The challenges for children with an incarcerated parent have become increasingly well-known over the past decade. The kids are more likely to fall behind in school, live in unstable households and struggle with mental health issues.
But a new study asks: What about the far larger group of kids with a parent or a relative who’s been criminally charged – incarcerated or not?
The 24-state analysis published in May in a journal of the American Medical Association begins to answer that question, identifying what its authors describe as “a serious public health threat to child well-being.” Roughly one out of seven children and teens in the United States has had a family member charged with a criminal offense in the past five years.
“They might individually cut you off — but the family, the household, will have less food, less financial support.”
— Naoka Carey
The peer-reviewed article was co-authored by professors Naoka E. Carey, formerly of New York University law school, and Rebekah Levine Coley, an educational psychologist at Boston College. Their JAMA Network Open article found the rate of criminal justice involvement in children’s families tripled between 2000 and 2019 — from more than 6% to more than 19% — even as crime rates declined. The study relied on an innovative criminal justice dataset that includes arrests, court filings, probation, parole and incarceration from states, and U.S. Census data on 76 million children 17 and under.
The authors also warn that their overall finding of one in seven kids is likely an underestimate. The study did not include relatives with federal juvenile justice cases, and notes that some dated records were unavailable.
The Imprint spoke with Carey, the study’s lead author, who has just joined Northeastern University School of Law as an assistant teaching professor. She described why she did this study, the significance of the findings, and what policymakers should do to help the children affected by relatives’ arrests.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me about your background, and how you came to do this study?
I am a lawyer, a law professor and a developmental psychologist. This project actually grew out of my work for my dissertation. I was very interested in families caught up in the criminal justice system: What happens to children in those families?
There’s been some wonderful research on parental incarceration — one of the questions in a famous survey on adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, asks: “Have you ever had a parent in jail or prison?” But we don’t have a lot looking at other kinds of criminal justice system contact.
I realized that there just wasn’t a lot of research out there on types of exposure to children beyond parental incarceration. So part of it is a goal of educating the field that this is pretty common, because I think a lot of families face a lot of stigma in talking about it.
“The longer you live as a child, the more likely somebody in your household will touch the system. It’s not some small group of families that is impacted, it is a lot of children and a lot of families.”
— Naoka Carey
What are the consequences for children whose relative is arrested?
We know parental incarceration is associated with a bunch of negative outcomes for children: Some of it is emotional health, well-being, stress. But also economic, physical health consequences, substance use.
The very early research that we have so far is that these are also associated with other criminal contexts — a family member getting arrested, or charged or convicted.
We know from research about individuals who have those kinds of records that it gets more difficult to find employment; you can be excluded from housing — whether it’s public housing or private rental housing. All those kinds of consequences that happen to adults trickle down to children.
What could policymakers do to support these children?
We could do a better job training all sorts of people who work with children — teachers, pediatricians, youth workers, social workers — to understand that this has become a really common experience for children.
The other big policy piece that I’m interested in is policies that affect the whole household. For example, if somebody in the family gets a charge, you could be potentially evicted from your housing. And with certain kinds of drug convictions in some states, they will cut you off from public benefits. They might individually cut you off — but the family, the household, will have less food, less financial support. So I’d revisit these policies that punish whole households.
You describe your finding — that there has been an increase in criminal justice system involvement among children’s relatives — as surprising, because mass incarceration has declined over the same time period. How do you make sense of that?
This is the question, and I’m still trying to figure it out. One possibility is that there is sort of a delay. Some of the research that found that the lifetime risk of imprisonment, for example, was going down, found it among younger people.
Also, we do see the crime rates have been going down globally, so you would expect to see reductions. But there are states where the incarceration rates are going up again. You might see incarceration rates go down, but maybe people are using probation instead — so conviction rates wouldn’t be going down.
I would just caution people not to get too excited about declines in incarceration, because I think we’re still seeing diverging patterns.
Was there anything else that you did not expect when you started this research?
Honestly, just the sheer scope of it. There is maybe a temptation to believe that a certain small group of families is driving all these numbers. And what was very, very apparent to me was that that’s just not true.
The longer you live as a child, the more likely somebody in your household will touch the system. It’s not some small group of families that is impacted, it is a lot of children and a lot of families.
What are the biggest unanswered questions from this study that you would prioritize in future research?
One is really disentangling what happens in a household when there’s been a conviction — versus an incarceration — and understanding better what the consequences of both of those things are. When do they build on each other? When do they separately act?
We want to make sure: If some of the negative consequences of incarceration are actually coming from just the record itself, that has important policy implications. What do we do about that?
