The Impact of Incarceration

The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Incarceration patterns are particularly skewed toward African Americans, as evidenced in the graph below from the Prison Policy Initiative.



Lots of experts and commentators focus on either the necessity or injustice of US penal policy, but relatively few look at its repercussions outside of moral issues of racial imbalance and the skyrocketing costs of incarceration. Though some of us no doubt intuit the potential negative effects of incarcerating a huge chunk of certain communities, there's not that much (though there is some) work done on figuring out the 'trickle down' impact of incarceration.

That being said, I stumbled across a study from the University of Wisconsin which really gets one thinking about how criminal justice policies feeds into the web of socioeconomic issues. Specifically, the authors asked what impact black incarceration had on black families, and even more specifically, on child poverty. Here's what they found:

• It appears that the main effects of imprisonment on child poverty occur not through removing men from communities, but from returning them to communities with diminished earning capacity.
• The effects of imprisonment vary with class. High imprisonment rates have less impact on children with college-educated mothers, and appear to be associated with higher rates of marriage for college-educated mothers.
• The effect of imprisonment on child poverty is always positive, although it is not necessarily large enough to be significant for all educational groups.
• High rates of Black male imprisonment are associated – after several years' lag – with reduced family income, especially in less educated families with men in them.

Like much research, there are many qualifications and as-of-yet unanswered questions to consider. This piece in particular makes it clear that there is such a dense clustering of variables and relationships (for example, does incarceration cause these single-mother households or not? What are the living situations before incarceration?) that causality is a tough thing to prove.

Still, you have to admire the effort. The closer we get to unraveling the concentration of difficulties that hampers low-income families, the better off we'll be.