Parental & sibling incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 pct points and improving their adult neighborhood quality

The Effects of Parental and Sibling Incarceration: Evidence from Ohio. Samuel Norris, Matthew Pecenco, Jeffrey Weaver. American Economic Review, Apr 2021. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190415

Abstract: Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the US. Parental incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult neighborhood quality. While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity.

Reactions from academia: Emmerich Davies on Twitter: "What are we even doing here? "Parental incarceration has beneficial effects on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 percentage points and improving their adult neighborhood quality."

Check also Parental Incarceration and Children’s Educational Attainment. Carolina Arteaga. Department of Economics, University of Toronto. November 24, 2020. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5664c583e4b0c0bb910ceb3b/t/60253d569ce8df19c83b7999/1613053272962/Parentalncarceration_Nov2020.pdf

Abstract: This paper presents new evidence showing that parental incarceration increases children’s educational attainment. I collect criminal records for 90,000 low-income parents who have been convicted of a crime in Colombia, and link them with administrative data on the educational attainment of their children. I exploit exogenous variation in incarceration resulting from the random assignment of defendants to judges, and extend the standard framework to incorporate both conviction and incarceration decisions. I show that the effect of incarceration for a given conviction threshold can be identified. My results indicate that parental incarceration increases educational attainment by 0.78 years for the children of convicted parents on the margin of incarceration.

JEL No. I24,J24,K42

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Multiple mechanisms could explain a negative causal effect of parental incarceration on child outcomes. The incarceration of a parent is typically a shocking experience for a child (Parke and Clarke-Stewart, 2003). It is usually followed by financial hardship, disruptions in children’s daily lives, such as unstable childcare arrangements and moves among homes or schools, and growing up without a parent has been linked to adverse outcomes for children (McLanahan et al., 2013). Working in the opposite direction, there are reasons to believe that parental incarceration might be positive for some children. Parents in prison have very high rates of drug and alcohol abuse, are more likely to suffer from mental health disorders and to have experienced childhood trauma, and are also more likely to have engaged in intimate partner violence.1 As a result, for some families, removing a violent parent or a negative role model from the household can create a safer environment for a child. Furthermore, a large literature documents the intergenerational transmission of violence, substance abuse and crime (Hjalmarsson and Lindquist, 2012), and incarceration can help to limit or break such transmission. Ultimately, the sign and size of such effects are empirical matters, motivating the current analysis.