Measuring Intergenerational Exposure to the U.S. Justice System: Evidence from Longitudinal Links between Survey and Administrative Data

Intergenerational exposure to the justice system is both a marker of vulnerability among children and a measurement of the potential unintended externalities of crime policy in the U.S. Estimating the size of this population has been hampered by inadequate data resources, including the inability to (1) observe non-incarceration sources of exposure, (2) follow children throughout their childhood, and (3) measure multiple adult influences in increasingly dynamic households. To overcome these challenges, we leverage billions of restricted administrative and survey records linked with the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS). We find substantially larger prevalences of intergenerational exposure to the criminal justice system than previously reported: 9% of children born between 1999–2005 were intergenerationally exposed to prison, 18% to a felony conviction, and 39% to any criminal charge; charge exposure rates reach as high as 62% for Black children. We regress these newly quantified types of exposure on measures of child well-being to gauge their importance and find that all types of exposure (parent vs. non-parent, prison vs. charges, current vs. previous) are strongly negatively correlated with development outcomes, suggesting substantially more U.S. children are harmed by crime and criminal justice than previously thought.