The Effect of Incarceration of Parents on Their Children

The United States is currently the leading nation in incarceration rates; in fact, more than
2 million Americans are serving life sentences. However, this was not the case earlier on; the
massive increase in mass incarceration rates is due to recent policy choices such as “get tough on
crime,” “war on drugs,” “mandatory minimum sentencing,” and the so-called “three-strikes
policies,” which have disproportionately affected people from the ethnic minority groups.
Scommegna (2014) confirms that from 1980 to 2012, the number of Americans behind bars
increased from roughly 500,000 to 2.6 million, which is a five times increase.
The issue is that the majority of these jailed Americans are parents. Therefore, a
substantial number of American children, primarily poor and minority children, are left to suffer
the consequences of their parents’ incarceration. The National Council on Family Relations
confirms that 7%  out of 5 million US children had a parent incarcerated during their childhood,
while another 2010 study by the Federal Bureau of Justice revealed that 1.9 million children
under the age of eighteen had experienced their parents’ incarceration (Wakefield & Wildeman,
2018). These figures are profoundly startling, especially because parents’ incarceration of their
children is often overlooked and is normally considered by policymakers as an unintended
consequence of mass incarceration, the so-called “low-hanging fruits” of incarcerated
individuals. Furthermore, most research on this issue often focuses on the elevated risks of health
and behavioral problems in these children without much screening for the elevated risks of these
abandoned and dysfunctional kids being incarcerated.
Parental incarceration often results in household instability, increases the risk of
childhood homeless, and consequently increases the dependence of these poor children on public
assistance. Socio-economic advantages and lack of parental figure that follows parental

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incarceration may push these children to fend for themselves, ending up picking criminal and
aggressive behaviors. For these reasons, this research paper will focus on investigating parental
incarceration’s impact on their children’s incarceration. The independent variable will be parental
incarceration, and the dependent variables will be delinquency and likelihood of getting arrested.
This research paper hypothesizes that children with incarcerated parents are more likely to
commit crime or get arrested during their early adulthood.
Literature Review

Previous research work on the impact of parental incarcerations on their children has
majorly focused on the increased risks of health and behavioral problems with no significant
research findings on increased delinquency among children. It can be safely argued that this
limited research is because this problem is often overlooked, plunging many minority and poor
children into the broadening scope of the US justice system(Turney, 2017). As it is common
knowledge, parents serve as the caregivers for their children, and their increased incarceration
imposes massive instability in many American households. This problem is exacerbated by the
fact that the majority of these children who witness their parents’ imprisonment come from
homes that struggle disproportionately with the many socioeconomic challenges that can drive
them to commit a crime (Wakefield & Wildeman, 2018).
Paternal incarceration is the most common and the most harmful for these children.
Locking fathers behind bars means that the primary caregivers of these families have been taken
away from them; these children are therefore forced by their economic conditions to get involved
in crimes such as robbery and drug trafficking to provide for their families (Martin, 2017). They
are also more likely to drop out of school due to a lack of authoritative figures or parental
guidance and end up abusing drugs or joining local street gangs, which further increases their

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chances of falling into the hands of law enforcement. Poor mental health outcomes resulting
from their parents’ incarceration could also influence them to adopt aggressive behaviors and end
up in violent crimes (Murray & Farrington, 2008). Financial problems after the incarceration of
parents may also lead them to become homeless and end up on the streets. Mothers who are left
to take care of their children alone after their husbands have been incarcerated are also more
likely to neglect their parental duties and adopt aggressive behaviors towards their children,
further pushing these kids towards delinquency (Turney, 2017).
Therefore, many theoretical perspectives try to explain how this problem manifests in
society, and all these mechanisms point toward meeting this research hypothesis. This research
work seeks to unmask how detrimental parental incarceration is in promoting delinquency
among children and the need for policymakers to formulate policies that do not just treat children
of incarcerated parents as the low-hanging fruits but rather as a vulnerable group that needs more
support. These research findings will also help show that policymakers should opt for other
forms of punishment, such as rehabilitation programs that keep parents closer to their kids
instead of mass incarceration. As a result, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of
parental incarceration on their children’s delinquency and the likelihood of committing a crime.
Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016) conducted a study among African American children
whose parents have been incarcerated. Their research work focus on depression, drug abuse and
involvement with the judicial system; the latter impact will be of the sole focus for this study. In
contrary to most research work on the issue, Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016) factored in the
difference in these impacts for the imprisonment of either mother, father or both, giving a
distinct picture of how pervasive and detrimental it is for children when both their parents have
been incarcerated. Data used in this research was collected from the National Longitudinal Study

