Speaker
Garrett Baker
Graduate Student, Joint program in Public Policy and Sociology
Duke University
Abstract
Decades after the rise of mass incarceration, a large literature has grown to debate the tradeoffs associated with this unparalleled social and policy experiment. While a significant body of research documents the consequences of parental incarceration in particular, it primarily examines outcomes related to children’s behavior, self-reported health, and educational attainment, but due to data limitations has not considered a perhaps more foundational aspect: children’s physical safety. In this paper, we leverage a unique statewide linkage of court and medical records from Wisconsin to provide the first evidence regarding parental incarceration and children’s safety. These data give us an unparalleled opportunity to study not only the descriptive texture and occurrence of parental criminal justice involvement and children’s use of the emergency room (ER), but also their timing at a monthly level. We leverage these panel data in an event study framework and analyze whether parental criminal justice involvement impacts child safety and ER utilization among very young children, thus enabling us to consider how the era of mass incarceration has impacted society’s most vulnerable.