Reexamining Race When Studying the Consequences of Criminal Justice Contact for Families

Why and in What Ways Is Race Missing in Studies of the Consequences of Criminal Justice Contact for Families?

Work that examines the collateral consequences of mass incarceration highlights the fact that inequalities likely extend to the families connected to current and former prisoners. Indeed, if racial inequality exists in contact with the criminal justice system, then racial inequalities also exist in the family members impacted by this contact (Lee et al. 2015; Wildeman 2009). Reviewing the insightful and valuable research in this volume, we first asked ourselves: Why and in what ways is race missing from these analyses and the larger body of research within which they are situated? We then consider the ways in which scholars can bring race into the forefront of research on criminal justice contact and family life in the United States.

While most studies that explore the consequences of mass incarceration for American families are motivated by racial inequality within the carceral system—rightfully so, given the massive racial disparities in incarceration rates and criminal justice involvement—the work often fails to engage this important issue in meaningful ways. Research is often inspired by vast racial inequalities in criminal justice contact and in social outcomes such as education, health, family stability, and employment, but fails to explicitly examine racial dynamics in the analysis. We neither interrogate why we see racial disparities in mass incarceration nor do we investigate why we might see racial disparities in outcomes due to mass incarceration.

Race might be missing from our analyses for a number of reasons. For one, race is often difficult to talk about. Seeing differences in the consequences of mass incarceration across races often requires a discussion of not only structural arrangements but also cultural conditions that may reify weakly supported generalizations about behaviors in the African American or Latino community (e.g., Geary 2015; Greenbaum 2015; Katz 2013; Patterson 2010). For example, to explain why we see differences in the association between incarceration and family formation across race, we must consider a large body of sometimes controversial research on racial differences in family formation (e.g., Moynihan 1965; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2004; Wilson 2009). It also requires engaging with critical race theory and other theoretical perspectives that are often not central in research on mass incarceration. Some researchers, then, see contending with these complex bodies of research as either research to be addressed in future work or something to avoid entirely.

Alternatively, race might be missing from work because analyses suggest it does not matter. While studies almost always “control” for race in their empirical analyses, often attention to the issue ends there. And studies that do test for the moderating effects of race (or variations in empirical associations by race) sometimes find no racial variation and dismiss race as not being an important factor or simply move on. Or they sometimes find that criminal justice contact is more deleterious for whites than African Americans or Hispanics, creating the potential for even more consternation and avoidance. However, we argue that analysis cannot stop here, especially because we know that race does matter. There are clear racial disparities or differences in many of the outcomes we aim to explore, so when our results suggest otherwise, our goal should be to unpack that further and try to understand why we see or do not see racial patterns in the empirical relationships we study.

For example, in some of her work, Haskins (2014) finds the deleterious impact of paternal incarceration on young children’s school readiness is stronger for white boys than African American boys. Indeed, other work sometimes finds no effects of incarceration for African American families (for some examples, see Wakefield and Wildeman 2013). On the surface, this is counter to what is expected and requires additional explanation. Moreover, racial disparities can still emerge even when impacts of mass incarceration are the same for whites and African Americans or stronger for whites compared with African Americans, as exposure to mass incarceration and its consequences is disproportionally experienced among African American families in the United States. Future work should unpack whether and in what ways there may be stronger or varied relationships between experiences of familial incarceration and well-being outcomes by race. A few suggestions follow.

Resilience hypotheses (e.g., Mineka and Kihlstrom 1978) suggest that forms of disruption or environmental shocks are potentially less stressful when the experience is less unexpected and alternative support systems are in place. Given that experiences with incarceration are more proportionally prevalent among African American families and therefore more visible in minority communities, these hypotheses could suggest that African American families and communities are more resilient, supportive, or for other reasons less sensitive to the effects of familial incarceration than the white children and families represented in the often urban data samples that we employ. Similarly, as discussed recently by Shawn Bushway (2013) and evidenced in work by Massoglia, Firebaugh, and Warner (2013), the presence of preexisting disadvantage in African American families and communities prior to criminal justice involvement might produce “floor effects” in some outcomes of interest, indicating impacts are stronger for whites primarily because they have farther to fall.

Moreover, since the criminal justice system touches a broader swath of the African American community than the white community, another interpretation could be that the white men and women who become incarcerated are in some way selectively “worse” (e.g., committed a more severe crime or spent more time incarcerated) than the African American ones, thus possibly affecting their children and families more severely than incarcerated African Americans. This is where better data on timing, duration, and crime severity would be useful. Another reason for the difference could be that white families tend to be more nuclear than African American families; the latter often rely on extended kin networks (Dunifon and Kowaleski-Jones 2002). Thus, for white families the loss of a member due to incarceration leaves a hole that in an African American family could be filled by other family members.

