Suchergebnisse

More than 2 million American children have a parent incarcerated, making the consequences of parental incarceration for families a critical concern. A growing literature documents significant challenges not only among incarcerated men, but also among their spouses, partners, and children. Much remains to be learned about these experiences, however; and the data available for doing so are limited. In this article, we demonstrate how the quality of available data on paternal incarceration can be improved by supplementing a leading population-based survey of families with administrative records on criminal history from a state criminal justice agency. This administrative supplement provides only a low-end estimate of the extent of criminal justice involvement in our sample, but still increases the number of fathers identified with criminal histories by more than 20 percent. Building on such a supplement—in our current survey or future ones—could improve the identification of justice-involved fathers on a broader scale.