The Intergenerational Effects of Parental Incarceration

Abstract

We estimate the causal effects of parental incarceration on children's short-and long-run outcomes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in parental incarceration from the random assignment of criminal defendants to judges with different incarceration tendencies. We find that the incarceration of a parent in childhood leads to a significant increase in teen crime and significant decreases in educational attainment and adult employment. The effects are concentrated among children from the most disadvantaged families, where criminal convictions increase by 10 percentage points, high school graduation decreases by 25 percentage points, and employment at age 25 decreases by 29 percentage points. In contrast, there are no detectable effects among children from more advantaged families. These results suggest that the incarceration of parents with young children may significantly increase the intergenerational persistence of poverty and criminal behavior, even in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets.

Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

“…Hence, it is not surprising the effects for the two subsamples are similar. Our results for parents are also broadly consistent with those found in the working paper by Dobbie et al (2017), which finds that incarceration has little effect on recidivism for parents, but negatively impacts participation in the labor market and family structure.…”

“…One possible reason our results diverge somewhat fromDobbie et al (2017) is that both their estimates and our estimates are imprecisely estimated, and so the differences between the two studies are due to statistical noise.…”

“…Looking at intergenerational correlations in crime, Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2012) document that children with criminal fathers have more than twice the probability of being convicted of a crime themselves, but that much of the effect can be accounted for by a parent's education and other behaviors. Weijer, Augustyn, and Besemer (2017) likewise document intergenerational correlations in crime for the Netherlands, England, and the U.S. Contemporaneous research by Dobbie et al (2017) uses a similar identification strategy as we do, and finds large increases in teen crime and pregnancy, and a reduction in youth employment in Sweden.…”

“…This short paper overcomes both the data and identification challenges in the context of Norway's criminal justice system. As far as we know, the only other quasi-experimental work on this topic is a contemporaneous working paper by Dobbie et al (2017) using data from Sweden.…”

The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes

“…Our main specification uses a standard leave-out mean removal rate as the measure of the tendency for each investigator. Prior literature has used this type of measure for judges and other authorities (Kling, 2006;Doyle, 2007Doyle, , 2008Aizer and Doyle, 2015;Bhuller et al, 2016;Eren and Mocan, 2017;Sampat and Williams, 2015;Dobbie, Goldin and Yang, 2018;Dobbie, Grönqvist, Niknami, Palme and Priks, 2018;Bhuller et al, 2018). We calculate the removal rate for all other cases assigned to an investigator using data from the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF).…”