Abstract
Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native American men and women are overrepresented in the criminal justice system , including arrests, convictions, and incarceration , which means their children are also disproportionately affected. Although these disparities often motivate research on the consequences of incarceration for children and families, studies that explicitly engage with the dynamics of race/ethnicity and the criminal justice system are rare. In this chapter, we review quantitative and qualitative research that takes on the important task of understanding how parental criminal justice involvement interacts with race/ethnicity to shape children ’s life experiences. We first summarize statistics on racial /ethnic disparities in the criminal justice involvement of parents. We then review research that examines whether the impact of parental criminal justice involvement varies by race/ethnicity and perspectives on why differences in the consequences may exist. Next, we consider how these disparities contribute to overall inequalities in child well-being. We consider a range of social outcomes and domains, from infant mortality to physical health and problems at school as well as avenues for future research on race/ethnicity and criminal justice system contact .
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Notes
- 1.
Asian individuals are incarcerated at a lower rate than White individuals. Asians tend to be underrepresented in the criminal justice system , but disaggregation by subgroup where possible may reveal some disproportionalities.
- 2.
Hispanic/Latinx individuals were more accurately represented. They experienced 18% of arrests and constituted 18% of the US population.
- 3.
To populate Table 4.1, we searched databases across disciplines for empirical research that examined how the impact of criminal justice system involvement might differ for US children from different racial /ethnic groups. All studies that fit these criteria are included in Table 4.1. We limit our review to studies that examine the impact of parental criminal justice involvement on children ages birth to 18. In addition to the studies included in Table 4.1, several studies consider and find racial /ethnic differences in the impact of parental incarceration during childhood and adolescence on young adults (e.g., Foster & Hagan, 2009, 2013; Lee, Porter, & Comfort, 2013).
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Bruns, A., Lee, H. (2019). Racial/Ethnic Disparities. In: Eddy, J., Poehlmann-Tynan, J. (eds) Handbook on Children with Incarcerated Parents. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16707-3_4
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