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Title: The Externalities of Imprisonment: Does Maternal Incarceration Affect Child Outcomes?
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Shierholz, Heidi S. Moore, Quinn |
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The Externalities of Imprisonment: Does Maternal Incarceration Affect Child Outcomes? Presented: Toronto, Canada, American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, November 2005 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: American Society of Criminology Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Incarceration/Jail; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. As a result of deliberate policy decisions, the incarceration rate for state and federal prisoners has grown by 340% since 1980. Incarceration rates have risen even faster for women -- 560% percent over the same time period. These dramatic increases raise conspicuous questions about the effects -- beyond the intended effects of punishment, incapacitation, and deterrence -- of imprisonment on prisoners, their families and their communities. Specifically, little is known about the effects of parental incarceration on children's outcomes, though the available evidence suggests that the effects are large and detrimental. Developing a more complete understanding of the independent effect of parental incarceration on child outcomes is crucial to informing policy decisions surrounding the use of imprisonment. In this paper, we examine the effects of maternal imprisonment on children's educational outcomes using data from the Children of the NLSY. These data include a rich set of variables related to both the mother and the child, including maternal criminal history and a set of standardized child cognitive assessments. We employ both child and sibling fixed-effects specifications to address the presence of unobservable characteristics that may be correlated with both maternal imprisonment and child outcomes. These fixed-effects estimates attempt to identify the independent effect of maternal imprisonment on child outcomes -- independent, that is, from the effects of the nonrandom selection into the population of kids whose moms are in prison. Preliminary results show that both reading scores and behavioral problems worsen significantly for every year of maternal imprisonment. |
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Bibliography Citation
Shierholz, Heidi S. and Quinn Moore. "The Externalities of Imprisonment: Does Maternal Incarceration Affect Child Outcomes?" Presented: Toronto, Canada, American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, November 2005. |