This project will provide new evidence on the effect of parental incarceration, addressing issues of statistical bias (endogeneity) with a quasi-experimental design that compares children whose parents, upon arrest, were randomly assigned to judges with differing propensities to incarcerate. Random assignment ensures that the differences in child outcomes can be attributed directly to parental incarceration (because the defendant was assigned to a harsh judge) versus a warning or probation (because the defendant was assigned to a lenient judge). This approach allows identification of the causal effect of parental imprisonment (and of incarceration length) for individuals with parents on the margin of incarceration.
The research design will be executed in two samples. For the first, the investigators will use historical prison rosters from the turn of the 20th century linked to the Censuses of 1890-1940 to estimates the very long-term income and criminal effects of parental incarceration. In the second, the investigators will use modern court records from Cook County to estimate the contemporary effect of parental incarceration on family structure, earnings, education, and criminal outcomes. Both sets of estimates will contribute to the current policy debate surrounding the long-term costs of both increased incarceration and longer sentence lengths, and to the academic understanding of intergenerational transmission of parental traits to their children.
