A new paper out in the journal Demography, co-authored by DUPRI scholar Christopher Wildeman, DUPRI student Garrett Baker, and Harvard Professor of Sociology Robert J. Sampson, examines the "intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact."
In the paper, titled "Adult Children of the Prison Boom: Family Troubles and the Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Justice Contact," the authors argue that "prior research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact is relatively sparse and limited by its lack of attention to the correlated “family troubles” and familial incarceration that predate criminal justice contact." Further, the authors "provide a test of the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact after adjusting extensively for these factors that predate such contact by linking longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods with official arrest histories from 1995 to 2020. The results provide support for three conclusions. First, parental criminal justice contact is associated with a shorter time to first arrest and a larger number of arrests even after rigorously accounting for selection. Second, robustness checks demonstrate that neither the magnitude nor the significance of the findings is sensitive to model choices. Third, associations are strongest among White individuals and inconsistently significant for African American and Hispanic individuals. Despite large recent crime declines, the results indicate that parental criminal justice contact elevates the criminal justice contact of the adult children of the prison boom, independent of the often-overlooked troubles that predate criminal justice contact, and that these associations are strongest among the White population."