The Effect of Black Male Imprisonment on Black Child Poverty

1. The Effect of Black Male Imprisonment on Black Child Poverty Pamela Oliver Jessica Jakubowski Gary Sandefur James E. Yocom University of Wisconsin-Madison

2. Plan for the talk • Quick overview of trends in Black imprisonment rates • Why high imprisonment ought to affect poverty (but might not) • Methods • Results. Effects of imprisonment on • Poverty (positive) • family income (negative) • marital status & education (complex) • Discussion

3. Trends in Black Imprisonment & Black Child Poverty

4. Black imprisonment has soared

5. Black male imprisonment is extremely high • ~40% of the Black male population is under the supervision of the correctional system (prison, jail, parole, probation) • 20%+ of Black men 25-44 had been in prison at end of 1990s • Estimated “lifetime expectancy” of spending some time in prison is 32% for young Black men (60% for those who are not high school graduates per Western/Petit) • ~ 12% of black men in their 20s were in prison or jail in the late 1990s

6. Children are affected • 7% of black children, 2.6% of Hispanic children, .8% of white children have a parent in prison • Many more have a parent who has been in prison • Even more are being reared in communities with a high proportion of former inmates • However, these effects are not showing up in global poverty trends

7. How might imprisonment reduce poverty or the appearance of poverty for those not imprisoned? • Possible sources of real reductions • Remove predatory individuals who drag down a community • Reduce downward spiral effects of crime on community • Reduce competition for jobs • BUT: These possibilities decline as proportion imprisoned becomes high • Reduction in appearance • removes poor [& unemployed & low-wage] people from the observed population (c.f. Western & others)

8. Imprisonment should increase child poverty • Removes working-age men from communities & families • A majority of inmates were employed at time of arrest, especially those who are parents • Prevents or disrupts marriage • Lowers economic contributions of men • The vast majority of those who go to prison get out and re-enter their communities • A prison record harms chances of employment, restricts opportunities to low wage work • Systemic effects: drags down a community’s ties to the world of work & economic advancement

9. Community effects • Prisons as criminogenic: spell in prison reduces capacity to lead a legitimate lifestyle, makes crime more attractive • Crime as capitalization of low income areas, increases as legitimate earnings sources decrease • Social disruptions from removal & stigmatization of large proportion of young men • Poverty -> crime -> imprisonment -> crime as a self-reinforcing cycle that may drag whole communities down

10. Why Black Men’s Incarceration Should Affect Black Child Poverty (our initial model)

11. How imprisonment affects children: more complex model

12. Poverty -> Crime -> Imprisonment? • These relations are not as clear as they may seem • Although poor individuals are much more likely to be arrested and go to prison for crimes, at the aggregate level, the poverty rate is not closely related to the imprisonment rate

13. Fig 1. Black child poverty declined while Black male imprisonment increased & Black marriage decreased marriage poverty imprisonment

14. Methods

15. Data: CPS Sample Poverty, income, household variables: Current Population Survey 1988-1998 • Children < 15 • Restricted to homogenous Black households, child resides with mother (and possibly also father) • Limited to 20 states + DC with enough Black children in the sample + prison data for stable results • Encompasses 89% of US Black population in 1990

16. Data: CPS Variables • Whether the child is in poverty • Whether the child lives with mother only or both parents • Number of children under 18 in household • Educational level of the most highly educated woman in the household (usually the mother; we call this mother’s education for simplicity) • Whether the household is in a metropolitan area • Age of child (younger children have younger parents & higher rates of poverty)

17. Data: Imprisonment Correctional Populations of the US 1982-1998. Count of persons in state institutions as of mid-year • Black male imprisonment rate for each state/year = number of Black men in prison divided by number of adult Black men in the general population ages 18-40 per US Census estimates • Imprisonment is lagged 4 years • Preliminary analysis shows effects peak at 4-5 years • Prison stays for most offenses are 2-4 years

18. Analytic Methods • Logistic regression (dichotomies) or OLS regression (numerical) or mlogit (education) • Adjustment of household clustering in CPS using household ID and Stata “cluster” option • All models include fixed effects dummy variables for state and year (not shown) • State dummies control for other unobserved factors affecting state Black child poverty levels • Year dummies control for national-level factors affecting Black child poverty levels as well as national-level trends in imprisonment

19. Results

20. Poverty, education, marital status

21. Proportion of children in poverty, by mother’s education and marital status Both marital status and mother’s education are strongly related to child poverty

22. Trends in education in Black families (most highly educated woman in child’s family): Distribution in three eras There was a substantial increase in the education of Black children’s mothers in the study period: less than high school and high school grad declined, while the proportion of Black mothers who had attended college went up

23. Proportion of Black children with single mothers, by education and era The rise in single mothers is largest for the less than high school and some college groups; single mothers are steady for high school graduate and college graduate mothers.

24. Effects of Imprisonment

25. Multivariate models • All models include dummy variables as controls for fixed state, year effects: coefficients not shown. • The individual factors by far are the strongest predictors of poverty, income and single mother: mother’s education, metropolitan residence, number of children • Imprisonment is different only for the 21x9 = 189 state/years, and the 20 state dummies and 8 year dummies absorb the variation between states and across years, so there may be stronger imprisonment effects if there is mutual causation • Consistent set of cases 1988-1998 across all analyses.

