Parental imprisonment, the prison boom, and the concentration of childhood disadvantage
Open accessAbstract
Although much research has focused on how imprisonment transforms the life course of disadvantaged black men, researchers have paid little attention to how parental imprisonment alters the social experience of childhood. This article estimates the risk of parental imprisonment by age 14 for black and white children born in 1978 and 1990. This article also estimates the risk of parental imprisonment for children whose parents did not finish high school, finished high school only, or attended college. Results show the following: (1) 1 in 40 white children born in 1978 and 1 in 25 white children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (2) 1 in 7 black children born in 1978 and 1 in 4 black children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (3) inequality in the risk of parental imprisonment between white children of college-educated parents and all other children is growing; and (4) by age 14, 50.5% of black children born in 1990 to high school dropouts had a father imprisoned. These estimates, robustness checks, and extensions to longitudinal data indicate that parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel—and distinctively American—childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents.
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In the syndemics literature, large-scale social forces such as mass incarceration, gender-inequitable norms, the home foreclosure epidemic, and racial segregation may be discussed but have largely gone un-modeled.
“In the literature on syndemics, large-scale social forces like mass incarceration,41, 42 gender-inequitable norms,43 the home foreclosure epidemic,44 and racial segregation45 may be discussed but have largely gone un-modeled.”
From Co-occurring epidemics, syndemics, and population health (2017) · cites this paper as [41]
One in four Black children born in 1990 had a father imprisoned.
“One in four Black children born in 1990 had a father imprisoned (Wildeman 2009).”
From On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto (2009) · cites this paper as Wildeman 2009
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- Authors
- Wildeman, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Michigan (US)
- Corresponding author
- Wildeman, Christopher
- Venue
- Demography
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2009-05-01
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 265-280
- ISSN
- 0070-3370 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-7790
- PMC
- PMC2831279
- OpenAlex
- W2168597020
- Cited by
- 538
- References
- 67
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 27 · 2022: 36 · 2021: 48 · 2020: 25 · 2019: 49 · 2018: 43 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 37 · 2015: 50 · 2014: 40 · 2013: 28 · 2012: 36
- FWCI
- 87.34
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Demography (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies
- Social Sciences › Demography › Family Dynamics and Relationships
- Keywords
- parental incarceration, childhood disadvantage, racial inequality, Black children, educational attainment, high school dropout, intergenerational transmission
- MeSH terms
- Black or African American, Humans, Parents, Prisons, Socioeconomic Factors, White People
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