Family is often a touchpoint in the national debate over the criminal justice system. To advocates of “criminal justice reform,” the harms to a child caused by sending his mother or father to prison often outweigh the benefits of incarceration. Proponents of this view to point to evidence that children whose parents are incarcerated underperform their peers on a variety of indicators.
But the actual research is not so certain. As I’ve written previously for IFS, the aforementioned analyses do not control for the way in which the children of incarcerated parents may have worse outcomes independent of incarceration, e.g. because they were forced to live with the sort of parent who eventually went to prison. Studies that try to identify the causal effect of parental incarceration often estimate it has zero or small but positive effects on a variety of outcomes: academic achievement, future risk of incarceration, and even neighborhood quality. A recently released paper, based on a larger pool of American students than previous research, provides some nuance to the picture, but replicates the essential finding that we dramatically overestimate the harms of parental incarceration to children.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Institute for Family Studies
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies