Incarceration, Marriage, and Family Life

This paper examines the effects of incarceration on marriage and family life. The paper reports on three empirical analyses. First, estimates show that incarcerated men are only about half as likely to be married as noninstituional men of the same age, however they are just as likely to have children. By 2000, more than 2 million children had incarcerated fathers; 1 in 10 black children under age 10 had a father in prison or jail by 2000. Analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Fragile families Study of Child Wellbeing, indicates that formerly incarcerated men experience lower marriage rates and increased risks of divorce. Finally, analysis of domestic violence data shows that formerly-incarcerated men are about twice as likely to have assaulted the mothers of their children than men of the same age, race, and recent hsitory of spouse abuse. Married women in longlasting and affectionate relationships are at lower risk of domestic violence. These results suggest that the crime-suppressing effects of incarceration, through incapacitation, may be offset by the negative effects of imprisonment on marriage. As imprisonment became common for low-education black men by the end of the 1990s, the penal system also became familiar to poor minority families. By 1999, 30 percent of noncollege black men in their mid-thirties had been to prison and through incarceration many were separated from their wives, girlfriends, and children. Women and children in low-income urban commmunities now routinely cope with absent husbands and fathers lost to incarceration, and adjust to their return after release. Poor single men detached from family life are also affected, bearing the stigma of a prison record in the marriage markets of disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Discussions of the family life of criminal offenders typically focus on the crime-suppressing effects of marriage, not incarceration. Researchers find that marriage offers a pathway out of crime for men with histories of delinquency. Not a wedding itself, but marriage in the context of a warm, stable, and constructive relationship offers the antidote to crime (Sampson and Laub 1993; Laub, Nagin and Sampson 1998). Wives and family members in such relationships provide the web of obligations and responsibilities that restrain young men and reduce their contact with the male friends whose recreations veer into anti-social behavior (Warr 1998). The prison boom places the link between crime and marriage in a new light. If a good marriage is important for criminal desistance, what is the effect of incarceration on marriage? The connections between incarceration, marriage, and the family are also implicated in the larger story of rising urban inequality. In the last three decades, American family life was transformed by declining marriage rates and growth in the number of single-parent households. Marriage rates fell among women from all class backgrounds. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of white women aged 25 to 34 who were married, declined from over 80 percent to just over 60 percent. Marriage rates for African American women