Last, an additional avenue worth exploring is the existence of treatment effects at multiple levels of context. For example, for African Americans—given residential segregation, spatial inequality in punishment, and the local concentration of incarceration in predominantly African American neighborhoods (Sampson and Loeffler 2010; Sobel 2006)—incarceration and criminal justice involvement is a community-level as well as an individual-level treatment, affecting the lives of families with and without incarcerated members at the individual and the aggregate level. If this is the case, spillover effects of incarceration would suppress individual-level estimates of the effect of incarceration on African American children and families—but potentially not white families—when employing quasi-experimental methods that compare same-race “control” counterparts, as the control group would be indirectly exposed to the treatment. Each of these suggestions pushes studies to further explore the intersection of race and other social institutions. Indeed, many of the articles in this volume are ripe to contribute to intersectionality work, especially in the areas of class, gender, and critical race theory. However, we also fully acknowledge that there are data issues that often make it difficult to examine statistical associations by race. We are limited by the few datasets that contain both complete information on criminal justice contact and the social and behavioral measures needed to examine the consequences of imprisonment on the family (see Wakefield, Lee, and Wildeman, this volume, for more on this). Many of the articles in this issue discussed contending with small samples and the idea that analyzing associations by race is therefore unfeasible. Thus, there is not only a need for better quantitative and qualitative data, but also a need for more critical engagement with our results with regard to race: asking “Why” pushes scholarly innovation, and we should do so more often.

Why Is It Important to Address Race in Studies of the Consequences of Criminal Justice Contact for Families?

Why does this call for a critical engagement with race matter? Mass incarceration and racial inequality in mass incarceration in the United States do not occur within a vacuum. Minority families that are impacted by mass incarceration also face assaults from other institutions and contexts, creating co-occurring disadvantages (e.g., Morris 2014). By acknowledging that families are contending with multiple disadvantages in addition to mass incarceration, we can create innovative modeling strategies in our research and innovative policies to contend with these issues. It might also help us to be more critical about harmful effects of mass incarceration masquerading as “blunted” effects for minority groups. In other words, incarceration does matter for African American families; it may not appear so because these families are also contending with incarceration and disadvantage in various other forms due to a long history of segregation (e.g., Sampson and Loeffler 2010).

Race also matters because it might force us to reconsider the value we place on developing causal models. For example, the population register data from Denmark discussed in this volume provide us with strong, compelling, and unique causal estimates of the impact changes in criminal justice policy can have on families. However, it is also important to pursue how well realistic findings from international data would translate to helping us understand and combat mass incarceration inequality in the United States. In addition to the sheer number, one of the unique features of mass incarceration in the United States is its intersection with race. Thus, work that employs international data should also be challenged to engage with ways to best translate its findings across varied institutional settings, which are quite different across race, class, and political lines.

Most importantly, race is becoming a much larger discussion in policy and criminal justice arenas. As the commentary by Nancy Rodriguez suggests the on-the-ground criminal justice community contends with issues regarding race every day—whether in discussions about police profiling, racial segregation in jails, or the racial composition of a city’s police force, race is at the forefront of discussions and decision-making. The reluctance to talk about race exists as much within academia as it does outside of it. Therefore, it is imperative that we critically engage with race in order to improve the quality of our research and its applicability to policy and practice within the criminal justice community.

We challenge work in this area to move beyond description of racial inequality and to think critically about how our society’s raced institutions interact with one another to stratify the experiences of American families. With few exceptions, studies that examine race often control for race as a marker of disadvantage. However, given the unique racial history in the United States, we know that race matters, and now is the time to think more critically about mechanisms and moderating effects of race in our analyses. Put more plainly, we simply cannot get the story about mass incarceration right if we do not talk about race and racism.

Race scholars argue that structural racism is a fundamental cause of the disadvantaged social status of African Americans and other racial minority groups across multiple domains and that the criminal justice system is just one institution to allow continued subjugation (e.g., Phelan and Link 2015). As the general public latches on to these ideas of the “new Jim Crow” (Alexander 2010), we also have to better understand what this means in our research. If the criminal justice system both fundamentally alters family life for all who come in contact with it and creates racial inequalities in well-being, then race always needs to be discussed and systematically studied. When our qualitative samples are primarily composed of racial/ethnic minorities, then race always needs to be discussed. When policing and criminal justice policies disproportionately target racial groups, then race always needs to be discussed. Let us work, then, to ensure that race is not relegated to a few sentences in our introductions, or conclusions, or footnotes in our research on the consequences of mass incarceration for families. Let us ensure that it is an integral narrative in all parts of our research.