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Parental Arrest, Incarceration and the Outcomes of Their Children

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Parental Arrest, Incarceration and the Outcomes of Their Children Parental Arrest, Incarceration and the Outcomes of Their Children Stephen B. Billings∗ November 6, 2017 Abstract Parental arrest and incarceration represents a profound and traumatic experience for almost 3 million children in the U.S. and scholars in sociology and criminology consis- tently nd negative impacts of parental incarceration on children across a range of academic and behavioral outcomes. Unfortunately, the challenge of disentangling parental incarceration from other parenting attributes has limited causal inference in this liter- ature. The research presented here provides compelling evidence that parental arrest coincides with negative outcomes for children, but that the incarceration of a parent may benet the child. Results suggest that incarceration removes negative role models and leads to changes in a child’s home environment. ∗[email protected], Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Acknowledgements: I thank Eric Chyn, Jennifer Doleac, Rick Manseld, Terra McKinnish, Erik Plug and Jerey Zax as well as participants at the University of Virginia Public Economics Workshop, 2017 University of Lund-SFI Labor/Health Economics workshop. I would also like to thank Julia Rush of the Mecklenburg County Sheri’s Department; Andy Baxter from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. 1 Preliminary Draft : November 6, 2017 1. Introduction The large number of adults incarcerated in the U.S. and the age prole of criminals entails that a number of young and school age children have the traumatic experience of a parental gure being removed from the household through the criminal justice system. In fact, Western and Pettit(2010) estimate about 2.7 million children have an incarcerated parent which represents about 1 in every 28 children. Given the prevalence of this childhood experience, a rather robust literature in sociological and criminology studies the impacts of parental incarceration on children and consistently highlights a large negative eect of parental incarceration on the life course outcomes of children (Wildeman et al.(2014); Wildeman et al.(2014); Foster and Hagan(2007); Wildeman and Western(2010); Besemer et al.(2011)). Scholars nd evidence that parental incarceration is linked to negative academic outcomes (Cho(2009) Cho(2010) Foster and Hagan (2007) ) , greater child mortality ( Wildeman et al.(2014) ) and more antisocial behavior ((Murray and Farrington 2005), Murray et al.(2012) Wildeman(2010)) among children. This research attributes these negative outcomes to factors such as reduced social capital, changes in a child’s living arrangements, nancial loss, trauma of actual arrest and incarceration and change/loss of relationship with a parent. Unfortunately and often recognized in this literature, an overarching identication issue is that criminal parents are likely to have non-criminal negative impacts on a child’s home environment and is it not clear how much direct involvement with the criminal justice system matters. Recent work (Dobbie et al.(2017)) using swedish administrative data attempts to address this shortcoming by incorporating variation in parental incarceration due to random judge assignment.2 Dobbie et al.(2017) nd negative eects of parental incarceration of a parent’s own labor market outcomes and no eects on educational attainment for children, but do nd increased rates of teen childbearing and criminal convictions for children of incarcerated parents. Even though these negative impacts conrm some of the existing literature, they still contrast Bhuller et al.(2016) who use random judge variation and nd benets of adult incarceration on own outcomes for recidivism and labor market outcomes in neighboring Norway.3 This recent research does highlight the potential for long-term eects on children due to parental incarceration, but also heterogeniety across criminal justice systems. Additionally, existing literature only focuses on birth parents and does not account for the large number of single mother 2In the paper I am presenting here, the use of random judge assignment is not possible given the lack of data on court records. 3The authors explain their positive impacts in Norway as a function of the job training and other benecial programs provided to inmates in the Norweigan prisons. 2 Preliminary Draft : November 6, 2017 households with absentee birth fathers in this population of families.4 The research presented here provides two contributions to this literature. First, I disen- tangle the eects of parental arrest from that of parental incarceration thereby providing direct evidence of the impacts of parental incarceration on children in the US. I primarily focus on short-term eects, but provide evidence of impacts on younger children that extend into early adulthood.5 Second, I focus on parents living with the children at the time of their arrests which overcomes the problem of absentee birth fathers muting any relationship between parental incarceration and children’s outcomes. In order to quantify the impacts of parental arrest and incarceration on their children, I match rich administrative data on children, adult arrests and incarceration to provide a student level panel of outcomes (e.g absences, school crimes, suspensions, test scores and grade retention) through public school and directly link the timing of arrest and incarceration to annual outcomes. My data incorporates all incarcerations of individuals 16 and older in Mecklenburg county (city of Charlotte, NC) jails and North Carolina state prisons and thus includes both pretrial incarceration as well as post-trial sentencing.6 Matching of parents to children is done based on names and addresses to ensure that parental gures live in the same residence as children.7 In order to identify the eects of parental incarceration, I use the nature of arrests and incarcerations in the US criminal justice system. The typical experience of a criminal is to be arrested and then either released with a citation or summons for court. For more serious crimes, arrestees are often arraigned in court and released upon payment of bond or serve time until a scheduled court appearance. The more serious the crime and more limited an individual’s nancial resources, the more likely an individual will spend time in jail/prison and that time in jail/prison will last longer. Since I only have non-experimental variation in parental incarceration, I incorporate student xed eects to control for average parental attributes for a child and limit results to temporal variation in parental arrests and incarceration. 4Directly determining if parents are living and regularly interacting with children is important since the incarceration of an absentee father or mother would have substantially dierent impacts than a parent living with the child. This point is particularly salient given that Glaze and Maruschak(2008) nd that only 42% of incarcerated fathers and 60% of incarcerated mothers live with children prior to incarceration. 5Short term refers to eects on children’s outcomes that occur within the same year or in some models within 1-3 years of parental incarceration. 6I cannot directly disentangle pretrial from post-sentencing incarcerations since this data does not include criminal court records or specic sentences. 7This type of matching does allow the inclusion of other relatives that live with the child such as uncles or aunts. I therefore use the denition of parent more broadly to include any relative providing care for the child. I do restrict the designation of parent to the age proles that would allow the individual to be old enough to be a biological parent. 3 Preliminary Draft : November 6, 2017 Given concerns that the timing of incarceration is endogenous to other changes in parenting behavior, I bound my estimates by drawing on the qualitative criminal justice literature where the incarceration of a parent typically follows traumatic and other negative changes in a child’s household environment.8 Under this assumption, the timing of more serious criminal activity will lead to parental incarceration and also coincide with larger non-criminal negative impacts on a child’s home environment. My estimates will be conservative as unobserved parental attributes such as substance addiction, limited nancial resources or violence in the home are likely to be positively correlated with criminal arrest and incarceration which would bias any estimates toward nding negative impacts of parental incarceration on children’s outcomes. Therefore, any positive impacts of parental incarceration is likely due to positive inuences of parental incarceration on the child such as the removal of a negative role model or allowing the other parental gure to end or even escape an abusive or negative relationship. I provide two compelling facts that reinforce this empirical strategy. First, I show that in aggregate, children of parents with more arrests and more incarcerations have worse outcomes. Second, I show that consistent with the removal of negative bias due to omitted variables, the incremental inclusion of control variables and xed eects for family environment shift the eects of parental incarceration from negative to positive. Results highlight a positive and signicant benet from parental incarceration on behav- ioral outcomes with parental incarceration generating an impact of 0:07 standard devia- tions of an annual summary index of school behavior. Smaller positive results of 0:02 standard deviations also hold for test scores, but not grade retention.
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