Our project directly contributes to DUPRI research on the social foundations of health, health inequalities, and health and family trajectories across the life course by making it possible to disaggregate the long-term health consequences of jail and prison incarceration for the first time at a national level. The project will allow Duke researchers to obtain access to novel data that are likely to have a significant impact on the study of the health consequences of mass incarceration. Given that incarceration and racial health inequalities will also be key research areas in Duke University’s future center grant application, we consider it to be strategically important, and also extremely valuable in terms of research, to have Duke be the place that made it possible to differentiate the effects of prison and jail incarceration in both the NLSY97 data (already done) and the NLSY79 data (proposed here) and that has several proposals in process using both of those datasets.
Related research by this team has already been funded through one intramural grant (S25,000 from Duke’s Social Science Research Institute) and one extramural grant ($75,000 from the Russell Sage Foundation). These two grants have fully funded essential data infrastructure work using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). The DUPRI grant would partially fund additional data infrastructure work using the longer-running National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79). Having access to both datasets will significantly enhance the likelihood of success for a planned National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 proposal, which we intend to submit in Fall 2024.
Specifically, adding the NLSY79 will allow us to assess the impact of jail and prison confinement on health at midlife, health at retirement, family formation and dissolution, and premature mortality. These are topics of particular concern among the likely NIH reviewer pool, given the age distribution of Americans who have now been exposed to the era of mass incarceration and the near-total lack of studies that can track the health and family consequences of incarceration across several decades.