Intergenerational Risks of Criminal Involvement and Incarceration

1 I am grateful for funding support for this project received from the Russell Sage Foundation. This study benefited from exceptional research assistance provided by Claudia Sitgraves. This was prepared for the NYU Law/Public Policy Colloquium and portions for inclusion as a Book Chapter in the edited volume, The Increasing Prison Population in the United States: What has it done for us and what has it done to us? (editors, Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll). I am also grateful to PSID staff for the access to the confidential restricted-use geocoded version of the data that are used in this paper. Abstract This paper provides nationally-representative estimates of the cumulative risks of incarceration and obtaining a criminal record by age 40 for a cohort born between 1951-1975. I show that men born in the 1960s/early 1970s have significantly greater cumulative lifetime risks of imprisonment than similarly-aged men born in the 1950s. This is in part a direct consequence of the transformation of incarceration and sentencing policy that took off in the 1980s. The racial disparities in lifetime incarceration risks are alarming. The results highlight that among black low-educated men, one-half either died or had been incarceration before the age of 40. Second, this analysis uses an innovative approach to investigate the relative importance of family background and neighborhood context on deviant behavior over the life course, including ever being expelled, criminal involvement, ever being incarcerated, the early formation of risk preferences, and risky health behaviors. Particularly noteworthy, the analysis of brother and male child neighbor correlations in adult incarceration history revealed remarkably high correlations of 0.69 and 0.54, respectively. These results highlight the profound influence that family and/or neighborhood background has on criminal involvement and risks of imprisonment. Moreover, the results suggest that neighborhood quality during childhood is a significant gatekeeper of the intergenerational transmission of deviant behavior and incarceration risks among males. Third, this study examines the intergenerational consequences by examining children of the next generation. I find, using the PSID-CDS data, that the prevalence rates of parental incarceration at some point during childhood are significantly larger than point-in-time estimates. I find that 20 percent of black children had a father with an incarceration history; and among black children with fathers who did not graduate from high school, an alarming 33 percent of their father's had an incarceration history. Fourth, this study is among the first longitudinal child-outcome studies that …