Influences of State Policies and Racialized Parental Incarceration on Youth Justice System Contact and Conflict, Emotional Estrangement and Intergenerational Life Outcomes

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From about 1970 to 2010, police profiling and mass incarceration increased at historically unprecedented rates in America. Since 2010, there have been variable reductions, especially among African-American parents and youth who have been disproportionately imprisoned for minor drug offenses punished as serious crimes. The economist Glen Loury has observed that ‘blackness’ had led to “misattributions detrimental to blacks,” while the sociologists Becky Pettit and Bruce Western has shown that this has made the abnormality of going to prison disproportionately “normal” for many African-American parents and their children. The present study focuses on the results of disparities in parental incarceration on children. The focus is on children from ages of about 15 to 35, using data from five waves of the National Longitudinal of Study Adolescent and Adult Health [Add Heath]. The analysis concentrates on (a) how state variation in parental incarceration and resulting family trajectories affects their children, (b) the unfolding life experiences of child transitions from youth to adulthood, and (c) the later life course educational and occupational consequences of differences in these parental and youth experiences. The Add Health data set offers unique possibilities for assessing unfolding life events of parents and children who have experienced variation in profiling and punishment across American states during the recent era of mass incarceration. This study will analyze this mass incarceration era sample of youth from adolescence into adulthood. Understanding variable consequences of state level policies requires analysis of these states alongside data also collected on the affected individuals, and the Add Health data allow both. In the past, Add Health has worked with this research team to add new measures of youth and adult crime and the return of parents, as well as their adolescent and young adult children, from prison. The current research will extend this work and uniquely develop new measures with Add Health of the policing and punishment of traffic violations. Traffic violations are uniquely important, for example, when they are disputed as resulting from “driving while Black.” Analysis of these measures will be of special importance because they can be embedded within the larger multiple wave and national framework of Add Health. The measurement and analysis will further examine how the variable accumulation across states and the sampled individuals of fines and court costs may have damaging consequences for life outcomes that last into and through middle adulthood. The above additions to the national Add Health data set will be made publicly available for other researchers to analyze as well.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.