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of Add Health and Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016) used a combination of both descriptive
statistics, bivariate, and multivariate comparisons tested their hypothesis after four waves of
interviews.
This study found that parental incarceration was correlated to their children’s winding up
in the justice system in their early adulthood. According to Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016),
mothers’ imprisonment had considerably greater negative consequences, since these children
were more likely to be arrested and had more arrests before they became 18 years old. It was
because maternal incarceration disrupts the mother-child bond, which has a significant impact on
African American children’s supervisory and disciplinary actions. Children whose parents were
involved in the criminal justice system were more likely to be delinquents and become criminals
too. However, according to Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016), additional research on children with
two imprisoned parents should be done because they are a very vulnerable group that is generally
overlooked. The caregiving situation of children after their parents have been incarcerated should
also be factored in. Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016) believe these negative consequences of
parental incarceration can be avoided by enacting policy-oriented measures such as reducing jail
terms, providing a supportive juvenile systems and reforming the prison policies to improve
family visits.  Such policies would massively benefit African American children who are
disproportionately affected.
Roettger and Swisher (2011) did another study that used a more racially diverse
population and found essentially identical results as Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016).  Roettger and
Swisher (2011) explored the impact of parental incarceration on their son’s delinquency and
arrests in the United States’ Hispanic, white, and black communities. As a result, this study
provides a larger context for the pervasiveness of this problem. Like Kopak and Smith-Ruiz

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(2016), Roettger and Swisher (2011) also used the data from the National Longitudinal Study of
Add Health, with roughly 15700 respondents completing the fourth wave of interviews. Unlike
Kopak and Smith-Ruiz (2016), this study took a more detailed approach to measuring their
variables. Besides measuring the timing and age of the child when their parents were
incarcerated, it also factored in the structure of their neighborhood by assessing socio-economic
conditions, the family process by measuring the history of alcoholism and physical abuse, and
adolescent social attachment. Delinquency was measured using the Guang Guo 12-item scale,
and respondent arrests between 18 and 25 were calculated using survey weights to get
probability.
According to Roettger and Swisher (2011), a father’s incarceration increases the
possibility of their son being delinquent or arrested during adolescence and early adulthood
despite their ethnic classification. However, these risks were higher for Hispanics and Black
youths due to the high incarceration rates of their fathers. Though, these positive associations
would be influenced by other controls such as family structure, socio-economic status,
neighborhood characteristics, and social attachment of the adolescent. However, this study
suffers the limitation of utilizing broader categorizations of whether their parents were
incarcerated before or after their birth instead of attempting to use a fine-grained age scale such
as incarcerated between 0-4 years, 5-9 years, or 10-14 years of age (Roettger & Swisher, 2011).
It is therefore critical that future research covers this age scaling and factors in the child’s
closeness to their parents at the time of incarceration. It, however, confirms this research’s
hypothesis, too, that there is a significant association between parental incarceration and
increased risks of delinquency and the likelihood of their children being arrested.

