PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN'S RISK OF BEING CHARGED BY EARLY ADULTHOOD: EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK*

• Author: CHRISTOPHER WILDEMAN,SIGNE HALD ANDERSEN
• Date: 01 February 2017
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12124

PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN’S

RISK OF BEING CHARGED BY EARLY ADULTHOOD:

EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK∗

CHRISTOPHER WILDEMAN1,2 and SIGNE HALD ANDERSEN2

1Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University

2Rockwool Foundation Research Unit

KEYWORDS: paternal incarceration, mass imprisonment, intergenerational transmis-

sion of crime, register data, Denmark

In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically de-

creased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to

isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the

reform affected a child’s risk of ever subsequently being charged with a crime. Specif-

ically, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare all Danish children

12–18 years of age whose fathers were eligible for a noncustodial sentence instead

of incarceration under the reform [N=1,546] with a reference group of children

whose fathers were convicted of similar crimes but were ineligible [N=1,852] in the

2 years surrounding when the reform was enacted [July 1, 2000] as a way of testing

the effects of the reform on children’s risk of ever being charged with a crime by 22–28

years of age. Our estimates indicate that having a father sentenced under the reform

sharply decreased the risk of being charged in the next 10 years for boys but not for

girls. Taken together, these results indicate that both paternal criminality and paternal

incarceration promote the criminal justice contact of male children and, hence, that

paternal incarceration is not solely a symptom of criminality but also a cause of it.

As the U.S. incarceration rate has increased, criminologists have developed an acute

interest in how incarceration affects current and former inmates (e.g., Massoglia, 2008;

Pager, 2003; Western, 2006), those tied to them (e.g., Clear, 2007; Comfort, 2008;

Wildeman, Schnittker, and Turney, 2012), and social inequality (e.g., Foster and Hagan,

2015; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Wildeman and Muller, 2012). Because of strong

interest in the intergenerational transmission of crime and criminal justice contact (e.g.,

Fergusson, Horwood, and Nagin, 2000; Robins, West, and Herjanic, 1975; West and

Farrington, 1977), research on the consequences of paternal incarceration for child

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2017.55.issue-1/issuetoc.

The authors thank Lars H. Andersen, Peter Fallesen, Maria Fitzpatrick, Mike Lovenheim, Sara

Wakefield, the four anonymous reviewers along with Editor-in-Chief D. Wayne Osgood at Crimi-

nology for providing helpful comments, as well as Danielle Zucker for providing excellent research

assistance throughout the course of this project. We also thank the Rockwool Foundation and the

Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University for funding this research.

Direct correspondence to Christopher Wildeman, 137 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Department

of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 (e-mail: christopher.

wildeman@cornell.edu).

C2016 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12124

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 55 Number 1 32–58 2017 32

EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK 33

well-being has been an especially lively area. By using a range of data sets and methods,

research in this area has consistently tied paternal incarceration to a whole host of

poor outcomes through childhood (e.g., Geller et al., 2012; Wakefield and Wildeman,

2011; Wildeman, 2010) and into adolescence (e.g., Foster and Hagan, 2007; Hagan and

Foster, 2012a; Murray, Loeber, and Pardini, 2012) and even adulthood (e.g., Murray and

Farrington, 2008; Murray et al., 2014).

Of course, it may be the case that the poor outcomes of children of incarcerated

fathers are driven not by paternal incarceration but instead by paternal criminality

and a host of other factors that led their fathers to end up incarcerated (Johnson and

Easterling, 2012; Sampson, 2011; Wildeman, Wakefield, and Turney, 2013). This concern

is especially troubling in regard to children’s criminal justice contact as 1) there are

theoretical reasons to expect the paternal incarceration–children’s criminal justice

contact relationship to be spurious and 2) the range of methods used to consider the

effects of paternal incarceration on children’s criminal justice contact (e.g., Murray and

Farrington, 2005; Porter and King, 2015; Roettger and Swisher, 2011) do less to assuage

concerns regarding spuriousness than do those used to consider other outcomes (e.g.,

Andersen and Wildeman, 2014; Geller et al., 2012; Wakefield and Wildeman, 2014).

In this article, we provide the first test of how an exogenous shock in the risk of

paternal incarceration affects children’s risk of being charged with a crime by 22–28 years

of age using register data and a Danish policy shock that led to a dramatic increase in

the use of community service (rather than in incarceration) for Danish adults sentenced

to spend less than a year in a correctional facility for a select group of crimes. This study

makes a contribution for two reasons, although it is important to note that it provides

only indirect insight into the effects of paternal incarceration on individual children

because of the focus on a specific policy shock. First, this study is a uniquely strong

test in this subfield as it is the first to link an exogenous change in the risk of paternal

incarceration1with children’s risk of criminal justice contact. Second, the policy shock

the study exploits provides estimates not of exogenous variation in sentence length, as

previous work on the effects of incarceration has done (e.g., Green and Winik, 2010;

Kling, 2006; Loeffler, 2013),2but on exogenous variation in spending time incarcerated

relative to receiving some other noncustodial sentence. As such, it provides insight into

how alternatives to incarceration such as community service could affect the criminal

justice contact of both fathers and their children.

PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN’S CRIMINAL

JUSTICE CONTACT

Research on the intergenerational transmission of criminality has a great history

in criminology as there has long been intense interest in the factors that cause the

1. We focus on paternal incarceration because research on maternal incarceration has 1) produced

unstable estimates in Denmark as few Danish mothers experience this event (Wildeman et al.,

2014) and 2) found inconsistent effects in the United States (e.g., Hagan and Foster, 2012b;

Huebner and Gustafson, 2007; Wildeman and Turney, 2014).

2. We lump Loeffler (2013) with these studies because all individuals in his sample had been detained

during the trial, meaning that all of them, whether “treated” with a prison sentence or not, had

been exposed to a jail stay.