Adolescent and Adult Lives of Children of Parents Returning From Prison

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This research will investigate the impact of parents returning from prison on their children. Parents are incarcerated today at a rate more than four times higher than in the 1970s. However, since 2009 releases from prisons have become more numerous than admissions, marking the beginning of a new era of the return of imprisoned parents to their families and communities. This research will add survey questions about this process of parental return to the fifth wave of a unique nationally representative study that has tracked children of non-incarcerated and incarcerated parents since the rise of incarceration in the last quarter of the last century. The sample will allow analysis across all population groups, and for mothers and daughters as well as fathers and sons, and also for step-parents. The research will focus on the readjustment of children during adolescence and early adulthood to the return of their previously imprisoned parents, assessing whether and under what conditions this return is associated with positive and negative outcomes, for example, in educational attainment and successful transitions to work and adulthood more broadly. The research will capture at a crucial historical moment the consequences for children of an unprecedented return of parents from prison to their families and society. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health [Add Health] that is the foundation of this research is based on a sample in which 14 percent of the children have a father and four percent have a mother who has been in jail or prison. These children will have been surveyed at five points in their lives, from their early teens to their early 30s. This detailed, repeated measurement will make it possible to closely study the age of onset, accumulation, and simultaneity in the effects of parental imprisonment in relation to, for example, the timing and sequences of school tracking and dropout decisions and work, marriage and parenting outcomes. This information on the adolescent and early adult child outcomes can then be considered more broadly in relation to the timing of parallel processes of change in family structures and justice system contacts. The research will use propensity scoring and fixed effects techniques to thoroughly assess causal inferences and threats posed by logically prior possibilities of parental selection into imprisonment and reentry. By adding parental incarceration histories to the nationally representative and historically unique Add Health data, this research will markedly expand opportunities to understand wide ranging processes and outcomes in child development from adolescence through early adulthood and in relation to two unique generations of American parents and children. There is no other data set that offers such extensive cross generational measurement possibilities for capturing this crucial moment in the unfolding life course consequences of an unprecedented American experiment with high levels of imprisonment and prisoner reentry.