual wages also increases aggregate race and ethnic wage inequality.
The rise in mass incarceration, as well as its unequal distribution across the population, may widen inequalities among individuals and families. In this manuscript, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a data source uniquely situated to understand the collateral consequences of incarceration, to consider the consequences of paternal incarceration for an overlooked aspect of family life: maternal parenting (measured by neglect, psychological aggression, and physical aggression). Results show that, among parents living together prior to paternal incarceration, confinement has modest, positive associations with maternal neglect and physical aggression, and that changes in family life (including relationship characteristics, economic insecurity, and mental health) following incarceration explain some of these associations. Additionally, there is some evidence that the consequences of paternal incarceration for neglect are strongest among mothers with a low propensity for sharing a child with a recently incarcerated father. Taken together, these results suggest that incarceration—given its concentration among disadvantaged families and, at least in one domain, its most consequential effects for the most advantaged of these disadvantaged families—has complicated and countervailing implications for inequalities in family life.
Rising imprisonment rates and declining marriage rates among low-education African Americans motivate an analysis of the effects of incarceration on marriage. An event history analysis of 2,041 unmarried men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth suggests that men are unlikely to marry in the years they serve in prison. A separate analysis of 2,762 married men shows that incarceration during marriage significantly increases the risk of divorce or separation. We simulate aggregate marriage rates using estimates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and find that the prevalence of marriage would change little if incarceration rates were reduced.
As the American imprisonment rate has risen, researchers have become increasingly concerned about the implications of mass imprisonment for family life. The authors extend this research by examining how paternal incarceration is linked to perceived instrumental support among the mothers of inmates' children. Results from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,132) suggest that recent, but not current, paternal incarceration is independently associated with less maternal perceived instrumental support and that this association persists after adjusting for a rich set of control variables, including prior perceived instrumental support. For families of recently incarcerated men, incarceration may be a double strike, simultaneously increasing the need for instrumental support while decreasing its availability when incarcerated fathers return to the community.
We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to consider the effects of maternal incarceration on 21 caregiver- and teacher-reported behavioral problems among 9-year-old children. The results suggest three primary conclusions. First, children of incarcerated mothers are a disadvantaged group that exhibit high levels of caregiver- and teacher-reported behavioral problems. Second, after we adjust for selection, the effects of maternal incarceration on children's behavioral problems are consistently null (for 19 of 21 outcomes) and rarely positive (1 of 21) or negative (1 of 21), suggesting that the poor outcomes of these children are driven by disadvantages preceding maternal incarceration rather than incarceration. These effects, however, vary across race/ethnicity, with maternal incarceration diminishing caregiver-reported behavioral problems among non-Hispanic whites. Finally, in models considering both maternal and paternal incarceration, paternal incarceration is associated with more behavioral problems, which is consistent with previous research and suggests that the null effects of maternal incarceration are not artifacts of our sample or analytic decisions.
Objectives:
We examined the association of family member incarceration with cardiovascular risk factors and disease by gender.
Methods:
We used a sample of 5470 adults aged 18 years and older in the National Survey of American Life, a 2001-2003 nationally representative cross-sectional survey of Blacks and Whites living in the United States, to examine 5 self-reported health conditions (diabetes, hypertension, heart attack or stroke, obesity, and fair or poor health).
Results:
Family member incarceration was associated with increased likelihood of poor health across all 5 conditions for women but not for men. In adjusted models, women with family members who were currently incarcerated had 1.44 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.03, 2.00), 2.53 (95% CI = 1.80, 3.55), and 1.93 (95% CI = 1.45, 2.58) times the odds of being obese, having had a heart attack or stroke, and being in fair or poor health, respectively.
Conclusions:
Family member incarceration has profound implications for women's cardiovascular health and should be considered a unique risk factor that contributes to racial disparities in health.
In this article, we examine the possible impact of mass imprisonment on the physical health of African American women. Specifically, we focus on a variety of mechanisms through which mass imprisonment may increase the risk of having three major chronic health conditions that are risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD): hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. This approach is distinctive in that it provides a broad theoretical framework through which mass imprisonment might harm the physical health of African American women in ways separate from the pathways linking mass imprisonment to their risk of contracting infectious diseases (especially HIV and other STIs), which has been the emphasis of most research in this area. In order to draw these connections, we begin by briefly discussing what mass imprisonment is and its social consequences. We then discuss our three CVD risk factors, documenting disparities between white and African American women in these risk factors and discussing mechanisms through which mass imprisonment might contribute to these disparities. We close by discussing the data needed to test our hypotheses and suggesting some avenues for future research.
