Parental imprisonment, the prison boom, and the concentration of childhood disadvantage

Imprisonment transformed the life-course of disadvantaged black men, but little research considers how parental imprisonment altered the social experience of childhood. This paper estimates the risk of parental imprisonment by age 14 for black and white children born 1978 and 1990. It also estimates the risk of parental imprisonment for children whose parents did not finish high school, finished high school only, and attended some college. Estimates show the following: (1) 1 in 40 white children born in 1978 and 1 in 25 white children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (2) 1 in 7 black children born in 1978 and 1 in 4 black children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (3) inequality in the risk of parental imprisonment between white children of college-educated parents and all other children is growing; and (4) 50.5 % of black children born in 1990 to high school dropouts had a father imprisoned before their 14th birthday. These estimates, robustness checks using synthetic cohort estimates, and extensions to longitudinal data indicate that parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel – and distinctively American – childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents