The Effect of Black Male Imprisonment on Black Child Poverty

From the early 1980s through 2000, the number and the percentage of African American men in prison skyrocketed. This would be expected to have negative impacts on Black well-being, but Black child poverty generally decreased during this period. Using data from the U.S. Prison Census and the Current Population Survey for the period from 1983-1998, we examine the effects of Black male imprisonment on the household composition, income and poverty of Black children. Regressions of outcomes on imprisonment control for unobserved effects of time and place with fixed effect models including dummy variables for state and year. As the effects of imprisonment may be delayed, lags of one to six years are examined; the effects of imprisonment on child poverty are highest with 3-6 years lag. Tests for interactions reveal that high imprisonment rates are associated with improved outcomes for children whose mothers have at least some college, but worse outcomes for children whose mothers are less educated. For the children of the least educated, imprisonment raises poverty through two paths. First, after lags long enough to permit exits from short prison sentences, high imprisonment lowers the incomes of less-educated two-parent families. Second, after lags of 4-6 years, high imprisonment rates are associated with higher rates of children having mothers with less than high school education; this, in turn, is associated with higher rates of single-parent families and with lower incomes for both singleand twoparent families. Results demonstrate the indirect ways in which criminal justice policy has affected poor families and also highlight the ways in which the differential effects of imprisonment on different subgroups of African Americans has masked some of the consequences of these policies. Incarceration has become a major factor in the social and economic structure of the United States, especially for African Americans. From the early 1980s through 2000, the number and the percentage of African Americans in prison skyrocketed. By 2000, 12% of Black men in their twenties were incarcerated, and over 20% of Black men ages 25-44 had been in prison at least once (Bonczar 2003). Previous sociological theory and research on the correlates of poverty, as well as common sense, suggest that removing substantial numbers of African American men from the labor force would be associated with increases in African American child poverty. Nevertheless, the simple time trends seem to contradict this intuition. The poverty rate for all Black children declined from 42 percent in 1980 to 30 percent in 2000, and the Black-White gap in poverty narrowed somewhat. Much of this decline occurred during the economic expansion of the later half 1 Partial funding for this research was provided by NSF grant SPS 0136833. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.