A burgeoning literature considers the consequences of mass imprisonment for the well-being of adult men and—albeit to a lesser degree—their children. Yet virtually no quantitative research considers the consequences of mass imprisonment for the well-being of the women who are the link between (former) prisoners and their children. This article extends research on the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment by considering the association between paternal incarceration and maternal mental health using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Results show that recent paternal incarceration increases a mother’s risk of a major depressive episode and her level of life dissatisfaction, net of a variety of influences including prior mental health. The empirical design lends confidence to a causal interpretation: effects of recent incarceration persist even when the sample is limited to mothers attached to previously incarcerated men, which provides a rigorous counterfactual. In addition, the empirical design is comprehensive; after isolating key mechanisms anticipated in the literature, we reduce the relationship between recent paternal incarceration and maternal mental health to statistical insignificance. These results imply that the penal system may have important effects on poor women’s well-being beyond increasing their economic insecurity, compromising their marriage markets, or magnifying their risk of divorce.
This paper examines how experience with the criminal justice system contextualizes the relationship between people’s attitudes toward informal and formal social controls. In a survey of residents of Leon County, Florida, we asked respondents whether or not they knew someone who had been incarcerated. We also asked about their assessment of informal controls in their neighborhoods and about public control with questions about police, judges, and the criminal justice system as a whole. We find that knowing someone who has been incarcerated makes people with a low assessment of formal control also have a low opinion of informal control. Blacks are more likely than nonblacks to have a low opinion of informal social control only if they have not been exposed to incarceration. Knowing someone who has been incarcerated makes blacks and nonblacks just as likely to hold a negative assessment of informal social control.
This article addresses two basic questions. First, it examines whether incarceration has a lasting impact on health functioning. Second, because blacks are more likely than whites to be exposed to the negative effects of the penal system—including fractured social bonds, reduced labor market prospects, and high levels of infectious disease—it considers whether the penal system contributes to racial health disparities. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and both regression and propensity matching estimators, the article empirically demonstrates a significant relationship between incarceration and later health status. More specifically, incarceration exerts lasting effects on midlife health functioning. In addition, this analysis finds that, due primarily to disproportionate rates of incarceration, the penal system plays a role in perpetuating racial differences in midlife physical health functioning.
Comparative research contrasts the corporatist welfare states of Europe with the unregulated U.S. labor market to explain low rates of U.S. unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, this article argues that the U.S. state made a large and coercive intervention into the labor market through the expansion of the penal system. The impact of incarceration on unemployment has two conflicting dynamics. In the short run, U.S. incarceration lowers conventional unemployment measures by removing able-bodied, working-age men from labor force counts. In the long run, social survey data show that incarceration raises unemployment by reducing the job prospects of ex-convicts. Strong U.S. employment performance in the 1980s and 1990s has thus depended in part on a high and increasing incarceration rate.
Aspects of interpersonal networks in which Americans discuss "important matters" are examined using data from the 1985 General Social Survey. These are the first survey network data representative of the American population. The networks are small, kin-centered, relatively dense, and homogeneous in comparison with the sample of respondents. Bivariate examination of subgroup differences by age, education, race/ethnicity, sex, and size of place indicates that network range is greatest among the young, the highly educated, and metropolitan residents. Sex differences consist primarily of differences in kin/nonkin composition of networks.
To explain the astounding over-representation of blacks behind bars that has driven mass imprisonment in the United States, one must break out of the `crime-and-punishment' paradigm to reckon the extra-penological function of the criminal justice system as instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. This article places the prison in the historical sequence of `peculiar institutions' that have shouldered the task of defining and confining African Americans, alongside slavery, the Jim Crow regime, and the ghetto. The recent upsurge in black incarceration results from the crisis of the ghetto as device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for the containment of lower-class African Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system have become linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion, spawning a carceral continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market. This carceral mesh has been solidified by changes that have reshaped the urban `Black Belt' of mid-century so as to make the ghetto more like a prison and undermined the `inmate society' residing in U.S. penitentiaries in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison not only perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of the black subproletariat, feeding the runaway growth of the carceral system. It also plays a pivotal role in the remaking of `race', the redefinition of the citizenry via the production of a racialized public culture of vilification of criminals, and the construction of a post-Keynesian state that replaces the social-welfare treatment of poverty by its penal management.
This article extends research on the consequences of parental incarceration for child well-being, the effects of mass imprisonment on black-white inequalities in child well-being, and the factors shaping black-white inequalities in infant mortality by considering the relationship between imprisonment and infant mortality, using individual- and state-level data from the United States, 1990 through 2003. Results using data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) show that parental incarceration is associated with elevated early infant mortality risk and that partner violence moderates this relationship. Infants of recently incarcerated fathers who are not abusive have twice the mortality risk of other infants, but there is no association if the father was abusive. Results from state-level analyses show a positive association between the imprisonment rate and the total infant mortality rate, black infant mortality rate, and black-white inequality in the infant mortality rate. Assuming a causal effect, results show that had the imprisonment rate remained at its 1990 level, the 2003 infant mortality rate would have been 3.9 percent lower, black-white inequality in the infant mortality rate 8.8 percent lower. Thus, results imply that imprisonment may have health consequences that extend beyond ever-imprisoned men to their social correlates and that these health spillover effects are not limited to infectious disease.
In this paper we develop a method to estimate both individual social network size (i.e., degree) and the distribution of network sizes in a population by asking respondents how many people they know in specific subpopulations (e.g., people named Michael). Building on the scale-up method of Killworth et al. (1998b) and other previous attempts to estimate individual network size, we propose a latent non-random mixing model which resolves three known problems with previous approaches. As a byproduct, our method also provides estimates of the rate of social mixing between population groups. We demonstrate the model using a sample of 1,370 adults originally collected by McCarty et al. (2001). Based on insights developed during the statistical modeling, we conclude by offering practical guidelines for the design of future surveys to estimate social network size. Most importantly, we show that if the first names to be asked about are chosen properly, the simple scale-up degree estimates can enjoy the same bias-reduction as that from the our more complex latent non-random mixing model.
In response to drastic increases and enduring disparities in American imprisonment, researchers have produced an expansive literature on the effects of mass imprisonment on inequality in America. We discuss this literature in three parts. First, we consider the obstacles to estimating the effects of imprisonment on individuals and to using those estimates to calculate the macrolevel impact of incarceration. Second, we review existing literature on the effect of mass imprisonment on inequalities in health and family life. Finally, we close by suggesting directions for future research.
Psychiatric disorders are unusually prevalent among current and former inmates, but it is not known what this relationship reflects. A putative causal relationship is contaminated by assorted influences, including childhood disadvantage, the early onset of most disorders, and the criminalization of substance use. Using the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (N = 5692), we examine the relationship between incarceration and psychiatric disorders after statistically adjusting for multidimensional influences. The results indicate that (1) some of the most common disorders found among former inmates emerge in childhood and adolescence and therefore predate incarceration; (2) the relationships between incarceration and disorders are smaller for current disorders than lifetime disorders, suggesting that the relationship between incarceration and disorders dissipates over time; and (3) early substance disorders anticipate later incarceration and other psychiatric disorders simultaneously, indicating selection. Yet the results also reveal robust and long-lasting relationships between incarceration and certain disorders, which are not inconsequential for being particular. Specifically, incarceration is related to subsequent mood disorders, related to feeling "down," including major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and dysthymia. These disorders, in turn, are strongly related to disability, more strongly than substance abuse disorders and impulse control disorders. Although often neglected as a health consequence of incarceration, mood disorders might explain some of the additional disability former inmates experience following release, elevating their relevance for those interested in prisoner reintegration.
Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government. To test this argument, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how criminal justice involvement shapes the citizenship and political voice of a growing swath of Americans. We find that custodial involvement carries with it a substantial civic penalty that is not explained by criminal propensity or socioeconomic differences alone. Given that the carceral state has become a routine site of interaction between government and citizens, institutions of criminal justice have emerged as an important force in defining citizen participation and understandings, with potentially dire consequences for democratic ideals.
This essay provides estimates of the influence of mass imprisonment on racial disparities in childhood well-being. To do so, we integrate results from three existing studies in a novel way. The first two studies use two contemporary, broadly representative data sets to estimate the effects of paternal incarceration on a range of child behavioral and mental health problems. The third study estimates changes in Black–White disparities in the risk of paternal imprisonment across the 1978 and 1990 American birth cohorts. Our research demonstrates the following:
Our results add to a growing research literature indicating that the costs associated with mass imprisonment extend far beyond well-documented impacts on current inmates. The legacy of mass incarceration will be continued and worsening racial disparities in childhood mental health and well-being, educational attainment, and occupational attainment. Moreover, the negative effects of mass imprisonment for childhood well-being are likely to remain, even if incarceration rates returned to pre-1970s levels. Our results show that paternal incarceration exacerbates child behavioral and mental health problems and that large, growing racial disparities in the risk of imprisonment have contributed to significant racial differences in child well-being. The policy implications of our work are as follows:
In the past three decades, incarceration has become an increasingly powerful force for reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. A new wave of sociological research details the contemporary experiment with mass incarceration in the United States and its attendant effects on social stratification. This review first describes the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into prison. It then considers the implications of the prison boom for understanding inequalities in the labor market, educational attainment, health, families, and the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Social researchers have long understood selection into prison as a reflection of existing stratification processes. Today, research attention has shifted to the role of punishment in generating these inequalities.
