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Title: Externalities of Imprisonment: Does Maternal Incarceration Affect Child Outcomes?
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Moore, Quinn
Shierholz, Heidi S.
Externalities of Imprisonment: Does Maternal Incarceration Affect Child Outcomes?
Presented: Toronto, ON, 2006 Meetings of The Canadian Law and Economics Association, September 2006
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM)
Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Incarceration/Jail; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Mothers, Incarceration; 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 over the last three decades to increase the probability and lengths of prison sentences, 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 some conspicuous policy questions about the effects -- beyond the intended effects of punishment, incapacitation, and deterrence -- of imprisonment on prisoners, their families and their communities. The economic literature on the externalities of imprisonment has focused primarily on the effects of involvement in the criminal justice system on later employment and earnings. Much less is known about the effects of parental incarceration on children's outcomes, though the little available evidence suggests that the effect is large and detrimental. Developing a more complete understanding of the independent effect of parental incarceration on child outcomes is crucial to informing policy decisions, particularly in light of the recent dramatic increase in 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. Math scores also worsen though the effect is not significant.

Bibliography Citation
Moore, Quinn and Heidi S. Shierholz. "Externalities of Imprisonment: Does Maternal Incarceration Affect Child Outcomes?" Presented: Toronto, ON, 2006 Meetings of The Canadian Law and Economics Association, September 2006.