Presented By: Department of Economics Seminars
Social, Behavioral and Experimental Economics (SBEE) Seminar: Measuring Intergenerational Exposure to the U.S. Justice System: Evidence from Longitudinal Links between Survey and Administrative Data
Mike Mueller-Smith, University of Michigan
We leverage over a terabyte of administrative and survey data linked with the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) to estimate the share of recent U.S. birth cohorts with intergenerational criminal justice exposure, addressing three primary shortcomings in the literature: (1) non-incarceration sources of exposure, (2) cumulative exposure over childhood, and (3) non-parental sources of exposure. We find that among children born between 1999 and 2005, 9% were intergenerationally exposed to prison, 18% to a felony conviction, and 39% to any criminal charge; notably higher rates are observed for minority children. To gauge the severity of these newly quantified types of exposure, we estimate fixed effects models correlating exposure measures with an array of child wellbeing variables. We find limited evidence of diminishing harms from non-prison, non-parent, and non-contemporaneous exposures, suggesting our new broader estimates may be as important as the smaller, more narrowly defined measures from the literature.