The Intergenerational Effects of the Criminal Justice System

Introduction: The interplay between the criminal justice system and the effects on the children of those involved in this system is not well understood. While information is emerging that confinement in prisons is detrimental to health, less work has focused on how the more common types involvement with the criminal justice system (i.e., arrest, prosecution, conviction, fees, and jail) affect the health of the alleged offenders and their families. Judicial policies regarding setting bail determine who stays incarcerated pre-trial, but there have been no evaluations examining whether pre-trial confinement affects children’s well-being. Post-conviction, many types of penalties are available to judges including probation, supervised probation, incarceration, fines, community service, and mandatory counseling and rehabilitation services. We study how specific decisions by the courts and other criminal justice agencies affect children’s wellbeing.

Methods: We use North Carolina (NC) statewide administrative criminal court and incarceration data for the years 2005-2014 and link parents to their biological children through birth records. Our study uses instrumental variables (e.g., prosecutor’s prosecution rate and judge’s conviction rate) to examine whether holding other factors constant, harsher penalties for criminal offenses imposed by the courts (and also more restrictive pretrial confinement terms) affect children’s involvement in social services and health care utilization (for children enrolled in Medicaid).

Results: Preliminary results suggest that parents who are prosecuted are less likely to be re-arrested, however, neither prosecution nor conviction prevents children from being referred to child protective services in the future. Additional results will examine factors that predict court decisions in cases (e.g., are parents of young children less likely to receive harsh sentences) and how these decisions affect child’s placement into foster care. Future work will examine how variation in parent’s court process affects children’s use of health services.

Conclusions: State and local policies and practices can directly affect how an individual’s court case is handled. In turn, variation in court experiences affects the health of the alleged offender and possibly their children. This study begins to provide empirical evidence for how court decisions aimed at offenders affect children’s health outcomes.