26. Child is Poor (Logistic regression) Each % point rise in imprisonment rate raises odds of poverty by ~21%

27. Log Family Income (OLS): All children Black children’s family incomes are lower where imprisonment was higher four years ago. Effect is stronger for two-parent families.

28. Log Family Income (children < 5 only) Effect sizes are similar to all children, but small N reduces significance for two-parent families

29. Conclusion: Family income • There does appear to be a negative effect of the lagged Black male imprisonment on Black children’s family income which is apparently due to the effect on male incomes. • Household income, net family income excluding transfers show the same patterns. • This aggregate effect is consistent with individual level research on effects of a prison record on lifetime earnings. • The 4 year lag is consistent with process of entering & returning from prison

30. Child has Single mother (Logistic) This was not expected: the lagged effect of imprisonment on single mothers is not significant. This seems illogical. But this model controls for the mother’s education.

31. Adult female education Strong prison effect for LTHS. ALSO a weaker + effect on college graduate. Per BIC test, prison is NS for <5 although coefficient is large.

32. Female Education: LTHS vs. all others Black children are 30% more likely to have mothers with LTHS if lagged imprisonment is 1 % point higher. This effect is even stronger for children under 5. BIC test says Imprisonment Rate is significant in all comparisons.

33. Mom single & LTHS (logistic regression) Effect for all children is weaker than effect on LTHS (married + single); effect for young children is comparable. Conclusion: the effect is on LTHS education.

34. Effects of Black male imprisonment on mother’s education • Each 1% increase in BMI yields • 30% increase in odds of that no woman in household is a HS graduate • AND 23% increase in odds that a woman is a college graduate • I.e. bifurcation in educational experience • Thus the second path from imprisonment seems to be through its effects on mother’s education which, in turn, is related to greater chance of being single mother AND to lower income

35. Other checks: Effects of lagged Black male imprisonment • Lowers (-) average age of child  more recent births as lags go up. Again, no significant interactions with education • Raises (+) # of children in family or household as lags go up. Imprisonment slows the decline in # of children. No interactions with mother’s education or marital status. • Seems to imply more children being born where imprisonment is higher, or fewer where it is lower.

36. Associations between imprisonment & household composition • Unrelated to # of men in household, either employed or unemployed. • High rates of non-college single mothers is associated with higher rates of imprisonment, both simultaneous and lagging single mothers. • Thus there appear to be patterns of mutual causality between education-marital status & imprisonment.

37. Black Imprisonment affects Black child poverty through (at least) two paths • Direct effect on reduction of male income • Indirect effect through increasing likelihood that the mother has not graduated high school which, in turn, increases the likelihood that the child is poor • Both effects are strongest with 3-5 year lags

38. Causal Direction Appears to be imprisonment  Child Poverty, NOT poverty  imprisonment • Effect is stronger, not weaker, when household composition & state/year dummies are controlled • Lagged effects of imprisonment are stronger than current effects (not shown) • Incarceration rates generally have low to negative correlation with poverty rates (see next slide) in cross-sectional aggregate analysis

39. Average correlations Details in paper tables

40. Black children’s poverty was negatively correlated with state Black male imprisonment rate

41. Magnitudes of effects • Effect sizes are small compared to individual-level factors • Design is conservative as the state dummy is the average across time, controls-out SOME of the effect of imprisonment on poverty & the year dummy controls-out any national-level tendency for imprisonment to cause poverty

42. Interactions: Class differentiation • The negative effects of high imprisonment rates on income are weaker for families where the woman has been to college, but BIC tests say interactions of prison and education are NS. • High imprisonment rates are associated with RISES in the proportion of Black children living with married college-graduate mothers • These differential effects masked the effects of imprisonment on the least educated and may point to class differences among Black people as related to incarceration patterns

43. Possible alternate explanations • Fixed effects model controls for unobserved factors consistently correlated with state or year • Increasing effects with lags through 3-5 years (not shown) is suggestive of temporal order prisonpoverty • Remaining alternate explanations have to be something that both increased Black male imprisonment AND, several years later, reduced Black family incomes (especially for two-parent families) and contributed to a bifurcation in the educational experience of Black women, especially lowering HS graduation while education was generally rising

44. Implications for research • Remember that large scale economic & fertility trends can mask the effects of social policies on well-being • Watch for different effects on different segments of the population • Stop assuming simple causal path of poverty -> crime -> incarceration • Need to look for longer-term & indirect effects • Is likely that incarceration rates generate positive feedbacks back into crime through increasing poverty: have to think about feedback systems

45. Thinking about system feedbacks

46. In conclusion • Does Black male incarceration affect Black child poverty? The answer appears to be YES. • In understanding the persistence of racial economic inequality, we need to keep our eye on inequalities in the criminal justice system.

47. The end

48. Black children’s poverty was negatively correlated with state Black male imprisonment rate

49. In fact . . . • If you correlate Black child poverty with the Black male imprisonment rate WITHIN a single year, the correlation is generally NEGATIVE (and was more negative in the 1980s) • Conversely, the cross-sectional correlations between Black male imprisonment and Black household income are generally POSTIVE (and were more positive in the 1980s) • Have to dismiss simple ideas that poverty causes imprisonment

50. Black children’s poverty was very weakly negatively correlated with state Black male imprisonment rate, while household income correlation was very weakly positive Correlations are low, highly variable with selection of states