Parental Imprisonment and Childhood Disadvantage / Wildeman, Christopher. Demography 46. 2 (May 2009): 265-80

 

.....THE PRISON BOOM AND THE RISK OF PARENTAL IMPRISONMENT

Two types of studies provide insight into the magnitude and social patterning of the risk

of parental imprisonment. Mumola (2000) provided point-in-time estimates of the percentage

of white and black children having a parent imprisoned, showing that 7.0% of

black children and 0.8% of white children have a parent imprisoned at any time. Studies

of the lifetime risk of imprisonment for adults also provide guidance for estimating the

magnitude, rate of change, and disparities in the risk of parental imprisonment. The lifetime

risk of imprisonment for American men more than tripled between 1974 and 1997:

up from 2% to 7% (Bonczar 2003:7). These risks are distributed unequally by race and

class. Black men born in 1965–1969 were 7 times more likely to have been imprisoned

than white men; high school dropouts were 12 to 16 times more likely to go to prison than

college-educated men (Pettit and Western 2004:162). Race and class inequality produced

astonishingly high lifetime risks of imprisonment for black men with little schooling;

nearly 60% of black male dropouts born in 1965–1969 had been to prison by 1999 (Pettit

and Western 2004:162). Although lifetime risks of imprisonment for women were small

compared with the risk for men, they more than doubled over this period; and research

indicates that imprisonment has become relatively common for black women with low

levels of educational attainment (Bonczar 2003:8).....