Although much research has focused on how imprisonment transforms the life course of disadvantaged black men, researchers have paid little attention to how parental imprisonment alters the social experience of childhood. This article estimates the risk of parental imprisonment by age 14 for black and white children born in 1978 and 1990. This article also estimates the risk of parental imprisonment for children whose parents did not finish high school, finished high school only, or attended college. Results show the following: (1) 1 in 40 white children born in 1978 and 1 in 25 white children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (2) 1 in 7 black children born in 1978 and 1 in 4 black children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (3) inequality in the risk of parental imprisonment between white children of college-educated parents and all other children is growing; and (4) by age 14, 50.5% of black children born in 1990 to high school dropouts had a father imprisoned. These estimates, robustness checks, and extensions to longitudinal data indicate that parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel-and distinctively American-childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents.
American crime policy took an unexpected turn in the latter part of the twenty-first century, entering a new penal regime. From the 1920s to the early 1970s, the incarceration rate in the United States averaged 110 inmates per 100,000 persons. This rate of incarceration varied so little in the United States and internationally that many scholars believed the nation and the world were experiencing a stable equilibrium of punishment.1 But beginning in the mid-1970s, the U.S. incarceration rate accelerated dramatically, reaching the unprecedented rate of 197 inmates per 100,000 persons in 1990 and the previously unimaginable rate of 504 inmates per 100,000 persons in 2008.2 Incarceration in the United States is now so prevalent that it has become a normal life event for many disadvantaged young men, with some segments of the population more likely to end up in prison than attend college.3 Scholars have broadly described this national phenomenon as mass incarceration.4
Although the share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since at least the early 1980s, the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in at least the second of these shifts by considering the effects of parental incarceration on child homelessness using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. These are the only data that simultaneously represent a contemporary cohort of the urban children most at risk of homelessness, establish appropriate time-order between parental incarceration and child homelessness, and control for prior housing, which is vital given the imprisonment-homelessness nexus. Results show strong effects of recent but not distal parental incarceration on the risk of child homelessness. They also show that effects are concentrated among African American children. Taken together, results suggest that mass imprisonment exacerbates marginalization among disadvantaged children, thereby contributing to a system of stratification in which the children of the prison boom become virtually invisible.
"Stigma, shame and hardship---this is the lot shared by families whose young men have been swept into prison. Braman reveals the devastating toll mass incarceration takes on the parents, partners, and children left behind." -Katherine S. Newman "Doing Time on the Outside brings to life in a compelling way the human drama, and tragedy, of our incarceration policies. Donald Braman documents the profound economic and social consequences of the American policy of massive imprisonment of young African American males. He shows us the link between the broad-scale policy changes of recent decades and the isolation and stigma that these bring to family members who have a loved one in prison. If we want to understand fully the impact of current criminal justice policies, this book should be required reading." -Mark Mauer, Assistant Director, The Sentencing Project "Through compelling stories and thoughtful analysis, this book describes how our nation's punishment policies have caused incalculable damage to the fabric of family and community life. Anyone concerned about the future of urban America should read this book." -Jeremy Travis, The Urban Institute In the tradition of Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game, this startling new ethnography by Donald Braman uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on the prisoners' families. Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled, and in many cities-urban centers such as Washington, D.C.-it has increased over five-fold. Today, one out of every ten adult black men in the District is in prison and three out of every four can expect to spend some time behind bars. But the numbers don't reveal what it's like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on life in the inner city. Author Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside-reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. Braman gives us the personal stories of what happens to the families and communities that prisoners are taken from and return to. Carefully documenting the effects of incarceration on the material and emotional lives of families, this groundbreaking ethnography reveals how criminal justice policies are furthering rather than abating the problem of social disorder. Braman also delivers a number of genuinely new arguments. Among these is the compelling assertion that incarceration is holding offenders unaccountable to victims, communities, and families. The author gives the first detailed account of incarceration's corrosive effect on social capital in the inner city and describes in poignant detail how the stigma of prison pits family and community members against one another. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.
Simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison
populations on crime. To break that simultaneity, this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument
for changes in the prison population. The resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies.
A one-prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen Index I crimes per year. While calculations of the costs
of crime are inherently uncertain, it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the
social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner.
This article examines the relationship between incarceration and health functioning. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the relationship between incarceration and more than 20 different measures of health are tested. Using multiple analytic procedures, a distinctive pattern of association emerges. Individuals with a history of incarceration appear consistently more likely to be afflicted with infectious disease and other illnesses associated with stress. In contrast, no consistent relationships were observed between incarceration status and ailments unrelated to stress or infectious disease. The results suggest that exposure to infectious disease and stress are important to understanding the lasting impact of incarceration on health.
This paper estimates effects of increases in incarceration length on employment and earnings prospects of individuals after their release from prison. I utilize a variety of research designs including controlling for observable factors and using instrumental variables for incarceration length based on randomly assigned judges with different sentencing propensities. The results show no consistent evidence of adverse labor market consequences of longer incarceration length using any of the analytical methods in either the state system in Florida or the federal system in California. (JEL: J24; K42)