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These findings were also confirmed by another longitudinal study conducted in Europe
by Murray et al. (2017). Murray and his colleagues investigated whether a parent’s criminality
strongly predicted their children’s criminality. To achieve this, this longitudinal study involved
the comparison of parental incarceration and its impacts on children from Sweden to the
predicted boy’s delinquency among the English cohort following the incarceration of their
parents. Such a study is highly beneficial to this research because it gives us a broader
understanding of the topic in another geographical location. Using a sample size of 15,117
Swedish children collected from the Project Metropolitan(Sweden), Murray et al. (2007)
compared the type of parent’s crime and sentencing, the relationship of parent’s offending to
child’s offending, sex and class differences in the effects of parent’s criminality and the
difference between these associations in England and Sweden.
Murray et al. (2017) revealed that incarceration of parents increased the likelihood of
offspring offending compared to when the parents are convicted and not incarcerated. 25% of
respondents whose parents were incarcerated when they were aged between 0 and 6 offended at
one point between 19 and 30 years but only 18% of these children whose parents were convicted
but not incarcerated offended. It also proved that the more convictions or offenses the parent had,
the more delinquency or offenses their children are more likely to have. Murray et al. (2017) also
confirmed that there were not many class differences in the impact of parent’s incarceration on
offspring’s criminality, but female children seemed to be more affected than their male peers.
However, it was revealed that parental incarceration was a stronger predictor of a child’s
criminality in England than in Sweden, probably because Sweden has a more sympathetic public
opinion on crimes and punishment and the prison and juvenile systems are welfare-oriented and
not majorly punitive(Murray et al., 2007).

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Most previous research conforms to the hypothesis of this research that there is a positive
association between parental incarceration and the likelihood of a child offending. However,
children’s delinquent behavior could often be a strong indicator of risk factors such as peer
pressure, unstable and crime-infiltrated neighborhoods, low socioeconomic status, mental
problems, or poor academic performance (Shader, 2001). These risk factors are more likely to
push these adults into crime than just a parent being incarcerated. Most previous research into
this problem is prone to this limitation. Therefore, these risk factors are considered when
researching the problem because that could be the underlying problem among the target
population and not necessarily, parental incarceration. From the analysis of previous research,
parental incarceration increases children’s exposure to these risk factors.
According to Geller et al. (2011), the impact of parental incarceration is far much worse
if the parent was a resident. However, on some rare occasions, the incarceration of a parent and
the subsequent struggles could serve as a call for change for some children. This could prompt
them to turn away completely from the life of crime. Besides, future research could involve
comparing various states since they have different sentencing guidelines, policies on prisoner-
family contact and social support offered to the families of the incarcerated to better understand
the problem in the United States. Given the magnitude of mass incarceration in the United States,
children should be protected against the damaging effects of this menace through social and
prison policies.

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References

Geller, A., Cooper, C. E., Garfinkel, I., Schwartz-Soicher, O., & Mincy, R. B. (2011). Beyond
absenteeism: Father incarceration and child development. Demography, 49(1), 49-
76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0081-9
Kopak, A. M., & Smith-Ruiz, D. (2016). Criminal justice involvement, drug use, and depression
among African American children of incarcerated parents. Race and Justice, 6(2), 89-
116. https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368715586633
Martin, E. (2017). Hidden Consequences: The Impact of Incarceration on Dependent
Children (278). National Institute of
Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/250349.pdf
Murray, J., & Farrington, D. (2008). The effects of parental imprisonment on children. Crime
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Murray, J., Janson, C., & Farrington, D. P. (2007). Crime in adult offspring of
prisoners. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 34(1), 133-
149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854806289549
Roettger, M. E., & Swisher, R. R. (2011). Associations of fathers’ history of incarceration with
sons’ delinquency and arrest among Black, white, and Hispanic males in the United
States*. Criminology, 49(4), 1109-1147. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-
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Scommegna, P. (2014, December 3). Parents’ imprisonment linked to children’s health,
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Shader, M. (2001). Risk factors for delinquency: An overview. United States. Office of Justice
Programs. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/frd030127.pdf
Turney, K. (2017). The unequal consequences of mass incarceration for
children. Demography, 54(1), 361-389. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0543-1
Wakefield, S., & Wildeman, C. (2018). How Parental Incarceration Harms Children and What
to Do About It. National Council on Family Relations, 3(1), 1-
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